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THE D C T 11, 



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There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than 
in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what 
to expect from the one as the other. Butlee's Remains. 



London : 

Spottiswoode and Shaw, 

New-street-Square. 



\ 




y^t^t^k 















IM ®II ^OILUill 




aliey i lei 












L W D U ; 

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THE DOCTOR, 



** 



BY THE LATE 



matot* goufbtv. 



EDITED BY 



HIS SON-IN-LAW, 



JOHN WOOD WARTER, B.D. 







COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, 




LONDON: 

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, 



rATERNOSTER-ROW. 

184S. 






4>\. 



"THOUGH THOU HADST MADE A GENERAL SURVEY 
OF ALL THE BEST OF MEN'S BEST KNOWLEDGES, 
AND KNEW SO MUCH AS EVER LEARNING KNEW ; 
YET DID IT MAKE THEE TRUST THYSELF THE LESS, 
AND LESS PRESUME. — AND YET WHEN BEING MOV'u 
IN PRIVATE TALK TO SPEAK ; THOU DIDST BEWRAY 
HOW FULLY FRAUGHT THOU WERT WITHIN; AND PROV'D 
THAT THOU DIDST KNOW WHATEVER WIT COULD SAY. 
WHICH SHOW'D THOU HADST NOT BOOKS AS MANY HAVE, 
FOR OSTENTATION, BUT FOR USE ; AND THAT 
THY BOUNTEOUS MEMORY WAS SUCH AS GAVE 
A LARGE REVENUE OF THE GOOD IT GAT. 
WITNESS SO MANY VOLUMES, WHERETO THOU 
HAST SET THY NOTES UNDER THY LEARNED HAND, 
AND MARK'D THEM WITH THAT PRINT, AS WILL SHOW HOW 
THE POINT OF THY CONCEIVING THOUGHTS DID STAND ; 
THAT NONE WOULD THINK, IF ALL THY LIFE HAD BEEN 
TURN'D INTO LEISURE, THOU COULDST HAVE ATTAIN'D 
SO MUCH OF TIME, TO HAVE PERUS'D AND SEEN 
SO MANY VOLUMES THAT SO MUCH CONTAIN'D." 

Daniel. Funeral Poem upon the Death of the late Noble 
Earl of Devonshire. 

" Well-languaged Daniel," as Browne called him in his " Britannia's Pastorals," was one of 
Southey's favourite poets. Let the above extract speak of the Author of " The Doctor, &c" 

THE EDITOR. 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



The intrinsic beauty, and, what is of more consequence, the moral and 
religious value of the sentiments contained in " The Doctor, &c," has called 
for a new and popular Edition of that work. It has fallen to my lot, — 
otherwise laboriously occupied, — to edit it. What is done, ought to be 
done well, — whether it be so or not, competent readers will be the best 
judges. Not unversed in books, and familiar with ancient and modern 
languages as toward circumstances have made me, I trust the endeavour 
has not been unattained, — though some errors — 

. . . Quas aut incuria fudit 
Aut humana parum cavit natura — 

will unavoidably be detected and charitably overlooked. 

Five out of six, it has been said by those quite able to form an unbiassed 
and judicious opinion, were assured as to the authorship of " The Doctor, 
&c." It is now well known that the lamented Southey played with its pages 
as he did with his kittens, — as a relaxation from his bread-earning and every- 
day pursuits. It is not too much to say that no one but Southey could 
have written it. Line upon line, — page upon page, — shows the man that 
feared God, and honoured the King, and loved his Country, and despised 
all political tinkers, whether in matters ecclesiastical or civil. 

The extract following from a letter to Miss Caroline Bowles, — the 
present no less talented than amiable and excellent Mrs. Southey, and 
my much valued friend, — contains the most interesting particulars relative 
to the work. It is dated, Keswick, June, 1835. 

" Miss B., who then lived in the next house, was the Bhow Begum. 
That whole chapter " (that is, Chapter VII. A. I.) " is from the life, and the 
Book grew out of that night's conversation, exactly as there related. But 
to go farther back with its history. There is a story of Dr. D. D. of D. 3 
and of his horse Nobs, which has, I believe, been made into a Hawker's 
Book. Coleridge used to tell it, and the humour lay in making it as long- 
winded as possible ; — it suited, however, my long-windedness better than 
his, and I was frequently called upon for it by those who enjoyed it, and 
sometimes I volunteered it, when Coleridge protested against its being told. 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



As you may suppose, it was never twice told alike, except as to names, and 
the leading features. "With something of Tristram Shandy, something of 
Rabelais, and more of Montaigne, and a little of old Burton, the predomi- 
nant characteristic is still my own." 

Though railroads outrun literature, and Mammon has more votaries 
than religious and useful learning, it says something for us that a book 
such as " The Doctor, &c." should again be called for, the more so when it 
is considered that its readers, after all, must be rather fit and few than 
many. But, well said Walter Savage Landor, — " Southey was the first, 
and remains to the present day almost the only critic, who was constantly 
guided by truth and conscience. Added to which, his judgment, especially 
in works of imagination, was incomparably more correct than any other 
man's." 

It only remains to add that the " Author of the Doctor, &c, in his 
Study," and the " Sketch of the Bust," are by Nash, — "Edward Nash," 
— (as he is described in the Colloquies, i. 238.) — (i My dear, kind-hearted 
friend and fellow traveller, whose death has darkened some of the blithest 
recollections of my latter life." Both of these are excellent in their way, 
— but the engraving of the Bust, in the eyes of myself, and Southey 's eldest 
daughter, Edith May Warter, is perfect. " The View of Keswick from 
the Study Window " is by Mrs. Southey, and it is a view not to be 
forgotten. For the few foot-notes not marked R. S., the Editor is 
responsible. 

I had laid down the pen, when these words of old Fuller — (an especial 
favourite of Southey's) — flashed across my mind. Reader! " No discreet 

PERSON WILL CONCLUDE OUR FAITH THE WORSE, BECAUSE OUR CHARITY IS 

the more." Apply them as thou readest ! 

John Wood Warter. 

Vicarage House, West Tarring, Sussex, 
May 1 5th, 1848 




r 



t &V fr/T^ ufru 




PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



Now they that like it may : the rest may chuse. 

G. Wither. 

Je veux dface descouverte qu'on scache que je fay lefol. 
Ei pourqnoy ne me le sera-t-il permis, si le grand Solon 
dans Athenes, ne douta de le faire pour apporter un grand 
bien a sa Republique t La Republique dont fay charge, 
est ce petit monde que Dieu a estably en moy ; pour la 
conservation duquel je ne scay meilleur moyen que de 
trompet mes afflictions par quelques honnesles jeux 
d'esprit j appellez-les bouffbnneries si ainsi le voulex. 

Pasquier. 

If you are so bold as to venture a blowing-up, look 
closely to it ! for the plot lies deadly deep, and 'twill be 

between your legs before you be aware of it But of all 

things have a care of putting it in your pocket, for fear it 
takes fire, or runs away with your breeches. And if you 
can shun it, read it not when you are alone ; or at least not 
late in the evening ; for the venom is strongest about mid- 
night, and seizes most violently upon the head when the 
party is by himself. 1 shall not tell you one line of what 
is in it ; and therefore consider well what you do, and 
look to yourself. But if you be resolved to meddle, be 
sure have a care of catching cold, and keep to a moderate 
diet ; for there is danger and jeopardy in it besides. 

Dr. Eachard. 

— For those faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extempo- 
ranean stile, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of 
rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excre- 
ments of authors, toyes and fopperies, confusedly tumbled 
out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, 
harsh, raw, rude, phantasticall, absurd, insolent, indis- 
creet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, 
and dry: — I confess all; ('tis partly affected;) thou 
canst not think worse of me than I do of myself. 'Tis not 
worth the reading ! I yield it. I desire thee not to lose 
time in perusing so vain a subject. I should be peradven- 
ture loth myself to read him or thee so writing ; 'tis not 
operce pretium. All I say is this; that I have precedents 
for it. Burton. 

A foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, 
shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolu- 
tions ; these are begot in the ventricle of memory, 
nourished in the womb of pia mate r, and delivered upon 
the mellowing of the occasion. But the gift is good in 
those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it. 

Love's Labour Lost. 

If the world like it not, so much the worse for them. 

Covvper. 



— un boschetto, 

Donne per quello givanfior cogliendo, 

Con diletlo, co' quel, co' quel dicendo ; 

Eccolo, eccol! . . che a? — efiordaliso! 

Va la per le viole ; 

Piit cola per le rose, cole, cole, 

Vaghe amorose. 

me, che' I prun mipungei 

Quell' allra me v' aggiunge. 

U', il, o, cW e quel che saltaf 

Un grillo ! un grillo ! 

Venite qua, correte, 

Ramponzoli cogliete ; 

E' non con essi ! 

Si, son ! — colei o colei 

Vien qua, vien qua perfunghi, un micolino 

Piu cold, piii cola per sermollino. 

Ugolino Ubaldini or 
Franco Sacchetti. 

If the particulars seem too large or to be over tediously 
insisted upon, consider in how many impertinent and 
trifling discourses and actions the best of us do consume 
far more hours than the perusal of this requires minutes, 
and yet think it no tediousness : and let them call to mind 
how many volumes this age imprints and reads which are 
foolish if not wicked. Let them be persuaded likewise, 
that I have not written this for those who have no need 
thereof, or to shew my own wit or compendiousness but 
to instruct the ignorant ; to whom I should more often 
speak in vain, if I did not otherwhile by repetitions and 
circumlocutions, stir up their affections, and beat into 
their understandings the knowledge and feeling of those 
things which I deliver. Yea, let them know that I know 
those expressions will be both pleasing and profitable to 
some which they imagine to be needless and super- 
abundant ; and that I had rather twenty nice critics 
should censure me for a word here and there superfluous 
than that one of those other should want that which might 
explain my meanings to their capacities, and so make 
frustrate all my labour to those who have most need of 
it, and for whom it was chiefly intended. 

G. Wither. 

Tempus ad hoc mecum latuit, por tuque resedit, 

Necfuil audaces impetus ire vias. 
Nunc animi venere ; juvat nunc denique funem 

Solvere : 

Ancora sublata est ; terra?, portusque valete ! 

Imus ; habet ventos nostra carina suos. 

Wallius. 



POSTSCRIPT. 



There was a certain Pisander whose name 
has been preserved in one of the proverbial 
sayings of the Greeks, because he lived in 
continual fear of seeing his own ghost. How 
often have I seen mine while arranging these 
volumes for publication, and carrying them 
through the press ! 

Twenty years have elapsed since the in- 
tention of composing them was conceived, 
and the composition commenced, in what 
manner and in what mood the reader will 
presently be made acquainted. The vicissi- 
tudes which in the course of those years 
have befallen every country in Europe are 
known to every one ; and the changes, which, 
during such an interval, must have occurred 
in a private family, there are few who may 
not, from their own sad experience, readily 
apprehend. 

Circumstances which when they were 
touched upon in these volumes were of 
present importance, and excited a lively 
interest, belong now to the history of the 
past. They who were then the great per- 
formers upon the theatre of public life have 
fretted their hour and disappeared from the 
stage. Many who were living and flourish- 
ing when their names were here sportively 
or severely introduced are gone to their 
account. The domestic circle which the 
introduction describes has in the ordinary 
course of things been broken up ; some of 
its members are widely separated from 
others, and some have been laid to rest. 
The reader may well believe that certain 
passages which were written with most 
joyousness of heart, have been rendered 
purely painful to the writer by time and 
change : and that some of his sweetest 
thoughts come to him in chewing the cud, 
like wormwood and gall. — But it is a 
wholesome bitterness. 



He has neither expunged nor altered any 
thing on any of these accounts. It would 
be weakness to do this on the score of his 
own remembrances, and in the case of allu- 
sions to public affairs and to public men it 
would be folly. The Almanack of the cur- 
rent year will be an old one as soon as next 
year begins. 

It is the writer's determination to re- 
main unknown ; and they who may suppose 
that 

By certain signs here set in sundry place, 

they have discovered him, will deceive them- 
selves. A Welsh Triad says that the three 
unconcealable traits of a person by which he 
shall be known, are the glance of his eye, the 
pronunciation of his speech, and the mode 
of his self-motion ; — in briefer English, his 
look, his voice, and his gait. There are no 
such characteristics by which an author can 
be identified. He must be a desperate 
mannerist who can be detected by his style, 
and a poor proficient in his art if he cannot 
at any time so vary it, as to put the critic 
upon a false scent. Indeed every day's 
experience shows that they who assume 
credit to themselves, and demand it from 
others for their discrimination in such 
things, are continually and ridiculously 
mistaken. 

On that side the author is safe ; he has a 
sure reliance upon the honour as well as the 
discretion of the very few to whom he is 
naturally or necessarily known ; and if the 
various authors to whom the Book will be 
ascribed by report, should derive any grati- 
fication from the perusal, he requests of 
them in return that they will favour his 
purpose by allowing such reports to pass 
uncontradicted. 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



[Prefixed to Vol. III. in the original Edition.'] 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 

"Ayivvv, £ . . . xx^dtx 

»PTiX8' ikChti 

. . . . uvovir' oLtt' a,v ociiT'/i tfoi Sozti, 
roXf&ritrov, t'dt, xagytrov, ocyoc/aoct x,ot^bi<x.g. 

Aristophanes. 

Je vas de nouveau percer mon tonneau, et de la traicte, 
laquelle par deux precedents volumes vous est assez cog T 
neue, vous tirer du creux de nos passetemps epicenaires 
un galant Herein, et consecutivement un joyeux quart de 
sentences Pantagruelliques. Par moy vous sera licite les 
appeller Diogeniques. — Et peur n'ayez que le vin faille. 
— Autant que vous en tirer ay par la dille, antant en en- 
tonneray per le bondon. Ainsi demourera le tonneau 
inexpuisible . II a source vive et veine perpetuelle. 

Rabelais. 

The wholesom'st meats that are will breed satiety 
Except we should admit of some variety. 

In music, notes must be some high, some base. 
And this I say, these pages have intendment, 

Still kept within the lists of good sobriety, 
To work in men's ill manners good amendment. 

Wherefore if any think the book unseasonable, 
Their stoic minds are foes to good society, 

And men of reason may think them unreasonable. 
It is an act of virtue and of piety, 

To warn men of their sins in any sort, 

In prose, in verse, in earnest, or in sport. 

Sir John Harrington. 

The great cement that holds these several discourses 
together is one main design which they jointly drive at, 
and which, I think, is confessedly generous and important, 
namely, the knowledge of — true happiness, so far as 
reason can cut her way through those darknesses and 
difficulties she is encumbered with in this life : which 
though they be many and great, yet I should belie the 
sense of my own success, if I should pronounce them in- 
superable ; as also, if I were deprived of that sense, 
should lose many pleasures and enjoyments of mind, 
which I am now conscious to myself of: amongst which, 
there is none so considerable as that tacit reflection within 
myself, what real service may be rendered to religion by 
these my labours. Henry More. 

Scribere fert animus multa et diversa,nec uno 
Gurgite versari semper ; quo flamina ducent 
Ibimus, et nunc has, nunc illas nabimus undas ; 
Ardua nunc ponti, nunc littora tuta petemus. 
Et quanquam inter dujn frelus ratione, latentes 
Naturae tentabo vias, atque abdita pandam, 
Prcecipue tamen ilia sequar qucecunque videntur 
Prodesse, ac sanctos mortalibus addere mores, 
Heu penitus {liceat verum mihi dicere) nostro 
Extinctos cevo. Paungenius. 

Ja n'est besoin {amy Lecteur ! ) t'escrire 

Par le menu le prouffit et plaisir 

Que recevras si ce livre veux lire, 

Et d'icelluy le sens prendre au desir ; 

Veuille done prendre d le lire loisir, 

Et que ce soit avecq intelligence. 

Si tu lefais, propos de grand plaisance 

Tu y verras, et moult prouffit eras ; 

Et si tiendras en grand resjouissance 

Le tien esprit, et ton temps passer as. Jean Favre. 



" Gods me ! how now ! what present have we here ? " 

" A Book that stood in peril of the press ; 
But now it's past those pikes, and doth appear 

To keep the lookers on from heaviness." 
" What stuff contains it ? " — " Fustian, perfect spruce, 

Wit's gallimalfry, or wit fried in steaks." 
" From whom came it, a God's name?" — " From his 
Muse, 

(Oh do not tell !) that still your favour seeks." 
" And who is that?"—" Truth that is I."— "What I? 

I per se I, great I, you would say." — " No ! 
Great I indeed you well may say ; but I 

Am little i, the least of all the row." 

Davies of Hereford. 

Lector, esto libro te ofrezco, sin que me aija mandado 
Senor alguno que le escriva, ni menos me ayan impor- 
lunado mis am/gos que le estampe, sino solamente por mi 
gusto, por mi antojo y por mi voluntad. Montalvan. 

The reader must not expect in this work merely the 
private uninteresting history of a single person. He may 
expect whatever curious particulars can with any pro- 
priety be connected with it. Nor must the general dis- 
quisitions and the incidental narratives of the present 
work be ever considered as actually digressionary in their 
natures, and as merely useful in their notices. They are 
all united with the rest, and form proper parts of the 
whole. They have some of them a necessary connexion 
with the history of the Doctor ; they have many of them 
an intimate relation, they have all of them a natural 
affinity to it. And the Author has endeavoured, by a 
judicious distribution of them through the work, to pre- 
vent that disgusting uniformity, and to take off that un- 
interesting personality, which must necessarily result 
from the merely barren and private annals of an obscure 
individual. He has thus in some measure adopted the 
elegant principles of modern gardening. He has thrown 
down the close hedges and the high walls that have con- 
fined so many biographers in their views. He has called 
in the scenes of the neighbouring country to his aid, and 
has happily combined them into his own plan. He has 
drawn off the attention from the central point before it 
became languid and exhausted, by fetching in some ob- 
jects from society at large, or by presenting some view of 
the philosophy of man. But he has been cautious of mul- 
tiplying objects in the wantonness of refinement, and of 
distracting the attention with a confused variety. He has 
always considered the history of the Doctor, as the great 
fixed point, the enlivening centre, of all his excursions. 
Every opening is therefore made to carry an actual re- 
ference, either mediate or immediate, to the regular his- 
tory of the Doctor. And every visto is employed only 
for the useful purpose of breaking the stiff straight lines, 
of lighting up the dark, of heightening the little, and of 
colouring over the lifeless, in the regular history of the 
Doctor. 

Preface to Whitaker's History of Manchester, 
mutatis mutandis. 



Chi tristezza da se cacciar desia, 
Legga quest' opra saporita e bella. 



Bertoldo. 



I exhort all People, gentle and simple, men, women and 
children, to buy, to read, to extol, these labours of mine. 
Let them not fear to defend every article ; for I will bear 
them harmless. I have arguments good store, and can 
easily confute, either logically, theologically, or metaphy- 
sically, all those who oppose me. Arbuthnot. 



PEELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



Scripta legis passim quamplurima, lector, in orbe, 
Quce damni plus quam commoditatis habent. 

Hcec fugienda procul cum sint, sic ilia petenda, 
Jucunda utilibus quce bene juncla docent. 

P. RUBIGALLUS PANNONIUS. 

Out of the old fieldes, as men saith, 
Cometh all this new corn fro' year to year ; 

And out of old bookes, in good faith, 
Cometh all this new science that men lere. 

Chaucer. 



[Prefixed to Vol. IV. in the original Edition.'} 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 

TO THE READER IN ORDINARY. 

The Muses forbid that I should restrain your meddling, 
whom I see already busy with the title, and tricking over 
the leaves : it is your own. I departed with my right, when 
I let it first abroad ; and now so secure an interpreter I 
am of my chance, that neither praise nor dispraise from 
you can affect me — The commendation of good things 
may fall within a many, the approbation but in a few ; for 
the most commend out of affection, self-tickling, an 
easiness or imitation ; but men judge only out of know- 
ledge. That is the trying faculty ; and to those works 
that will bear a judge, nothing is more dangerous than a 
foolish praise. You will say, I shall not have yours there- 
fore ; but rather the contrary, all vexation of censure. If 
I were not above such molestations now, I had great 
cause to think unworthily of my studies, or they had so of 
me. But I leave you to your exercise. Begin. 

Ben Jonson. 

Je n'adresse point ce Livre a un Grand, sur une vaine 
opinion quefaurois de la garantir ou de Venvie, ou de le 
/aire vivre contre les rudes assauts du temps, d'autant que 
sa principale recommendation doit deriver de son propre 
fonds, et non de Vappuy de celuy a quije le dedierois : car 
rien ne Fauclorisera, s'il n'est remply de belles concep- 
tions, et tissu d'un langage bref, nerveux, et escrit d'une 
plume franche, resolue et kardie. La rondeur d'escrire 
plaist } ces choses sont pour donner prix et pointe d nos 
escrits, et depiter le temps et la mort. Je prie Dieu que 
ces Tomes ressemblent d la beaule d'un jardin, duquel 
Vun cueille une belle rose, V autre une violette, ou une 
girofl.ee ; ainsi souhaitay-je qu'en ceste diver site de sujects, 
dont elles sont plaines, chacun tire dequoy resveiller, res- 
jouyr et contenter son esprit. Nicolas Pasquier. 

Non ego me methodo aslringam serviliter ulla, 
Sed temere Hyblccce more vagabor apis, 

Quo me spes praedce, et generandi gloria mellis, 
Liberaque ingenii quoferet ala mei. Cowley. 

Take not too much at once, lest thy brain turn edge ; 
Taste it first as a potion for physic, and by degrees thou 
shalt drink it as beer for thirst. Fuller. 

Qui V a fait? Quiconque il soit, en ce a este prudent, 
qu'il n'y a point mis son nom. Rabelais. 

Jo me »' andrd con la barchetla mia, 

Qnanto V acqua comporta un picciol legno ; 

E cid ck' io penso con la fantasia, 
Di piacere ad ognuno e 7 mio disegno : 



Convien che varie cose al mondo sia, 

Come son varj volti e vario ingegno, 
E place a V uno il bianco, a V altro ilperso, 
diverse materie in prosa o in verso. 

Forse coloro ancor che leggeranno 

Di questa tanto piccola favilla 
Larnente conpoca esca accenderanno 

De' monti o di Parnaso o di Sibilla : 
E de' mieifior come ape piglieranno 

I dotti, s' alcun dolce ne distitta ; 
II resto a molti pur dard diletto, 
E lo autore ancor fia benedetto. 



Pulci. 



Most Prefaces are effectually apologies, and neither the 
Book nor the Author one jot the better for them. If the 
Book be good, it will not need an apology ; if bad it will 
not bear one : for where a man thinks by calling himself 
noddy in the epistle, to atone for shewing himself to be 
one in the text, he does, with respect to the dignity of an 
author, but bind up two fools in one cover. 

Sir Roger D'Estrange. 

Inter cuncta leges, — 

Qua ratione queas traducere leniter cevum ; 

Ne te semper inops agitet vexetque cupido, 

Ne pavor, et rerum mediocriter utilium spes ; — 

Quid minuat cur as ; quid te tibi reddat amicumj 

Quid pure tranquillet, honos, an dulce lucellum, 

An secretum iter, etfallentis semita vitce. Horace. 

Si ne suis je toutesfois hors d'esperance, que si quel- 
qu'un daigne lire, et Men gouster ces miens escrits, (en- 
cores que le langage n'en soit eslevi, ny enfle) il ne les 
trouvera du tout vuides de saveur; ny tant desgarniz 
d'utilite, qu'ils n'en puissent tirer plaisir et profit, pourveu 
que leurs esprits ne soyent auparavant saisiz de mal 
vueillance, ou imbuz de quelques autres mauvaises 
opinions. Je prie doncques tous Lecteurs entrer en la 
lecture des presents discours, delivres de toute passion et 
emulation. Car quand I'amertume d'envie ou mal vueil- 
lance, est detrempee en desir de contredire, elle ne laisse 
jamais le goust que deprave et maljugeant. 

Pierre de St. Julien. 

Here are no forced expressions, no rack'd phrase, 

No Babel compositions to amaze 

The tortured reader, no believed defence 

To strengthen the bold Atheist's insolence, 

No obscene syllable that may compel 

A blush from a chaste maid. Massinger. 

Read, and fear not thine own understanding ; this book 
will create a clear one in thee ; and when thou hast consi- 
dered thy' purchase, thou wilt call the price of it a charity 
to thyself. Shirley. 

One caveat, good Reader, and then God speed thee ! 

Do not open it at adventures, and by reading the broken 
pieces of two or three lines, judge it; but read it through, 
and then I beg no pardon if thou dislikest it. Farewell. 
Thomas Adams. 
Listen while my tongue 
Reveals what old Harmodius wont to teach 
My early age ; Harmodius, who had weigh'd 
Within his learned mind whate'er the schools 
Of Wisdom, or thy lonely whispering voice, 
O faithful Nature, dictate of the laws 
Which govern and support this mighty frame 
Of universal being. Akenside. 

Aiue' eXfl', 'onus &■> xou troQurieos yevy. 

Euripides. 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



[Prefixed to Vol. V. in the original Edition.] 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 

See here, see here, a Doctor rare, 

Who travels much at home ; 
Come take his pills, — they cure all ills, 

Past, present, and to come. 

Take a little of his nif-naf, 

Put it on your tif-taf. 

The Bishoprick Garland. 

Quod virgo proba, quod stolata mater, 
Quod purus positd severitate 
Jam post pulpita perlegat sacerdos. 

T. L. on Sir Wm. Killigrew's Selindra. 

I entered en this work certainly with considerable 
materials, and since engaging in it, in reading, in think- 
ing, in correcting and improving, I have proportioned my 
labours to my undertaking. Every step I advanced, I did 
but more clearly see how much farther I might go. Here 
too readers and some writers may be reminded of the 
effect produced by finding a pleasure in your employ- 
ment ; some burdens are sweet ; you lose the sense of 
weight by the deceptions of fancy and occasional rests ; 
and in proportion as your journey becomes more agree- 
able, you are in danger of growing more dilatory. 

George Dyer. 

Si tu tombes entre les mains de ceux qui ne voyent rien 
d'autruy que pour y trouver sujet de s'y desplaire, et qu'ils 
te reprockent que ton Docteur est ennuyeux ; responds 
lew qu'il est a leur choix de lui voir ou ne lui voir point. 
— Si tu te trouves parmy ceux qui font profession d'inter- 
preter les songes, et descouvrir les pensees plus secrettes 
d'autruy, et qu'ils asseurent que * * est un iel homme 
et * * une telle femme ; ne leur respond rien ; car Us 
scavent assez qu'ils ne scavent pas ce qu'ils disent : mais 
supplie ceux qui pourroient estre abusez de leur s fictions, 
de consider er que si ces choses ne m'importent, f aurois eu 
bien peu d'esprit de les avoir voulu dis&imuler et ne V avoir 
sceufaire. Que si en ce qu'ils diront, il n'y a guere d'ap- 
parence, il ne lesfaut pas croire : et s'il y en a beauccup, 
il faut penser que pour couvrir la chose que je voulois 
tenir cachee et ensevelie,je Veusse autrement desguisee. 

Astree — mutatis mutandis. 

I would not be in danger of that law of Moses, that if a 
man dig a pit and cover it not, he must recompense those 
which are damnified by it ; which is often interpreted of 
such as shake old opinions, and do not establish new as 
certain, but leave consciences in a worse danger than they 
found them in. I believe that law of Moses hath in it 
some mystery and appliableness ; for by that law men are 
only tiien bound to that indemnity and compensation, if an 
ox or an ass, (that is such as are of a strong constitution 
and accustomed to labour) fall therein; but it is not said 
so, if a sheep or a goat fall : no more are we if men in a 
silliness or wantonness will stumble or take a scandal, 
bound to rectify them at all times. And therefore because 
I justly presume you strong and watchful enough, I make 
account that I am not obnoxious to that law; since my 
meditations are neither too wide nor too deep for you. 
Donne's Letters. 

Such an author consulted in a morning sets the spirits 
for the vicissitudes of the day, better than the glass does 
a man's person. Sir Richard Steele. 



The Load-stone of Attraction I find out, 
The Card of Observation guides about, 
The Needle of Discretion points the way. 

Dutchess of Newcastle. 

— (Z^roi Trctvtrcitrdz /u.<zr/y.ici. 
'"PifAfii fu.lv 01 irxori'/i xni kqiyyii yu&ri /u.tXe&!»y' 
Kai Aixiri trxori-w yuarof, tpairos hi ka.(Zi<rdi' 
Ouro? ihov •xa.vnatffi o"et<p^s, o\xXa,vriTOs Vy?ci%xu. 
"E/05T6, /u.'/i trxoriviv hi hiaixivt, x.cu yvb$ov euti' 
'HiXicv yXuxvht^xl; ihov <p<x.o$ 'i%oxc- >.otfAxu. 

Sibylline Verses. 

Of things that be strange 

Who loveth to read 
In this book let him range 

His fancy to feed. Richard Robinson. 

At ego tibi sermone isto — 

Varias fabulas conseram, auresque tuas 

Benevolus lepido susurro permulceam. 

Apuleius. 

Whoso doth attempt the Author's works to read 
Must bring with him a stayed head, and judgement to 

proceed ; 
For as there be most wholesome hests and precepts to be 

found, 
So are there rocks and shallow shelves to run the ship 

aground. Arthur Golding. 

I am studying the art of patience: — to drive six snails 
before me from this town to Moscow, neither use goad nor 
whip to them, but let them take their own time. The 
patientest man i' the world match me for an experiment ! 

Webster. 

He says and he says not, cares and he cares not, he's 
king and he's no king ; his high-born soul is above this 
sublunary world ; he reigns, he rides in the clouds and 
keeps his court in the Horizon : he's Emperor of the 
Superlative Heights, and lives in pleasure among the 
Gods ; he plays at bowls with the Stars, and makes a foot- 
ball of the Globe ; he makes that to fly far, far out of the 
reach of Thought. Hurlothrumbo. 

Lo libresfo befaitz, e de bos motz complit ; 
E sil voletz entendre, li gran e li petit 
Podon i mot. apendre de sen e de bel dit; 
Car aisel qui lefe nal ventre totfarsit, 
E sel que nol conoish, ni nol a resentit. 
Ja no so cujaria. 

Cansos de la Crozada 
contr els Ereges Dalbreges- 

Something oddly 
The book-man prated ; yet he talked it weeping. 

Ford. 

We content ourselves to present to thinking minds, 
the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new 
theories, that may be further cultivated, beautified and 
enlarged. Truth however being of a coherent nature.it 
is impossible to separate one branch from another and see 
it in all its beauty. I beg therefore my readers not to 
judge of the work by parcels, but to continue to the end, 
that so they may see the connection of every part with 
the whole. Scattered rays do not always enlighten ; but 
when reunited they give a mutual lustre to each other. 
The Chevalier Ramsay. 



Xll 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



I must be allowed my freedom in my studies, for I sub- 
stitute my writings for a game at the tennis-court or a 
club at the tavern. I never counted among my honours 
these opuscula of mine, but merely as harmless amuse- 
ments. It is my partridge, as with St. John ; my cat, as 
with Pope St. Gregory ; my little dog, as with St. Dominic ; 
my lamb, as with St. Francis ; (my pig, he might have 
said as with St. Antony,) my great black mastiff, as with 
Cornelius Agrippa ; and my tame hare, as with Justus 
Lipsius. Catherinot. 

As quoted and translated by D' Israeli. 

To ignorants obdurde, quhair wilfull errour lyis, 
Nor zit to curious folks, quhilks carping dois deject thee, 

Nor zit to learned men, quha thinks thame onelie wyis, 
But to the docile bairns of knowledge I direct thee. 

James I. 

Albeit I have studied much and learned little, yet I have 
learned to glean some handf'ulls of corn out of the rankest 
cockle; to make choice of the most fragrant flowers of 
humanity, the most virtuous herbs of philosophy, the 
most sovereign fruits of government, and the most hea- 
venly manna of divinity ; to be acquainted with the fairest, 
provided for the foulest, delighted with the temperatest, 
pleased with the meanest, and contented with all weather 
— greater men may profess and can achieve greater mat- 
ters : I thank God I know the length, that is the short- 
ness of my own foot. If it be any man's pleasure to ex- 
tenuate my sufficiency in other knowledge, or practise to 
empeach my ability in words or deeds, to debase my for- 
tune, to abridge my commendations, or to annihilate my 
fame, he shall find a cold adversary of him that hath laid 
hot passions watering, and might easily be induced to be 
the invective of his own non proficiency. 

Gabriel Harvey. 



I Prefixed to Vol. VI. in the original Edition.~\ 

PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 

Two thyngys owyth every clerk 

To advertysyn, begynnyng a werk, 

If he procedyn wyl ordeneely, 

The fyrste is what, the secunde is why. 

In wych two wurdys, as it semyth me, 

The Foure causys comprehendyd be 

Wych as our philosofyrs us do teche, 

In the begynnyng men owe to seche 

Of every book ; and aftyr there entent, 

The fyrst is clepyd cause efficyent: 

The secunde they clepe cause materyal, 

Formal the thrydde; the fourte fynal. 

The efficyent cause is the auctour, 

Wych aftyr hys cunnyng doth hys labour 

To a complyse the begunne matere, 

Wych cause is secunde ; and the more clere 

That it may be, the formal cause 

Seltyth in dew ordre clause be clause. 

And these thre thyngys, longyn to what, 

Auctour, matere and forme ordinat, 

The fynal cause declaryth pleynly 

Of the werk begunne the cause why ; 

That is to seyne what was the entent 

Of the auctour fynally, and what he ment. 

OSBERN BoKENAM. 



Look for no splendid painted outside here, 
But for a work devotedly sincere; 
A thing low prized in these too high-flown days : 
Such solid sober works get little praise. 
Yet some there be 
Love true solidity. 

And unto such brave noble souls I write, 
In hopes to do them and the subject right. 
I write it not to please the itching vein 
Of idle-headed fashionists, or gain 
Their fond applause ; 
I care for no such noise. 

I write it only for the sober sort, 
Who love right learning, and will labour for't; 
And who will value worth in art, though old, 
And not be weary of the good, though told 
'Tis out of fashion 
By nine-tenths of the nation. 

I writ it also out of great good will 
Unto my countrymen ; and leave my skill 
Behind me for the sakes of those that may 
Not yet be born ; but in some after day 
May make good use 
Of it, without abuse. 

But chiefly I do write it, for to show 
A duty to the Doctor which I owe. 

Thomas Mace. 

Physicians are many times forced to leave such methods 
of curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being 
overruled by their patient's impatiency are fain to try the 
best they can in taking that way of cure, which the cured 
will yield unto: in like sort, considering how the case 
doth stand with this present age, full of tongue and weak 
of brain, behold we yield to the stream thereof: into the 
causes of goodness we will not make any curious or deep 
inquiry ; to touch them now and then it shall be sufficient, 
when they are so near at hand that easily they may be 
conceived without any far removed discourse. That way 
we are contented to prove, which being the worse in itself, 
is notwithstanding now, by reason of common imbecility, 
the fitter and likelier to be brooked. Hooker. 

Qui lit beaucoup et jamais ne medite, 
Semble d celuy qui mange avidement, 
Et de tous mets surcharge tellement 

Son estomach que rien ne luy profit. 

QUATRAINE DE PlBRAC. 

Thus Englished by Sylvester, 

Who readeth much and never meditates, 

Is like a greedy eater of much food, 
Who so surcloys his stomach with his cates 

That commonly they do him little good. 

Je scay qu'en ce discours Von me pourra reprendre, que 
fay mis beaucoup de particularitez qui sont fort super- 
flues. Je le crois : mais,je scay, que si elles desplaisent 
a aucuns, elles plairont aux autres : me semblant, que ce 
n' est pas assez, quand on loue des personnes, dire qu 'elles 
sont belles, sages, vertueuses, valeureuses, vaillanles, mag- 
nanimes, liberates, splendides et tres-parfaites. Ce sont 
loiianges et descriptions generates, et lieux-communs 
empruntex de tout le monde. II en faut specifier Men le 
tout, et descrire particulieremeni les perfections, afin que 
micux on les louche au doigt: ct telle est man opinion. 

Bkantome. 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



xin 



Non sai se V arte, o il caso abbia forntta 
Cost bell' opra, o siano enlrambi a parte ; 

Perocche V arte e tal cite il caso imita, 
E' l caso e tal eke rassonriglia all' arte: 

E questo a quella, e quella a questo unita, 
Quanto pud, quanta sa, mesce e comparte. 

Un la materia al bel lavor dispose, 

L'altra meglio adornolla, e pots' ascose. 

Metastasio. 

Tous ceux qui ont quelquesfois pese le grand travail et 
le labeur de V imagination, Vont juge pour le plus grand 
qui se puisse trouver, et ont eu raison ; d'aulant que 
celuy lequel veutet desire en contenter plusieurs, doit aussi 
chercher des moyens difftrens, afln que ce qui est ennuyeux 
a I'un, l' autre le trouve doux et agreable ; car de le donner 
& tous, il est impossible ; veu, qu'entre trois personnes 
seulement que Von aura conviees, il se trouvera une 
grande dtference de gouts, ainsi que I'a dit Horace, luy 
dis-je qui Vavoit si bien experiments : par ainsi il n'est 
pas possible qu'en une si longue kistoire que celle dontje 
vay traictant, que je ne donne de la peine par la diver site 
des chapitres. Toutesfo'is si le jugement s'en j met par des 
personnes privees et libres de toute passion, Us diront que 
e'est le vray moyen d'entretenir les esprits curieux. 

L'Histoire du Chevalier du Soleil. 

Be rattier wise than witty, for much wit hath commonly 
much froth; and 'tis hard to jest and not sometimes jeer 
too ; which many times sinks deeper than was intended or 
expected ; and what was designed for mirth, ends in sad- 
ness. Caleb Trenchfield, 
(probably a fictitious name,) Restituta. 

In some passages you will observe me very satirical. 
Writing on such subjects I could not be otherwise. I can 
write nothing without aiming, at least, at usefulness. It 
were beneath my years to do it, and still more dishonour- 
able to my religion. I know that a reformation of such 
abuses as I have censured is not to be expected from the 
efforts of an author ; but to contemplate the world, its 
follies, its vices, its indifferences to duty, and its strenuous 
attachment to what is evil, and not to reprehend, were to 
approve it. From this charge, at least, I shall be clear ; 
for I have neither tacitly, nor expressly flattered either its 
characters or its customs. Cowper. 

Nemo eo sapientius desipuisse, nemo stultius sapuisse 
videtur. 

Said of Cardan by I know not who. 

II y en a qui pensent que les lecteurs regoivent peu.d' in- 
struction, quand on leur represente des choses qui n'ont 
pas este achevees, qu'eux appellent ceuvres imparfaites ; 
maisje ne suis pas de leur advis ; car quand quelquefait 
est descrit a la verite, et avec ses circonstances, encor qu'il 
ne soit parvenu qu'd mychemin, si peut-on tnusjours en 
tirer dufruict. La Noue. 

Authors, you know of greatest fame, 

Thro' modesty suppress their name ; 

And would you wish me to reveal 

What these superior wits conceal? 

Forego the search, my curious friend, 

And husband time to better end. 

All my ambition is, I own, 

To profit and to please unknown, 

Like streams supplied from springs below 

Which scatter blessings as they flow. 

Dr. Cotton. 



Thus have I, as well as I could, gathered a posey of 
observations as they grew, — and if some rue and worm- 
wood be found amongst the sweeter herbs, their whole- 
someness will make amends for their bitterness. 

Adam Littleton. 

This worthy work in which of good examples are so 
many, 

This orchard of Alcinous, in which there wants not any 

Herb, tree, or fruit that may mans use for health or 
pleasure serve ; 

This plenteous horn of Acheloy, which justly doth de- 
serve 

To bear the name of Treasury of Knowledge, I present 

To your good worships once again,— desiring you there- 
fore 

To let your noble courtesy and favour countervail 

My faults, where art or eloquence on my behalf doth fail, 

For sure the mark whereat I shoot is neither wreaths of 
bay, 

Nor name of author, no, nor meed; but chiefly that it 
may 

Be liked well of you and all the wise and learned sort ; 

And next, that every wight that shall have pleasure for 
to sport 

Him in this garden, may as well bear wholesome fruit 
away 

As only on the pleasant flowers his retchless senses stay. 

GOLDING. 

Doubtless many thoughts have presented, and are still 
presenting themselves to my mind, which once I had no 
idea of. But these, in I believe every instance, are as 
much the growth of former rooted principles, as multiplied 
branches grow from one and the same main stem. Of such 
an inward vegetation I am always conscious ; and I equally 
seem to myself to perceive the novelty of the fresh shoot, 
and its connexion with what had been produced before. 
Alexander Knox. 

The extensive argument and miscellaneous nature of 
the work led him to declare his sentiments on a multitude 
of questions, on which he thought differently from other 
writers, and of course, to censure or confute their opinions. 
Whole bodies of men, as well as individuals of the highest 
reputation, were attacked by him, and his manner was to 
speak his sense of all with freedom and force. So that 
most writers, and even readers, had some ground of com- 
plaint against him. Not only the free-thinkers and un- 
believers, against whom the tenour of his book was 
directed, but the heterodox of every denomination were 
treated without much ceremony, and of the orthodox 
themselves, some tenet or other, which till then they had 
held sacred, was discussed and reprobated by him. Strag- 
gling heresies, or embodied systems, made no difference 
with him ; as they came in his way, no quarter was given 
to either, "his end and manner of writing," as Dr. Mid 
dleton truly observed, "being to pursue truth wherever 
he found it." Hurd's Life of Warburton. 

Thou art like my rappee, here, a most ridiculous super- 
fluity; but a pinch of thee now and then is a more delicious 
treat. Clandestine Marriage. 

Yea — but what am I? 

A scholar, or a schoolmaster, or else some youth ? 

A lawyer, a student, or else a country clown ? 

A brumman, a basket-maker, or a baker of pies ? 

A flesh, or a fishmonger, or a sower of lies ? 

A louse, or a louser, a leek or a lark, 

A dreamer, a drommell, a fire or a spark ? 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES. 



A caitiff, a cut-throat, a creeper in corners, 
A hairbrain, a hangman, or a grafter of homers ? 
A merchant, a maypole, a man or a mackarel, 
A crab or a crevise, a crane or a cockerell ? 

Api us and Virginia. 



It may appear to some ridiculous 

Thus to talk knave and madman, and sometimes 

Come in with a dried sentence, stuft with sage. 

Webster. 



Etsi verb, quce in isto opere desiderentur, rectius forsan 
quam quivis alius, perspiciam ; et si meo plane voto stan- 
dumfuisset, id, in tanta, quce hodie est librorum copia, vel 
plane suppressissem, vel in multos annos adhuc pressissem; 
tumen aliquid amicis, aliquid tempori dandum ; et cum iis 
qui aliquid fructus ex eo sperant, illud communicandum 
putavi. Hunc itaque meum qualemcunque laborem, Lec- 
tor candide, boni consule ; quod te facile faclurum confldo, 
si eum animum ad legendum attuleris, quern ego ad scri- 
bendum, veritatis nimirum aliisque inserviendi cupidum. 

Sennertus. 



CONTENTS. 



PRELUDE OF MOTTOES.— Page vii. 



POSTSCRIPT.— p. viii. 
CHAPTER VII. A. I.— p. 1. 

A FAMILY PARTY AT A NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR'S. 

Good Sir, reject it not, although it bring 

Appearances of some fantastic thing 

At first unfolding ! George Wither to the King. 

CHAPTER VI. A. I.— p. 2. 

SHOWING THAT AN AUTHOR MAY MORE EASILY BE 
KEPT AWAKE BY HIS OWN IMAGINATIONS THAN 
PUT TO SLEEP BY THEM HIMSELF, WHATEVER 
MAY BE THEIR EFFECT UPON HIS READERS. 

Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced 
to take up her lodging in a cat's ear : a little infant that 
breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out as 
if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow. "Websteb. 



CHAPTER V. A.I.— p. 3. 

SOMETHING CONCERNING THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
DREAMS, AND THE AUTHOR'S EXPERIENCE IN 
AERIAL HORSEMANSHIP. 

If a dream should come in now to make you afear'd, 
With a windmill on his head and bells at his beard, 
Would you straight wear your spectacles here at your toes, 
And your boots on your brows and your spurs on your 
nose? Ben Jons on. 



CHAPTER IV. A. I.— p. 4. 

A CONVERSATION AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE. 

Tel condamne mon coq a-Vane qui unjour enjustifiera le 
bon sens. Li Pretieuse. 



CHAPTER III. A. I.— p. 5. 

THE UTILITY OF POCKETS. A COMPLIMENT PRO- 
PERLY RECEIVED. 

La tasca e propria cosa da Christiani. 

Benedetto Varchi. 



CHAPTER II. A.I.— p. 6. 

CONCERNING DEDICATIONS, PRINTERS' TYPES, AND 
IMPERIAL INK. 

Hy aura des clefs, et des ouvertures de mes secrets. 
La Pretieuse. 



DEDICATION.— p. 8. 



CHAPTER I. A. I.— p. 8. 

NO BOOK CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A PREFACE. 

I see no cause but men may pick their teeth, 
Though Brutus with a sword did kill himself. 

Taylor, the Water Poet. 

ANTE-PREFACE.— p. 8. 

I here present thee with a hive of bees, laden some with 
wax, and some with honey. Fear not to approach ! 
There are no Wasps, there are no Hornets here. If some 
wanton Bee should chance to buzz about thine ears, 
stand thy ground and hold thy hands : there's none will 
sting thee if thou strike not first. If any do, she hath 
honey in her bag will cure thee too. Quarles. 



PREFACE.— p. 9. 

Oh for a quill plucked from a Seraph's wing ! 

Young. 



INITIAL CHAPTER.— p. 10. 

'Eg eu d*i roc. !T(ureo. — Homer. 



CONTENTS. 



THE DOCTOR, 



Eccoti il libro ; 7nettivi ben cura 
Iddio t' ajuti e dia buona ventura. 

Orl. Innam. 



CHAPTER I. P.I.— p. 11. 

THE SUBJECT OF THIS HISTORY AT HOME AND AT 
TEA. 
If thou be a severe sour complexioned man then I here 
disallow thee to be a competent judge. Izaak Walton. 

CHAPTER II. P. I.— p. 11. 

WHEREIN CERTAIN QUESTIONS ARE PROPOSED CON- 
CERNING TIME, PLACE AND PERSONS. 

Quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxiliis? cur? quomodo? 
quando? Technical Verse. 

CHAPTER III. P.L— p. 12. 

WHOLESOME OBSERVATIONS UPON THE VANITY OF 



Whosoever shall address himself to write of matters of 
instruction, or of any other argument of importance, it 
behoveth that before he enter thereinto, he should reso- 
lutely determine with himself in what order he will handle 
the same ; so shall he best accomplish that he hath un- 
dertaken, and inform the understanding, and help the 
memory of the Reader. 

Gwillim's Display of Heraldry. 

CHAPTER IV. P. I. —p. 13. 

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF DR. DOVE, WITH THE 
DESCRIPTION OF A YEOMAN'S HOUSE IN THE 
WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE A HUNDRED YEARS 
AGO. 

Non possidentem multa vocaveris 
Recte beatum ; rectius occupat 
Nomen beati, qui Deorum 
Muneribus sapienter uti, 
Duramque collet pauperiem pali, 
Pejusque letho flagitium timet. 

Horace, L. 4. Od. 9. 

CHAPTER V. P.L— p. 15. 

EXTENSION OF THE SCIENCE OF PHYSIOGNOMY, 
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE PRACTICAL 
USES OF CRANIOLOGY. 

Hanc ergo scientiam blande excipiamus, hilariterque 

amplectamur, ut vere nostram et de nobismel ipsis trac- 

tantem ; quam qui non amat, quam qui non amplectitur, 

neo philosophiam amat, neque suce vilce discrimina curat. 

Baptista Porta. 



CHAPTER VI. P. I.— p. 17. 

A COLLECTION OF BOOKS NONE OF WHICH ARE 
INCLUDED AMONGST THE PUBLICATIONS OF ANY 
SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
RELIGIOUS OR PROFANE. — HAPPINESS IN HUMBLE 
LIFE. 

Felix ille animi, divisque simillimus ipsis, 

Quern non mordaci resplendens gloria fuco 

Solicitat, non fastosi mala gaudia luxus, 

Sed tacitos sinit ire dies, et paupere cultu 

Exigit innocuce tranquilla silentia vita. Politian. 



CHAPTER VII. P. I.— p. 20. 

RUSTIC PHILOSOPHY. AN EXPERIMENT UPON 
MOONSHINE. 
Quien comienza en juventud 
A Men obrar, 
Serial es de no errar, 
En senetud. 
Proverbios del Marques de Santillana. 



CHAPTER VIII. P.L — p. 23. 

A KIND SCHOOLMASTER AND A HAPPY SCHOOL 
BOY. 

Though happily thou wilt say that wands be to be 
wrought when they are green, lest they rather break than 
bend when they be dry, yet know also that he that bendeth 
a twig because he would see if it would bow by strength 
may chance to have a crooked tree when he would have a 
straight. Euphues. 

INTERCHAPTER I. — p. 26. 

REMARKS IN THE PRINTING OFFICE. THE AUTHOR 
CONFESSES A DISPOSITION TO GARRULITY. PRO- 
PRIETY OF PROVIDING CERTAIN CHAPTERS FOR 
THE RECEPTION OF HIS EXTRANEOUS DIS- 
COURSE. CHOICE OF AN APPELLATION FOR SUCH 
CHAPTERS. 

Perque vices aliquid, quod tempora longa videri 
Non sinat, in medium vacuas referamus ad aures. 

Ovid. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IX. P. I. — p. 26. 

exceptions to one of king solomon's rules — 
a winter's evening at daniel's fireside. 

These are my thoughts ; I might have spun them out 
into a greater length, but I think a little plot of ground, 
thick sown, is better than a great field which, for the most 
part of it, lies fallow. N orris. 



CHAPTER X. P.I. — p. 27. 

ONE WHO WAS NOT SO WISE AS HIS FRIENDS 
COULD HAVE WISHED, AND YET QUITE AS HAPPY 
AS IF HE HAD BEEN WISER. NEPOTISM NOT 
CONFINED TO POPES. 

There are of madmen as there are of tame, 

All humoured not alike. Some 

Apish and fantastic ; 

And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image 

So blemished and defaced, yet do they act 

Such antic and such, pretty lunacies, 

That spite of sorrow, they will make you smile. 

Dekker. 



CHAPTER XI. P. I. —p. 29. 

A WORD TO THE READER, SHOWING WHERE WE 
ARE, AND HOW WE CAME HERE, AND WHERE- 
FORE ; AND WHITHER WE ARE GOING. 

'Tis ( my venture 
On your retentive wisdom. Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER XII. P. I.— p. 31. 

A HISTORY NOTICED WHICH IS WRITTEN BACK- 
WARD. THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES AN ESPE- 
CIAL EVIL FOR SCHOOLBOYS. 

For never in the long and tedious tract 
Of slavish grammar was I made to plod ; 
' No tyranny of Rules my patience rackt ; 
I served no prenticehood to any Rod ; 
But in the freedom of the Practic way 
Learnt to go right, even when I went astray. 

Dr. Beaumont. 

CHAPTER XIII. P. I. — p. 33. 

A DOUBT CONCERNING SCHOOL BOOKS, WHICH 
WILL BE DEEMED HERETICAL: AND SOME AC- 
COUNT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY SUBSTITUTE FOR 
OVID OR VIRGIL. 

They say it is an ill mason that refuseth any stone ; 
and there is no knowledge but in a skilful hand serves, 
either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other 
knowledge. Herbert's Remains. 

CHAPTER XIV. P. I. — p. 36. 

AN OBJECTION ANSWERED. 

Is this then your wonder ? 
Nay then you shall under- 
stand more of my skill. Ben Jonson. 



CHAPTER XV. P. I. — p. 37. 

THE AUTHOR VENTURES AN OPINION AGAINST THE 
PREVAILING WISDOM OF MAKING CHILDREN 
PREMATURELY WISE. 

Pray you, use your freedom : 
And so far, if you please allow me mine, 
To hear you only ; not to be compelled 
To take your moral potions. Massinger. 

CHAPTER XVI. P. I. — p. 38. 

USE AND ABUSE OF STORIES IN REASONING, WITH 
A WORD IN BEHALF OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 
AND IN REPROOF OF THE EARL OF LAUDER- 
DALE. 

My particular inclination moves me in controversy 
especially to approve his choice that said, for/in mallem 
quamformosa. Dr. Jackson. 

INTERCHAPTER II. — p. 40. 

ABALLIBOOZOBANGANORRIBO. 

Io 7 dico dunque e dicol die ognun rrC ode. 

Benedetto Varchi. 

CHAPTER XVII. P. I. —p. 42. 

THE HAPPINESS OF HAVING A CATHOLIC TASTE. 

There's no want of meat, Sir ; 
Portly and curious viands are prepared 
To please all kinds of appetites. Massinger. 

CHAPTER XVIII. P. I. — p. 44, 
all's well that ends well. 

Tot. d'atv iTifj.vYio-()£), — vsro rov koyov t^a.vaysca.^o/u.ivoi 
lTt/XV7j(r8ri<rO[X,KI. Herodotus. 

CHAPTER XIX. P. I. — p. 45. 

A CONVERSATION WITH MISS GRAVEAIRS. 

Operi suscepto inserviendum fuit ; so Jacobus Mycillus 
pleadeth for himself in his translation of Lucian's Dia- 
logues, and so do I ; 1 must and will perform my task. 

Burton. 

CHAPTER XX. P. I. — p. 46. 

HOW TO MAKE GOLD. 

U Alchindsia non travaglia a voto ; 

Ei cerca V oro, ei cerca V oro, io dico 

Ch" ei cerca P oro ; e s' ei giungesse inporto 

Fora ben per se slesso e per altrui. 

L'oro e sornma posanza infra mortali ; 

Chiedine a Cavalier, chiedine a Dame, 

Chiedine a tutto il Mondo. Chiabrera. 

CHAPTER XXI. P. I. — p. 49. 

A DOUBT CONCERNING THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY. 

El comicnxo de salud 
cs el saber, 
distinguir y conoccr 
qual cs virtad. 
Proverbios del Marques de Saotiixana. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XXII. P. I.— p. 50. 
Tbi> 5' dTrafxEiSu/JLtvoc;. 

Ofclice colu'i, che intender puote 
Le cagion de le cose di natura, 
Che al piu di que' che vivon sono ignotc ; 

E sotto il pie si mettc ogni paura 
Defati, e de la morte, ch'e si trisla, 
Ne di vulgo gli cal, ne d'altro ha cur a. 

Tansillo. 



CHAPTER XXIII. P. I. — p. 52. 

ROWLAND DIXON AND HIS COMPANY OF PUPPETS. 

Alii se ve tan eficaz el llanto, 
las fabulas y historias retratadas, 
que parece verdad, y es dulce encanto. 
* * * * 

Y para el vulgo rudo, que ignorante 
aborrece el manjar costoso, guisa 
el plato del gracioso extravaganle ; 

Con que les hart as de contento y risa, 
gustando de mirar sayal grossero, 
mas que sutil y Candida camisa. 

Joseph Ortiz de Villena. 



CHAPTER XXIV. P.I. — p. 55. 

QUACK AND NO QUACK, BEING AN ACCOUNT OF DE. 
GREEN AND HIS MAN KEMP. POPULAR MEDI- 
CINE, HERBARY, THEORY OF SIGNATURES, WIL- 
LIAM DOVE, JOHN WESLEY, AND BAXTER. 

Hold thy hand ! health's dear maintainer ; 

Life perchance may burn the stronger : 
Having substance to maintain her 
She untouched may last the longer. 
When the Artist goes about 
To redress her flame, I doubt 
Oftentimes he snuffs it out. Quarles. 



CHAPTER XXV. P.I. — p.G2. 
Hiatus valde lacrymabilis. 

Time flies away fast, 
The while wc never remember 

How soon our life here 

Grows old with the year 
That dies with the next December ! 

Hekrick. 



CHAPTER XXVI. p.L — p.64. 

DANIEL AT DONCASTER ; THE REASON WHY HE 
WAS DESTINED FOE THE MEDICAL PROFESSION, 
RATHER THAN HOLY ORDERS ; AND SOME RE- 
MARKS UPON SERMONS. 

Je ne veux dissimuler, amy Lecleur, que je n'aye Men 
preveu, ct me Herts pour deiiement adverty, que ne puts 
evitcr la reprehension d'aucuns, et les calomnies de plu- 
sieurs, ausquc Is c'esl cscrit desplaira du tout. 

ClIKISTOFLE DE IIeRICOURT. 



CHAPTER XXVII. P. I. — p. 67. 

A PASSAGE IN PROCOPIUS IMPROVED. A STORY 
CONCERNING URIM AND THUMMLM ; AND THE 
ELDER DANLEL'S OPINION OF THE PROFESSION 
OF THE LAW. 

Here is Domine Picklock, 
My man of Law, sollicits all my causes, 
Follows my business, makes and compounds my quarrels 
Between my tenants and me ; sows all my strifes 
And reaps them too, troubles the country for me, 
And vexes any neighbour that I please. Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. P. I. — p. 69. 

PETER HOPKINS. EFFECTS OF TIME AND CHANGE. 
DESCRIPTION OF HIS DWELLING-HOUSE. 

Combien de changemens dequis que suis au monde, 
Qui n'est qu'un point du terns ! Pasquiek. 

CHAPTER XXIX. P. I. — p. 70. 
a hint of reminiscence to the reader. the 
clock of st. george's. a word in honour 
of archdeacon markham. 

There is a ripe season for everything, and if you slip 
that or anticipate it, you dim the grace of the matter be 
it never so good. As we say by way of Proverb that an 
hasty birth brings forth blind whelps, so a good tale 
tumbled out before the time is ripe for it, is uaf rateful to 
the hearer. Bishop Hackett. 



CHAPTER XXX. P. I. — p. 72. 

THE OLD BELLS RUNG TO A NEW TUNE. 

If the bell have any sides the clapper will find 'em. 

Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER XXXI. P. I. — p. 75. 

MORE CONCERNING BELLS. 

Lord, ringing changes all our bells hath marr'd ; 

Jangled they have and jarr'd 
So long, they're out of tune, and out of frame ; 

They seem not now the same. 
Put them in frame anew, and once begin 
To tune them so, that they may chime all in. 

Herbert. 

CHAPTER XXXII. P. I. — p. 76. 

AN INTRODUCTION TO CERTAIN PRELIMINARIES 
ESSENTIAL TO THE PROGRESS OF THIS WORK. 

Mas demos ya el assiento en to importante, 
Que cl tiempo huye del mundo por la posla. 

Balbuena. 



CHAPTER XXXIII. P. I. — p. 78. 

DONCASTRIANA. THE RIVER DON. 
Kivers from bubbling springs 
Have rise at first ; and great from abject things. 

Miudleton. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. P. I. — p. 80. 

MORAL, INTEREST OF TOPOGRAPHICAL WORKS. 
LOCAL ATTACHMENT. 

Let none our Author rudely blame 

Who from the story has thus long digrest ; 

But for his righteous pains may his fair fame 
For ever travel, whilst his ashes rest. 

Sir William Davenant. 



INTERCHAPTER III. — p. 82. 

THE AUTHOR QUESTIONS THE PROPRIETY OF PER- 
SONIFYING CIRCUMSTANCE, DENIES THE UNITY 
AND INDIVISIBILITY OF THE PUBLIC, AND MAY 
EVEN BE SUSPECTED OF DOUBTLNG ITS OMNI- 
SCIENCE AND ITS INFALLIBILITY. 

Haforse 
Testa la plebe, ove si chinda in vece 
Di se?mo, altro die nebbia'f o forma voce 
Chi sta pik saggia, die un bebu dCarmento ? 

Chiabheka. 

CHAPTER XXXV. P. I. —p. 83. 

DONCASTRIANA. POTTERIC CARR. SOMETHING 
CONCERNING THE MEANS OF EMPLOYING THE 
POOR, AND BETTERING THEIR CONDITION. 
Why should I sowen draf out of my fist 
When I may sowen wheat, if that me list ? 

Chaucer. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. P.I. — p. 85. 

REMARKS ON AN OPINION OF MR. CRABBE's. TOPO- 
GRAPHICAL POETRY. DRAYTON. 

Do, pious marble, let thy readers know 

What they and what their children owe 

To Drayton's name, whose sacred dust 

We recommend unto thy trust. 

Protect his memory, and preserve his story ; 

Remain a lasting monument of his glory ; 

And when thy ruins shall disclaim 

To be the treasurer of his name, 

His name that cannot fade shall be 

An everlasting monument to thee. 

Epitaph in Westminster Abbey. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. P. I. — p. 87. 

ANECDOTES OF PETER HEYLYN AND LIGHTFOOT, 
EXEMPLIFYING THAT GREAT KNOWLEDGE IS 
NOT ALWAYS APPLICABLE TO LITTLE THINGS ; 
AND THAT AS CHARITY BEGLNS AT HOME, SO IT 
MAY WITH EQUAL TRUTH SOMETIMES BE SAID 
THAT KNOWLEDGE ENDS THERE. 

A scholar in his study knows the stars, 

Their motion and their influence, which are fix'd, 

And which are wandering ; can decypher seas, 

And give each several land his proper bounds : 

But set him to the compass lie's to seek, 

Where a plain pilot can direct his course 

From hence unto both the Indies. Heywood. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. P. I. — p. 90. 

THE READER IS LED TO INFER THAT A TRAVELLER 
WHO STOPS UPON THE WAY TO SKETCH, BOTA- 
NISE, ENTOMOLOGISE OR MINERALOGISE, TRA- 
VELS WITH MORE PLEASURE AND PROFIT TO 
HIMSELF THAN IF HE WERE IN THE MAIL 
COACH. 

Non servio materia sed indulgeo ; quam quo dutit se- 
quendum est, non quo invitat. Seneca. 

INTERCHAPTER IV— p. 91. 

ETYMOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES CONCERNING THE 
REMAINS OF VARIOUS TRIBES OR FAMILIES 
MENTIONED IN SCRIPTURAL HISTORY. 

All things are big with jest ; nothing that's plain 
But may be witty, if thou hast the vein. Herbert. 

CHAPTER XXXIX. P. I. — p. 92. 

A CHAPTER FOR THE INFORMATION OF THOSE WHO 
MAY VISIT DONCASTER, AND ESPECIALLY OF 
THOSE WHO FREQUENT THE RACES THERE. 

My good Lord, there is a Corporation, 

A body, — a kind of body. Mibdleton. 

CHAPTER XL. P. I. — p. 96. 

REMARKS ON THE ART OF VERBOSITY. A RULE OF 
COCCEIUS, AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE LAN- 
GUAGE AND PRACTICE OF THE LAW. 

If they which employ their labour and travail about the 
public administration of justice, follow it only as a trade, 
with unquenchable and unconscionable thirst of gain, 
being not in heart persuaded that justice is God's own 
work, and themselves his agents in this business, — the 
sentence, of right, God's own verdict, and themselves his 
priests to deliver it ; formalities of justice do but serve to 
smother right ; and that which was necessarily ordained 
for the common good, is through shameful abuse made 
the cause of common misery. Hooker. 



CHAPTER XLI. P. I. — p. 97. 

REVENUE OF THE CORPORATION OF DONCASTER 
WELL APPLIED. DONCASTER RACES. 

Play not for gain but sport : who plays for more 
Than he can lose with pleasure, stakes his heart ; 
Perhaps his wife's too, and whom she hath bore. 

Herbert. 

INTERCHAPTER V. — p. 98. 

WHEREIN THE AUTHOR MAKES KNOWN HIS GOOD 
INTENTIONS TO ALL READERS, AND OFFERS 
GOOD ADVICE TO SOME OF THEM. 

I can write, and talk too, as soft as other men, with 
submission to better judgements, — and I leave it to you 
Gentlemen. I am but one, and I always distrust myself. 
I only hint my thoughts : You'll please to consider whether 
you will not think that it may seem to deserve your con- 
sideration — This is a taking way of speaking. But much 
good may do them that use it ! ASGILL. 



XX 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XLII. P. I.— p. 100. 

DONCASTER CHUECH. THE RECTORIAL TITHES 
SECURED BY ARCHBISHOP SHARP FOR HIS OWN 
FAMILY. 

Say ancient edifice, thyself with years 
Grown grey, how long upon the hill has stood 
Thy weather-braving tower, and silent mark'd 
The human leaf in constant bud and fall ? 
The generations of deciduous man, 
How often hast thou seen them pass away ! 

HURDIS. 

CHAPTER XLIII. P. I. — p. 101. 

ANTIQUITIES OF DONCASTER. THE DE^E MATRES. 
SAXON FONT. THE CASTLE. THE HELL CROSS. 

/ 'ieux monuments, — 
Las, peu a peu cendre vous devenez, 
Fable du peuple et publiques rapines ! 
Et bien qu'au Temps pour tin temps facent guerre 
Les bastimens, si est ce que le Temps 
Oeuvrcs et noms finablement atterre. 

Joachim du Bellay. 



CHAPTER XLIY. P. I. — p. 103. 

HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES CONNECTED WITH 
DONCASTER. THOMAS, EARL OF LANCASTER. 
EDWARD IV. ASKE'S INSURRECTION. ILLUS- 
TRIOUS VISITORS. JAMES I. BARNABEE. 
CHARLES I. CHURCH LIBRARY. 

They unto whom we shall appear tedious, are in no wise 
injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare 
that labour which they are not willing to endure. 

Hooker. 

CHAPTER XLV. P. I. — p. 105. 

CONCERNING THE WORTHIES, OR GOOD MEN, WHO 
WERE NATIVES OF DONCASTER, OR OTHERWISE 
CONNECTED WITH THAT TOWN. 

Vir bonus est quis f Terence. 

INTERCHAPTER VI. —p. 106. 

CONTINGENT CAUSES. PERSONAL CONSIDERATIONS 
INDUCED BY REFLECTING ON THEM. THE 
AUTHOR TREMBLES FOR THE PAST. 

Vcrcis que no hay lazada desasida 

De nudo y de pendencia soberana ; 
N't a poder trastornar la orden del cielo 

Lasfuerzas llegan, ni el saber del suelo. 

Balbuena. 

CHAPTER XLVI. P. I. — p. 107. 
daniel dove's arrival at doncaster. the 
organ in st. george's church, the pulpit, 
mrs. neale's benefaction. 

Non ulla Musis pagina gratior 
Quam quaj seven's ludicra jimgere 
Novil, faligatamque nugis 

Utilibus recreare mentem. Dr. Johnson. 



CHAPTER XL VII. P. I.— p. 111. 

DONCASTRIANA. GUY'S DEATH. SEARCH FOR HIS 
TOMBSTONE IN INGLETON CHURCHYARD. 
Go to the dull churchyard and see 
Those hillocks of mortality, 
Where proudest man is only found 
By a small hillock on the ground. Tixai.l Poetry. 

CHAPTER XL VIII. P. I.— p. 112. 

A FATHER'S MISGIVINGS CONCERNING HIS SON'S 
DESTINATION. PETER HOPKINS'S GENEROSITY. 
DANIEL IS SENT ABROAD TO GRADUATE IN 
MEDICINE. 
Heaven is the magazine wherein He puts 
Both good and evil ; Prayer's the key that shuts 
And opens this great treasure : 'tis a key 
Whose wards are Faith and Hope and Charity. 
Wouldst thou prevent a judgement due to sin ? 
Turn but the key and thou mayst lock it in. 
Or wouldst thou have a blessing fall upon thee ? 
Open the door, and it will shower on thee ! 

Quarles. 

CHAPTER XLIX — p. 113. 

CONCERNING THE INTEREST WHICH DANIEL THE 
ELDER TOOK IN THE DUTCH WAR, AND MORE 
ESPECIALLY IN THE SIEGE AND PROVIDENTIAL 
DELIVERY OF LEYDEN. 

Glory to Thee in thine omnipotence, 

O Lord who art our shield and our defence, 

And dost dispense, 

As seemeth best to thine unerring will, 

(Which passeth mortal sense,) 

The lot of Victory still ; 

Edging sometimes with might the sword unjust ; 

And bowing to the dust, 

The rightful cause, that so much seeming ill 

May thine appointed purposes fulfil ; 

Sometimes, (as in this late auspicious hour 

For which our hymns we raise,) 

Making the wicked feel thy present power ; 

Glory to thee and praise, 

Almighty God, by whom our strength was given ! 

Glory to Thee, 6 Lord of Earth and Heaven ! 

Southey. 

CHAPTER L. P. I. — p. 115. 

VOYAGE TO ROTTERDAM AND LEYDEN. THE 
AUTHOR CANNOT TARRY TO DESCRIBE THAT 
CITY. WHAT HAPPENED THERE TO DANIEL 
DOVE. 

He took great content, exceeding delight in that his 
voyage. As who doth not that shall attempt the like ? — 
For peregrination charms our senses with such unspeak- 
able and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy 
that never travelled, a kind of prisoner, and pity his case 
that from his cradle to his old age he beholds the same 
still ; still, still, the same, the same ! Burton. 

CHAPTER LI. P. I. — p. 117. 

ARMS OF LEYDEN. DANIEL DOVE, M. D. A LOVE 
STORY, STRANGE BUT TRUE. 

Oye el extraflo caso, advierte y sieuie ; 

Suceso es raro, mas verdad ha sido. Balbuena. 




CONTENTS. 



xxi 



CHAPTER LIL P. I. — p. 118. 

SHOWING HOW THE YOUNG STUDENT FELL IN 
LOVE — AND HOW HE MADE THE BEST USE OF 
HIS MISFORTUNE. 

// creder, donne vaghe, e cortesia, 

Quando colui che scrive o chefavella, 
Possa essere sospetto di bugia, 

Per dir qualcosa troppo rara e bella. 
Dunque chi ascolta questa istnria mea 

E non la credc frottola o novella 
Ma cosa vera — come ella e difatto, 
Fa che di lui mi chiami soddisfatto 
E pure che mi diate plena fede, 
De la dubbiezza altrui poco mi cale. 

RlCCIARDETTO. 

CHAPTER LIII. P. I. — p. 120. 

OF THE VARIOUS WAYS OF GETTING IN LOVE. A 
CHAPTER CONTAINING SOME USEFUL OBSER- 
VATIONS, AND SOME BEAUTIFUL POETRY. 

Let cavillers know, that as the Lord John answered the 
Queen in that Italian Guazzo, an old, a. grave discreet man 
is fittest to discourse of love-matters ; because he hath 
likely more experience, observed more, hath a more staid 
judgement, can better discern, resolve, discuss, advise, 
give better cautions and more solid precepts, better in- 
form his auditors in such a subject, and by reason of his 
riper years, sooner divert. Burton. 

CHAPTER LTV. P. I. — p. 121. 

MORE CONCERNING LOVE AND MARRIAGE, AND 
MARRIAGE WITHOUT LOVE. 
Nay Cupid, pitch thy trammel where thou please. 
Thou canst not fail to catch such fish as these. 



CHAPTER LV. P. I. —p. 128. 

THE AUTHOR'S LAST VISIT TO DONCASTER. 
Fuere quondam hcec sedfuere ; 
Nunc ubi sint t rogitas ? Id annos 
Scire hos oportet scilicet. borne 
Musce, Lepores — Charlies mercel 
gaudia offuscata nullis 
Litibus! sine nube soles! Janus Douza. 

CHAPTER LVI. P.I. — p. 124. 

A TRUCE WITH MELANCHOLY. GENTLEMEN SUCH 
AS THEY WERE IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 
1747. A HLNT TO YOUNG LADIES CONCERNING 
THEIR GREAT-GRANDMOTHERS. 

Fashions that are now called new, 
Have been worn by more than you ; 
Elder times have used the same, 
Though these new ones get the name. 

Middleton. 

CHAPTER LVII. P. L— p. 126. 

AN ATTEMPT IS M4.DE TO REMOVE THE UN- 
PLEASANT IMPRESSION PRODUCED UPON THE 
LADIES BY THE DOCTOR'S T YE- WIG AND HIS 
SUIT OF SNUFF-COLOURED DITTOS. 

So full of shapes is fancy 
That it alone is high fantastical. 

Twelfth Night. 



CHAPTER LVIII. P. I. — p. 126. 

CONCERNING THE PORTRAIT OF DR. DANIEL DOVE. 
The sure traveller 
Though he alight sometimes still goeth on. 

Herbert. 

CHAPTER LIX. P. I — p. 128. 

SHOWING WHAT THAT QUESTION WAS, WHICH 
WAS ANSWERED BEFORE IT WAS ASKED. 
Chacun a son stile ; le mien, comme vouz voi/ez, n'est 
pas laconique. Me. de Sevigne. 

CHAPTER LX. P. I. — p. 128. 

SHOWING CAUSE WHY THE QUESTION WHICH 
WAS NOT ASKED OUGHT TO BE ANSWERED. 
Nay in troth I talk but coarsely, 
But I hold it comfortable for the understanding. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

CHAPTER LXI. P. L— p. 130. 

WHEREIN THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED WHICH 
OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN ASKED. 
Ajutami, tu penna, et calamaio, 
Ch' io ho tra mono una materia asciutta. 

Mattio Franzesi. 

, CHAPTER LXIL — p. 132. 

IN WHICH IS RELATED THE DISCOVERY OF A 
CERTAIN PORTRAIT AT DONCASTER. 
Call in the Barber ! If the tale be long 
He'll cut it short, I trust. Middleton. 

CHAPTER LXIIL— p.133. 

A DISCUSSION CONCERNING THE QUESTION LAST 
PROPOSED. 
Questo e bene un de' piu profondi passi 
Che noi habbiamo ancora oggi tentato • 
E non e mica da huomini bassi. 

Agnuolo Firenzuola. 

CHAPTER LXIV. — p. 135. 

DEFENCE OF PORTRAIT-PAINTING. A SYSTEM OF 
MORAL COSMETICS RECOMMENDED TO THE 
LADIES. GWILLIM. SIR T. LAWRENCE. GEORGE 
WITHER. APPLICATION TO THE SUBJECT OF 
THIS WORK. 

Pingitur in tabulis formce peritura vcnustas, 

Vivat ut in tabulis, quod pcrit in facie. Owen. 

CHAPTER LXV. — p. 137. 

SOCIETY OF A COUNTRY TOWN. SUCH A TOWN 
A MORE FAVOURABLE HABITAT FOR SUCH A 
PERSON AS DR. DOVE THAN LONDON WOULD 
HAVE BEEN. 

Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell ; 
Inn any where; 

And seeing the snail, which every where doth roam, 
Carrying his own home still, still is at home, 
Follow (for he is easy paced) this snail ; 
Be thine own Palace, or the World's thy jail. Donne. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER LXVI. — p. 139. 

ME. COPLEY OF NETHERHALL. SOCIETY AT HIS 
HOUSE. DRUMMOND. BURGH. GRAY. MASON. 
MILLER THE ORGANIST AND HISTORIAN OF 
DONCASTER. HERSCHEL. 



All worldly joys go less 
To the one joy of doing kindnesses. 



Herbert. 



CHAPTER LXVIL— p. 140. 

A MYTHOLOGICAL STORY MORALISED. 

Ilfaut mettre les fables en presse pour en tirer quelque 
sue de verite. Garasse. 

CHAPTER LXYIIL — p. 144. 

ECCENTRIC PERSONS, WHY APPARENTLY MORE 
COMMON EST ENGLAND THAN IN OTHER COUN- 
TRIES. HARRY BINGLEY. 

Blest are those 
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled, 
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please. Hamlet. 



CHAPTER LXIX. — p. 147. 

A MUSICAL RECLUSE AND HIS SISTER. 

Some proverb maker, I forget who, says, " God hath 
given to some men wisdom and understanding, and to 
others the art of playing on the fiddle " 

Professor Park's Dogmas of the Constitution. 

CHAPTER LXX. — p. 148. 

SHOWING THAT ANY HONEST OCCUPATION IS 
BETTER THAN NONE, BUT THAT OCCUPATIONS 
WHICH ARE DEEMED HONOURABLE ARE NOT 
ALWAYS HONEST. 

J'ai peine d concevoir pourquoi le plupart des homines 
ont une si forte envie d'etre heureux, et une si grande 
incapacity pour le devenir, 



Voyages de Milord Ceton. 



CHAPTER LXXI. — p. 150. 

TKANSITION IN OUR NARRATIVE PREPARATORY 
TO A CHANGE IN THE DOCTOR'S LIFE. A SAD 
STOBT SUPPRESSED. THE AUTHOR PROTESTS 
AGAINST PLAYING WITH THE FEELINGS OF HIS 
EEADERS. ALL ARE NOT MERRY THAT SEEM 
MIRTHFUL. THE SCAFFOLD A STAGE. DON 
KODBIOO CALDKIION. THISTLEWOOD. THE 

WOULD A MASQUERADE, BUT THE DOCTOR 
ALWAYS IN HIS OWN CHARACTER. 

This breaks no rule of order. 

If order wore infringed then should I flee 

From my chief purpose, and my mark should miss. 

Order is Nature's beauty, and the way 

To Order is by rules that Art hath found. GwiLLlM. 



CHAPTER LXXIL — p. 154. 

IN WHICH THE FOURTH OF THE QUESTIONS PRO- 
POSED IN CHAPTER II. P. I. IS BEGUN TO BE 
ANSWERED; SOME OBSERVATIONS UPON AN- 
CESTRY ARE INTRODUCED, AND THE READER 
IS INFORMED WHY THE AUTHOR DOES NOT 
WEAR A CAP AND BELLS. 
Boast not the titles of your ancestors, 
Brave youths ! they're their possessions, none of yours. 
When your own virtues equall'd have their names, 
'Twill be but fair to lean upon their fames, 
For they are strong supporters ; but till then 
The greatest are but growing gentlemen. Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER LXXIIL — p. 156. 

RASH MARRIAGES. AN EARLY WIDOWHOOD. AF- 
FLICTION RENDERED A BLESSING TO THE SUF- 
FERER ; AND TWO ORPHANS LEFT, THOUGH NOT 
DESTITUTE, YET FRIENDLESS. 

Love built a stately house; where Fortune came, 
And spinning fancies, she was heard to say 

That her fine cobwebs did support the frame ; 

Whereas they were supported by the same. 
But Wisdom quickly swept them all away. 

Herbert. 

CHAPTER LXXIV.— p. 157. 

A LADY DESCRIBED WHOSE SINGLE LIFE WAS 
NO BLESSEDNESS EITHER TO HERSELF OR 
OTHERS. A VERACIOUS EPITAPH AND AN AP- 
PROPRIATE MONUMENT. 

Beauty ! my Lord, — 'tis the worst part of woman ! 

A weak poor thing, assaulted every hour 

By creeping minutes of defacing time ; 

A superficies which each breath of care 

Blasts off; and every humorous stream of grief 

Which flows from forth these fountains of our eyes, 

Washeth away, as rain doth winter's snow. Goff. 

CHAPTER LXXV. — p. 159. 

A SCENE WHICH WILL PUT SOME OF THOSE 
READERS WHO HAVE BEEN MOST IMPATIENT 
WITH THE AUTHOR, IN THE BEST HUMOUR 
WITH HIM. 

There is no argument of more antiquity and elegancy 
than is the matter of Love ; for it seems to be as old as 
the world, and to bear date from the first time that man 
and woman was: therefore in this, as in the finest metal, 
the freshest wits have in all ages shown their best work- 
manship. Robert Wilmot. 

CHAPTER LXXVL — p. 1G0. 

A STORY CONCERNING CUPID WHICH NOT ONE 
READER IN TEN THOUSAND HAS EVER HEARD 
BEFORE; A DEFENCE OF LOVE WHICH WILL 
BE VERY SATISFACTORY TO THE LADIES. 
They do lie, 
Lie grossly who say Love is blind : by him 
And heaven they lie ! he has a sight can pierce 
Thro' ivory, as clear as it were horn, 
And reach his object. Be/ujmont and Fletcher. 



CONTENTS. 



xxm 



CHAPTER LXXYIL — p. 163. 

MOKE CONCERNING- LOVE AND THE DREAM OF 
LIFE. 

Happy the bonds that hold ye ; 
Sure they be sweeter far than liberty. 
There is no blessedness but in such bondage ; 
Happy that happy chain ; such links are heavenly. 
Beaumont and Fletcher. 

INTERCHAPTER VII. — p. 164. 

OBSOLETE ANTICIPATIONS ; BEING A LEAF OUT OF 
AN OLD ALMANACK, WHICH LIKE OTHER OLD 
ALMANACKS THOUGH OUT OF DATE IS NOT OUT 
OF USE. 

If 

You play before me, I shall often look on you, 

I give you that warning before hand. 

Take it not ill, my masters, I shall laugh at you, 

And truly when I am least offended with you ; 

It is my humour. Middleton. 

INTERCHAPTER VIII. — p. 167. 

A LEAF OUT OF THE NEW ALMANACK. THE AU- 
THOR THINKS CONSIDERATELY OF HIS COMMEN- 
TATORS ; RUMINATES; RELATES AN ANECDOTE 
OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE; QUOTES SOME 
PYRAMIDAL STANZAS, WHICH ARE NOT THE 
WORSE FOR THEIR ARCHITECTURE, AND DE- 
LIVERS AN OPINION CONCERNING BURNS. 

To smell a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the 
body ; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the 
Soul. " Earth thou art, to earth thou shalt return." 

Fuller. 

INTERCHAPTER IN.— p. 169. 

AN ILLUSTRATION FOR THE ASSISTANCE OF THE 
COMMENTATORS DRAWN FROM THE HISTORY OF 
THE KORAN. REMARKS WHICH ARE NOT IN- 
TENDED FOR MUSSELMEN, AND WHICH THE 
MISSIONARIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ARE 
ADVISED NOT TO TRANSLATE. 

You will excuse me if I do not strictly confine myself to 
narration ; but now and then intersperse such reflections 
as may offer while I am writing. John Newton. 

INTERCHAPTER X.— p. 171. 

MORE ON THE FOREGOING SUBJECT. ELUCIDA- 
TIONS FROM HENRY MORE AND DR. WATTS. AN 
INCIDENTAL OPINION UPON HORACE WALPOLE. 
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT " FLOWETH AT ITS 
OWN SWEET WILL." PICTURES AND BOOKS. A 
SAYING OF MR. PITT'S CONCERNING WILBER- 
FORCE. THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS IN WHAT 
SENSE IT MIGHT BE SAID THAT HE SOMETIMES 
SHOOTS WITH A LONG BOW. 

Vorrei, disse il Signor Gasparo Pallavicino, che voi 
ragionassi tin poco phi minutamente di questo, che non 
fate ; che in vcro vi tcnete motto al generate, et quasi ci 
?nostrate le cose per transito. Il Cortegiano. 



CHAPTER LXXVIIL — p.174. 

AMATORY POETRY NOT ALWAYS OF THE WISEST 
KIND. AN ATTEMPT TO CONVEY SOME NOTION 
OF ITS QUANTITY. TRUE LOVE THOUGH NOT LN 
EVERY CASE THE BEST POET, THE BEST MORA- 
LIST ALWAYS. 

El Amor es tan ingenioso, que en mi opinion, maspoetas 
ha hecho el solo, que la misma nnturaleza. 

Perez de Montalvan. 

CHAPTER LXXIX. — p. 177. 

AN EARLY BEREAVEMENT. TRUE LOVE ITS OWN 
COMFORTER. A LONELY FATHER AND AN ONLY 
CHILD. 

Read ye that run the aweful truth, 
With which 1 charge my page ; 
A worm is in the bud of youth, 
And at the root of age. Cowper. 

CHAPTER LXXX. — p. 178. 

OBSERVATIONS WHICH SHOW THAT WHATEVER 
PRIDE MEN MAY TAKE IN THE APPELLATIONS 
THEY ACQUIRE IN THEIR PROGRESS THROUGH 
THE WORLD, THEIR DEAREST NAME DIES BEFORE 
THEM. 

Thus they who reach 

Grey hairs, die piecemeal. Southey. 



CHAPTER LXXXL— p. 179. 

A QUESTION WHETHER LOVE SHOULD BE FAITHFUL 
TO THE DEAD. DOUBTS ADVANCED AND CASES 
STATED. 

even in spite of death, yet still my choice, 
Oft with the inward all-beholding eye 

1 think I see thee, and I hear thy voice ! 

Lord Sterline. 

CHAPTER LXXXIL — p. 181. 

THE DOCTOR IS INTRODUCED, BY THE SMALL POX, 
TO HIS FUTURE WIFE. 

Long-waiting love doth entrance find 

Into the slow-believing mind. Sydney Godolphin. 



CHAPTER LXXXIIL— p. 182. 

THE AUTHOR REQUESTS THE READER NOT TO BE 
IMPATIENT. SHOWS FROM LORD SHAFTESBURY 
AT WHAT RATE A JUDICIOUS WRITER OUGHT TO 
PROCEED. DISCLAIMS PROLIXITY FOR HIMSELF, 
AND GIVES EXAMPLES OF IT IN A GERMAN PRO- 
FESSOR, A JEWISH RABBI, AND TWO COUNSEL- 
LORS, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 

Pand. He that will have a cake out of the wheat, must 
tarry the grinding. 

Troilus. Have I not tarried ? 

Paud. Ay, the grinding ; but you must tarry the bolting. 
Troilus. Have I not tarried ? 



CONTENTS. 



Pand. Ay, the bolting ; but you must tarry the leaven- 
ing. 

Troilus. Still have I tarried. 

Pand. Ay, to the leavening : but here's yet in the 
word hereafter, the kneading, the making of the cake, the 
heating of the oven, and the baking. Nay, you must stay 
the cooling too ; or you may chance to burn your lips. 

TllOILUS AND CRESSIDA. 



CHAPTER LXXXIV. — p. 184. 

A LOOP DROPPED IN THE FOREGOING CHAPTER 
IS HERE TAKEN UP. 

Enobarbus. Every time 

Serves for the matter that is then born in it. 
Lepidus. But small to greater matters must give way. 
Enobarbus. Not if the small come first. 

Shakespeare. 



CHAPTER LXXXV. — p. 184. 

THE DOCTOR'S CONTEMPORARIES AT LEYDEN. 
EARLY FRIENDSHIP. COWPER'S MELANCHOLY 
OBSERVATION THAT GOOD DISPOSITIONS ARE 
MORE LIKELY TO BE CORRUPTED THAN EVIL 
ONES TO BE CORRECTED. YOUTHFUL CONNEC- 
TIONS LOOSENED IN THE COMMON COURSE OF 
THINGS. A FINE FRAGMENT BY WALTER 
LANDOR. 

Lass mich den Slunde gedenken, und jedes kleineren 
unstands. 
Ach, wer ruft nicht so gem unwiederbringliches an! 
Jcnes s'dsse Gedr'dnge dcr leichtesten irdischen Tage, 

Ach, wer schatzt ihn genug, diesen vereilenden Werth I 
Klein erscheinet es nun, duch ach ! nicht kleinlich dem 
Herzen ; 
Macht die Liebe, die Kunst,jegliches hleine doch gross. 

Goethe. 



CHAPTER LXXXVL — p. 188. 

PETER HOPKINS. REASONS FOR SUPPOSING THAT 
HE WAS AS GOOD A PRACTITIONER AS ANY IN 
ENGLAND ; THOUGH NOT THE BEST. THE 
FITTEST MASTER FOR DANIEL DOVE. HIS SKILL 
IN ASTROLOGY. 

Que sea Medico mas grave 
Quien 7nas aforismos sabe, 

Bien puede ser. 
Mas que no sea mas cxperto 
El que mas huvicre mucrto, 

No puede scr. Gongora. 

CHAPTER LXXXVIL — p. 191. 

ASTROLOGY. ALMANACKS. PRISCILLIANISM RE- 
TAINKD IN THEM TO THIS TIME. 

I wander 'twixt the poles 
And heavenly hinges, 'mongst eccentrical*, 
Centers, concentricks, circles and epicycles. 

Albumazar. 



CHAPTER LXXXVIIL — p. 193. 

AN INCIDENT WHICH BRINGS THE AUTHOR INTO A 
FORTUITOUS RESEMBLANCE WITH THE PATRI- 
ARCH OF THE PREDICANT FRIARS. DIFFERENCES 
BETWEEN THE FACT AND THE FABLE ; AND AN 
APPLICATION WHICH, UNLIKE THOSE THAT ARE 
USUALLY APPENDED TO ESOP'S FABLES, THE 
READER IS LIKELY NEITHER TO SKIP NOR TO 
FORGET. 

Dire aqui una maldad grande del Demonio. 

Pedro de Ciecja de Leon. 

CHAPTER LXXXIX — p. 194. 

A CHAPTER CHARACTERISTIC OF FRENCH ANTIQUA- 
RIES, FRENCH LADIES, FRENCH LAWYERS, 
FRENCH JUDGES, FRENCH LITERATURE, AND 

FRENCHNESS IN GENERAL. 

Quid de pulicibus ? vitce salientia puncta. Cowley. 

CHAPTER XC. — p. 199. 

WHEREIN THE CURIOUS READER MAY FIND SOME 
THINGS WHICH HE IS NOT LOOKING FOR, AND 
WHICH THE INCURIOUS ONE MAY SKIP IF HE 

PLEASES. 

Voulant doncques satisfaire d, la curiosite de touts bons 
compagnons, j' 1 ay revolve toutes les Pantarches des Cieux, 
calcule les quadrats de la Lune, crochele tout ce que 
jamais penserent touts les Aalrophiles, Hyper nephelistes, 
Anemophy laces, Uranopctes et Ombrophores. Rabelais. 

CHAPTER XCL — p. 202. 

THE AUTHOR DISPLAYS A LITTLE MORE OF SUCH 
READING AS IS SELDOM READ, AND SHOWS THAT 
LORD BYRON AND AN ESSEX WIDOW DIFFERED 
IN OPINION CONCERNING FRIDAY. 

Sifavois disperse cecien divers endroits de mon ouvrage, 
faurois evite la censure de ceux qui appelleront ce chapitre 
un fatras de petit recueils. Mais comme je chcrche la 
commodile de mes lecteurs plutot que la mienne, je veux 
bien au depens de cette censure, leur epargner la peine de 
rassembler ce quej'aurois disperse. Bayle. 

CHAPTER XCIL— p. 206. 

CONCERNING PETER HOPKINS AND THE INFLUENCE 
OF THE MOON AND TIDES UPON THE HUMAN 
BODY. A CHAPTER WHICH SOME PERSONS MAY 
DEEM MORE CURIOUS THAN DULL, AND OTHERS 
MORE DULL THAN CURIOUS. 

A man that travelleth to the most desirable home, hath 
a habit of desire to it all the way ; but his present business 
is his travel; and horse, and company, and inns, and ways, 
and weariness, &c, may take up more of his sensible 
thoughts, and of his talk and action, than his home. 

Baxter. 

CHAPTER XCIIL— p. 210. 

REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER ANTICIPATED 
AND ANSWERED. 

^fi ■xoXXa, Xfgss? olgTi xocvowir' 'iffy, 



On juvv,uovli 



■ 0VZ.iT 00 



'j''HV 



Sophocles. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XCIV.— p. 213. 

THE AUTHOR DISCOVERS CERTAIN MUSICAL COR- 
RESPONDENCIES TO THESE HIS LUCUBRATIONS. 
And music mild I learn'd that tells 
Tune, time and measure to the song. Higgins. 

CHAPTER XCV.— p. 214. 

WHEREIN MENTION IS MADE OP LORD BYRON, 
RONSARD, RABBI KAPOL AND CO. IT IS SUG- 
GESTED THAT A MODE OP READING THE STARS 
HAS BEEN APPLIED TO THE RECOVERY OF 
OBLITERATED ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS ; AND IT IS 
SHOWN THAT A MATHEMATICIAN MAY REASON 
MATHEMATICALLY, AND YET LIKE A FOOL. 

Thus may ye behold 
This man is very bold, 
And in his learning old 
Intendeth for to sit. 
I blame him not a whit ; 
For it would vex his wit, 
And clean against his earning 
To follow such learning 
As now-a-days is taught. 

Doctour Double- Ale. 

CHAPTER XCVL— p. 217. 

A MUSICIAN'S WISH EXCITED BY HERSCHEL'S 
TELESCOPE. SYMPATHY BETWEEN PETER HOP- 
KINS AND HIS PUPIL. INDIFFERENTISM USEFUL 
IN ORDINARY POLITICS, BUT DANGEROUS IN 
RELIGION. 

Not intendiamo parlare alle cose che utile sono alia 
umana vita, quanto per nostro intendimento si potra in 
questa parte comprendere ; e sopra quelle particclle che 
detto avemo di comporre. Busone da Gubbio. 

CHAPTER XCVIL — p. 220. 

MR. BACON'S PARSONAGE. CHRISTIAN RESIGNA- 
TION. TIME AND CHANGE. WILKIE AND THE 
MONK IN THE ESCURIAL. 

The idea of her life shall sweetly creep 

Into his study of imagination ; 

And every lovely organ of her life 

Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit, 

More moving delicate, and full of life, 

Into the eye and prospect of his soul, 

Than when she lived indeed. Shakespeare. 

CHAPTER XCVIIL— p. 222. 

CHRISTIAN CONSOLATION. OPINIONS CONCERNING 
THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. 

The voice which I did more esteem 
Than music in her sweetest key ; 

Those eyes which unto me did seem 
More comfortable than the day ; 

Those now by me, as they have been, 

Shall never more be heard, or seen ; 

But what I once enjoyed in them, 

Shall seem hereafter as a dream. 



All earthly comforts vanish thus ; 

So little hold of them have we, 
That we from them, or they from us, 

May in a moment ravished be. 
Yet we are neither just nor wise, 
If present mercies we despise ; 
Or mind not how there may be made 
A thankful use of what we had. Wither. 



CHAPTER XCIX— p. 224 

A COUNTRY PARISH. SOME WHOLESOME EXTRACTS, 
SOME TRUE ANECDOTES, AND SOME USEFUL 
HINTS, WHICH WILL NOT BE TAKEN BY THOSE 
WHO NEED THEM MOST. 

Non e inconvcniente, che delle cose delettahili alcune ve 
sieno utili, cosi come dell' utili rnolte ne sono delettahili, 
et in tutte due alcune si truovano honeste. 

Leone Medico (Hebreo). 



CHAPTER C — p. 227. 



SHOWING HOW THE VICAR DEALT WITH THE 
JUVENILE PART OF HIS FLOCK; AND HOW HE 
WAS OF OPINION THAT THE MORE PLEASANT 
THE WAY IN WHICH CHILDREN ARE TRAINED 
UP TO GO CAN BE MADE FOR THEM, THE LESS 
LIKELY THEY WILL BE TO DEPART FROM IT. 

Sweet were the sauce would please each kind of taste, 
The life, likewise, were pure that never swerved ; 

For spiteful tongues, in cankered stomachs placed, 
Deem worst of things which best, percase, dpserved. 

But what for that V This medicine may suffice, 

To scorn the rest, and seek to please the wise. 

Sir Walter Raleigh. 



CHAPTER CI.— p. 229. 

SOME ACCOUNT OF A RETIRED TOBACCONIST AND 
HIS FAMILY. 

Nonfumum cxfulgore, sed exfumo dare lucem. 

Horace. 



INTERCHAPTER XL— p. 231. 

ADVICE TO CERTAIN READERS INTENDED TO AS- 
SIST THEIR DIGESTION OF THESE VOLUMES. 

Take this in good part, whatsoever thou be, 
And wish me no worse than I wish unto thee. 

Tusser. 



CHAPTER CII. — p. 232. 

MORE CONCERNING THE AFORESAID TOBACCONIST. 

I doubt nothing at all but that you shall like the man 
every day better than other ; for verily I think he lacketh 
not of those qualities which should become any honest 
man to have, over and besides the gift of nature wherewith 
God hath above the common rate endued him. 

Archbishop Cuanmer. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CIIL — p.236. 

A FEW PARTICULARS CONCERNING NO. 113. 



BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHIN; 
FAMILY AT THAXTED GRANGE. 



AND OP THE 



Opinion is the rate of things, 

From hence our peace doth flow ; 
I have a better fate than kings, 

Because I think it so. Katharine Philips. 



CHAPTER CIV. — p. 239. 

A REMARKABLE EXAMPLE, SHOWING THAT A 
WISE MAN, WHEN HE RISES IN THE MORNING, 
LITTLE KNOWS WHAT HE MAY DO BEFORE 
NIGHT. 

— Now I love, 
And so as in so short a time I may ; 
Yet so as time shall never break that so, 
And therefore so accept of Elinor. 

Robert Greene. 

CHAPTER CV.— p. 242. 

A WORD OF NOBS, AND AN ALLUSION TO CiESAR. 
SOME CIRCUMSTANCES RELATING TO THE DOC- 
TOR'S SECOND LOVE, WHEREBY THOSE OP HIS 
THIRD AND LAST ARE ACCOUNTED FOR. 

Un mal que se entra por medio los ojos, 
Y va se derecho hasta el corazon ,• 
Alii en ser llegado se torna qficion, 

Y da -mil pesares, plazeres y °nojos; 

Causa alegrias, tristezas, antojos j 
Haze llorar, y haze reir, 
Haze cantar, y haze planir ; 

Da pensamientos dos mil a manojos. 

Question de Amor. 

INTERCHAPTER XII. — p. 245. 

THE AUTHOR REGRETS THAT HE CANNOT MAKE 
HIMSELF KNOWN TO CERTAIN READERS ; STATES 
THE POSSIBLE REASONS FOR HIS SECRESY ; 
MAKES NO USE IN SO DOING OF THE LICENCE 
WHICH HE SEEMS TO TAKE OUT IN HIS MOTTO ; 
AND STATING THE PRETENCES WHICH HE AD- 
VANCES FOR HIS WORK, DISCLAIMING THE 
WHILE ALL MERIT FOR HIMSELF, MODESTLY 
PRESENTS THEM UNDER A GRECIAN VEIL. 

"EvOct yko ri htt ■tytvhc; Xiyt<rQou Xtyi<rQct). 

Herodotus. 

INTERCHAPTER XIII.— p. 247. 

A PEEP FROM BEHIND THE CURTAIN. 

Ha, ha, ha, now ye will make me to smile, 

To see if I can all men beguile. 

Ha, my name, my name would ye so fain know? 

Yea, I wis, shall ye, and that with all speed. 
I have forgot it, therefore I cannot show. 

A, a, now I have it ! I have it indeed ! 
My name is Ambidexter, I signify one 

That with both hands finely can play. 

King Cambyses. 



CHAPTER CVL— p. 249. 

THE AUTHOR APOSTROPHISES SOME OF HIS FAIR 
READERS; LOOKS FARTHER THAN THEY ARE 
LIKELY TO DO, AND GIVES THEM A JUST THOUGH 
MELANCHOLY EXHORTATION TO BE CHEERFUL 
WHILE THEY MAY. 

Hark how the birds do sing, 

And woods do ring ! 
All creatures have their joy, and Man hath his : 

Yet if we rightly measure, 

Man's joy and pleasure 
Rather hereafter, than in present is. Herbert. 

CHAPTER CVIL — p. 250. 

THE AUTHOR INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO A RE- 
TIRED DUCHESS, AND SUGGESTS A PARALLEL 
BETWEEN HER GRACE AND THE RETIRED TO- 
BACCONIST. 

In midst of plenty only to embrace 
Calm patience, is not worthy of your praise ; 

But he that can look sorrow in the face 
And not be daunted, he deserves the bays. 

This is prosperity, where'er we find 

A heavenly solace in an earthly mind. 

Hugh Crompton. 

CHAPTER CYIIL — p.256. 

PERCY LODGE. THAXTED GRANGE. RAPIN THE 
JESUIT AND SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 

It seems that you take pleasure in these walks, 
Sir. 
Cleanthes. Contemplative content I do, my Lord ; 

They bring into my mind oft meditations 
So sweetly precious, that in the parting 
I find a shower of grace upon my cheeks, 
They take their leave so feelingly. 

Mas.singer. 



INTERCHAPTER XIV. — p. 259. 

CONCERNING INTERCHAPTERS. 

If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be ex- 
cused, because the whole world is become a hodge-podge. 

Lyly. 

CHAPTER CIX — p.263. 

incidental mention of hammond, sir edmund 
king, joanna baillie, sir william temple, 
and mr. thomas peregrine courtenay. 
peter collinson an acquaintance of mr. 
Allison's, holidays at thaxted grange. 

And sure there seem of human kind 

Some bom to shun the solemn strife ; 
Some for amusive tasks design'd 
To soothe the certain ills of life, 
Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 

New founts of bliss disclose, 
Call forth refreshing shades and decorate repose. 

Shenstone. 



CONTENTS. 



XXV n 



CHAPTER CX — p. 267. 

A TRANSITIONAL CHAPTER, WHEREIN THE AUTHOR 
COMPARES HIS BOOK TO AN OMNIBUS AND A 
SHIP, QUOTES SHAKESPEARE, MARCO ANTONIO 
DE CAMOS, QUARLES, SPENSER, AND SOMEBODY 
ELSE, AND INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO SOME 
OF THE HEATHEN GODS, WITH "WHOM PERHAPS 
THEY WERE NOT ACQUAINTED BEFORE. 

We are not to grudge such interstitial and transitional 
matter as may promote an easy connection of parts and 
an elastic separation of them, and keep the reader's mind 
upon springs as it were. Henry Taylor's Statesman. 

CHAPTER CXI. — p. 268. 

CONCERNING MAGAZINES, AND THE FORMER AND 
PRESENT RACE OF ALPHABET-MEN. 

Altriglihan messo no?ne Santa Croce, 
Allri lo chiaman V A. B. C. guasiando 
La misura, gl' accenti, et la sua voce. Sansoyino. 

CHAPTER CXIL — p. 270. 

HUNTING IN AN EASY CHAIR. THE DOCTOR'S 
BOOKS. 
That place that does contain 
My books, the best companions, is to me 
A glorious court, where hourly I converse 
With the old sages and philosophers ; 
And sometimes for variety I confer 
With Kings and Emperors, and weigh their counsels, 
Calling their victories, if unjustly got, 
Unto a strict account, and in my fancy 
Deface their ill-placed statues. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

CHAPTER CXIIL — p. 271. 

THOMAS GENT AND ALICE GUY, A TRUE TALE, 
SHOAYLNG THAT A WOMAN'S CONSTANCY WILL 
NOT ALWAYS HOLD OUT LONGER THAN TROY 
TOWN, A:N T D YET THE WOMAN MAY NOT BE THE 
PARTY WHO IS MOST LN FAULT. 

Io dico, non dimr.ndo 
Quel c7ie tu vuoi udir, perch' io V ho visto 
Ove s' appunta ogni ubi, e ogni quando. Dante. 

CHAPTER CXIY. — p. 276. 

THE AUTHOR HLNTS AT CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES 
IN THE LIFE OF THOMAS GENT ON WHICH HE 
DOES NOT THLNK IT NECESSARY TO DWELL. 

Round white stones will serve they say, 

As well as eggs, to make hens lay. Butler. 

CHAPTER CXV. — p. 279. 

THE READER IS REMINDED OF PRINCE ABINO 
JASSIMA AND THE FOX- LADY. GENT NOT LIKE 
JOB, NOR MRS. GENT LIKE JOB'S WIFE. 

A me parrebbe a la storiafar torto, 

S' io non aggiungo qualche codicillo ; 
Accib che ognun chi legge, benedica 
i' ultimo effctto de la ?nia fatica. Pulci. 



CHAPTER CXYI. — p. 281. 

DR. SOUTHEY. JOHN BUNYAN. BARTHOLOMEW'S 
SCHER.EUS. TERTULLIAN. DOMENICO BERNINO. 
PETRARCH. JEREMY TAYLOR. HARTLEY COLE- 
RIDGE. DIEGO DE SAN PEDRO, AND ADAM 
LITTLETON. 

Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray ; 
Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. 

Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in ! 

Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky ! 

Liard, Robin, you must bob in ! 
Round, around, around, about, about ! 
All good come running in, all ill keep out. 

Middleton. 

CHAPTER CXYIL— p.284. 

CONCERNING JOB'S WIFE. 
This insertion is somewhat long, and utterly imper- 
tinent to the principal matter, and makes a great gap in 
the tale ; nevertheless is no disgrace, but rather a beauty 
and to very good purpose. Puttenham. 

CHAPTER CXYIIL — p.288. 

POLNTS OF SIMILITUDE AND DISSIMILITUDE BE- 
TWEEN SIR THOMAS BROWNE AND DOCTOR 
DOTE. 

But in these serious w r orks designed 

To mend the morals of mankind, 

We must for ever be disgraced 

With all the nicer sons of taste, 

If once the shadow to pursue 

W 7 e let the substance out of view. 

Our means must uniformly tend 

In due proportion to their end, 

And every passage aptly join 

To bring about the one design. Churchill 

IXTERCHAPTER XV. — p. 290. 

THE AUTHOR RECOMMENDS A CERTALN WELL- 
KNOWN CHARACTER AS A CANDIDATE FOR 
HONOURS, BOTH ON THE SCORE OF HIS FAMILY 
AND HIS DESERTS. HE NOTICES ALSO OTHER 
PERSONS WHO HAVE SIMILAR CLAIMS. 

Thoricht, auf Bessrung de.r Thoren %u harren ! 

Kinder der klugheit, o habet die Narren 

Eben zum Narren auch, wie sich's gehort. Goethe. 

CHAPTER CXIX. — p. 292. 

THE DOCTOR IN HIS CURE. IRRELIGION THE RE- 
PROACH OF HIS PROFESSION. 
Virtue, and that part of philosophy 
Will I apply, that treats of happiness 
By virtue specially to be achieved. 

Taming of the Shrew. 

CHAPTER CXX. — p. 294. 

EFFECT OF MEDICAL STUDIES ON DIFFERENT DIS- 
POSITIONS. JEW PHYSICIANS, ESTIMATION AND 
ODIUM IN WHICH THEY WERE HELD. 
Confiesso la digression ; mas es facil al que no quisiere 
leerla, passar al eapilulo siguiente, y esta advertencia 
sirva de disculpa. Luis MlWOZ. 



XXV111 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CXXL — p. 297. 

WHEREIN IT APPEARS THAT SANCHO'S PHYSICIAN 
AT BAEATARIA ACTED ACCORDING TO PRECE- 
DENTS AND PRESCRIBED LAWS. 

Le/tor, tu vedi ben corn 1 io innalzo 

La mia materia, eperb con piu arte 

Nun ti maravigliar s' i' la rincalzo. Dante. 

CHAPTER CXXIL — p. 300. 

A CHAPTER WHEREIN STUDENTS IN SURGERY MAY 
FIND SOME FACTS WHICH WERE NEW TO THEM 
IN THE HISTORY OF THEIR OWN PROFESSION. 

If I have more to spin 
The wheel shall g:>. Herbert. 

CHAPTER CXXIIL — p. 303. 

SOME ALLUSION TO, AND SOME USE OF THE FIGURE 
OF SPEECH CALLED PARENTHESIS. 

J'ecrirai ici mes pensees sans ordre, et non pas peut- 
etre dans une confusion sans dessein ; c'est le veritable 
ordre, et qui marquera toujour s mon objet par le desordre 
ineme. Pascal. 

CHAPTER CXXIV. — p. 306. 

THE AUTHOR MORALISES UPON THE VANITY OF 
FAME ; AND WISHES THAT HE HAD BOSWELLISED 
WHILE IT WAS IN HIS POWER TO HAVE DONE SO. 

Mucho tengo que llvrar, 
Mucho tengo que reir. 

CHAPTER CXXV.- 

FAME IN THE BOROUGH ROAD. 
DANIELISES. 

Due, Ftimo,— 

Hue me insolenti tramite ; devius 
Tentabo inaccessos profanis 
Invidice pedibus recessus. 

Vincent Bourne. 

CHAPTER CXXVL — p. 313. 

MR. BAXTER'S OFFICES. MILLER* S CHARACTER OF 
MASON ; WITH A FEW REMARKS IN VINDICATION 
OF gray's FRIEND AND the doctor's AC- 
QUAINTANCE. 

Te sonar c qu.is mihi 

Genique vim dabit lui? 
S'yii) quis cequor hocce arare ckarteum, 

Et arv a per papyrina 
Salu loquace seminar e lite ras? Janus Dousa. 



Gongora. 
p. 309. 

THE AUTHOR 



CHAPTEB CXXVII. 



p. 318. 

Till, doctob's theory of PROGRESSIVE EXIST- 
i.\< B. 



Quam mullec pecudes humano in corporc vivunt! 

Palingenius. 



CHAPTER CXXVIII. — p. 320. 

ELUCIDATIONS OF THE COLUMBIAN THEORY. 
Thou almost makest me waver in my faith, 
To hold opinion with Pythagoras, 
That souls of animals infuse themselves 
Into the trunks of men. Merchant of Venice. 

CHAPTER CXXIX. — p. 326. 

WHEREIN THE AUTHOR SPEAKS OF A TRAGEDY 
FOR THE LADIES, AND INTRODUCES ONE OF 
WILLIAM DOVE'S STORIES FOR CHILDREN. 

Y donde sobre todo de sa dueTio 

El gran tesoro y el caudal se infiere, 
Es que al grande, al mediano, y al pequcrio, 

Todo se da de balde a quien lo quiere. Balbuena. 

THE STORY OF THE THREE BEARS.— 

p. 327. 
A tale which may content the minds 
Of learned men and grave philosophers. Gascoyne. 

CHAPTER CXXX. — p. 330. 

CHILDREN AND KITTENS. APHORISMS ASCRIBED TO 
THE LAUREATE, DR. SOUTHEY. MORE COLUM- 
BIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

Oh ! if in after life we could but gather 
The very refuse of our youthful hours ! 

Charles Lloyd. 

CHAPTER CXXXI. — p. 331. 

THE DOCTOR ABSTAINS FROM SPECULATING ON 
PERILOUS SUBJECTS. A STORY OF ST. ANSELM. 

This field is so spacious, that it were easy for a man to 
lose himself in it ; and if I should spend all my pilgrimage 
in this walk, my time would sooner end than my way. 

Bishop Hall. 

CHAPTER CXXXIL — p. 333. 

DR. CADOGAN. A REMARKABLE CASE OF HEREDI- 
TARY LONGEVITY. REMARKS ON THE ORDINARY 
TERM OF HUMAN LIFE. 
Live well, and then how soon so e'er thou die, 
Thou art of age to claim eternity. Randolph ^ 

CHAPTER CXXXIII. — p. 334. 

MORE THOUGHTS CONCERNING LIFE, DEATH AND 
IMMORTALITY. 

Clericus es ? legito hcec. Laicus ? legito ista libenter. 
Crede mihi, invenies hie quod uterque voles. 

D. Du.-Tr. Med. 

CHAPTER CXXXIV. — p.337. 

A TRANSITION, AN ANECDOTE, AN APOSTROPHE, 
AND A PUN, PUNNET, OR PUNDIGRION. 

Est brevitaie opus, ut currat sententia, nru se 
Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures j 
Etsermone opus est, modo tristi, scepejocoso. 

Horace. 



CONTENTS. 



XXIX 



CHAPTER CXXXV. — p.338. 

REGINALD HEBER. A MISTAKE OBVIATED, WHICH 
MIGHT OTHERWISE EASILY BE MADE. 

Perhaps some Gull, as witty as a Goose, 

Says with a coy skew look, " it's pretty, pretty ! 
But yet that so much wit he should dispose 
For so small purpose, faith" saith he, " 'tis pity !" 

Davies of HEREFORD- 
CHAPTER CXXXVI. —p. 339. 

THE PEDIGREE AND BIRTH OF NOBS, GIVEN IN 
REPLY TO THE FIRST QUERY IN THE SECOND 
CHAPTER P. I. 
Theo. Look to my Horse, I pray you, well. 
Diego. He shall, Sir. 

Inc. Oh ! how beneath his rank and call was that now ! 
Your Horse shall be entreated as becomes 
A Horse of fashion, and his inches. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

LNTERCHAPTER XVI. — p. 340. 

THE AUTHOR RELATES SOME ANECDOTES, REFERS 
TO AN OPINION EXPRESSED BY A CRITIC ON THE 
PRESENT OPUS, AND DESCANTS THEREON. 
Every man can say B to a battledore, and write in praise 
of virtue and the seven liberal sciences ; thresh corn out 
of full sheaves, and fetch water out of the Thames. But 
out of dry stubble to make an after-harvest, and a plenti- 
ful crop without sowing, and wring juice out of a flint, 
that is Pierce a God's name, and the right trick of a 
workman. Nash. 

CHAPTER CXXXVIL — p. 345. 

DIFFERENCE OF OPINION BETWEEN THE DOCTOR 
AND NICHOLAS CONCERNING THE HIPPOGONY, 
OR ORIGIN OF THE FOAL DROPPED IN THE 
PRECEDING CHAPTER. 

his birth day, the eleventh of June 

When the Apostle Barnaby the bright 
Unto our year doth give the longest light. 

Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER CXXXVIIL— p. 346. 

DOUBTFUL PEDIGREE OF ECLIPSE. SHAKESPEAR 
(N. B. NOT WILLIAM) AND OLD MARSK. A PECU- 
LIARITY OF THE ENGLISH LAW. 

Lady Percy. But hear you, my Lord ! 
Hotspur. What say'st thou, my lady ? 
Lady Percy. What is it carries you away ? 
Hotspur. Why my Horse, my love, my Horse. 

Shakespeare. 

CHAPTER CXXXIX. — p. 347. 

FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS RELATING TO ONOMA- 
TOLOGY. 
Moreover there are many more things in the World 
than there are names for them ; according to the saying 
of the Philosopher ; Nomina sunt finita, res autem in- 
finites ; ideo unum nomen plura significat : which saying 
is by a certain, or rather uncertain, author approved: 
Muftis speciebus non sunt nomina ; idcirco necessarium 
est nomina fingc re, si nullum ante erit nomen imposition. 

Gwillim. 



CHAPTER CXL. — p. 353. 

HOW THERE AROSE A DISPUTE BETWEEN BARNABY 
AND NICHOLAS CONCERNING THE NAMING OF 
THIS COLT, AND OF THE EXTRAORDINARY CIR- 
CUMSTANCES THAT ENSUED. 

Quoiqu'il en so>t, je ne tairai point cette histoire ; je 
V abandonne a la credulite, ou d Vincredulite des Lecterns, 
ils prendront d cet egard quel parti il leur plaira. Je 
tiirai seulement, s'ils ne la veulent pas croire, que je les 
defie de me prouver qti'elle soil absolument impossible j ils 
ne le prouveront jamais. Gomgam. 

CHAPTER CXLL— p. 354. 

A SINGULAR ANECDOTE AND NOT MORE SAD THAN 

TRUE. 

Oh penny Pipers, and most painful penners 

Of bountiful new Ballads, what a subject, 

W T hat a sweet subject for your silver sounds ! 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

CHAPTER CXLIL— p. 355. 

A DEFECT IN HOYLE SUPPLIED. GOOD ADVICE 
GIVEN, AND PLAIN TRUTH TOLD. A TRIBUTE 
OF RESPECT TO THE MEMORY OF F. NEWBERY, 
THE CHILDREN'S BOOKSELLER AND FRIEND. 

Neither is it a thing impossible or greatly hard, even by 
such kind of proofs so to manifest and clear that point, 
that no man living shall be able to deny it, without deny- 
ing some apparent principle such as all men acknowledge 
to be true. Hooker. 

CHAPTER CXLIIL— p. 356. 

A FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO DESCRIBE THE PHYSICAL 
AND MORAL QUALITIES OF NOBS. 

Quant a moi, je desirerois fort sqavoir bien dire, mi que 
j"eusse eu une bonne plume, et bien taillee a convmande- 
rnent, pour Vexalter et lou'er comme il le merite. Toutes- 
fois, telle quelle est,je m'en vais V employer au hazard. 

Brantome. 

CHAPTER CXLTV. — p. 363 

HISTORY AND ROMANCE RANSACKED FOR RESEM- 
BLANCES AND NON-RESEMBLANCES TO THE 
HORSE OF DR. DANIEL DOVE. 

Renowned beast ! (forgive poetic flight !) 
Not less than man, deserves poetic right. 

The Bruciad. 

CHAPTER CXLV. — p. 309. 

WILLLS.M OSMER. INNATE QUALITIES. MARCH OF 
ANIMAL INTELLECT. FARTHER REVEALMEXT OF 
THE COLUMBLAN PHILOSOPHY. 

There is a word, and it is a great word in this Book,* 
l;r i to uv to, — In id ipsutn, that is, to look to the thing 
itself, the very point, the principal matter of all ; to have 
our eye on that, and not off it, upon alia omnia, any thing 

but it To go to the point, drive all to that, as also to go 

to the matter real, without declining from it this way or 
that, to the right hand or to the left. Bp. Andkewes. 

* The New Testament which the Preacher had before 
him. 



XXX 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CXLVL— p. 373. 

DANIEL DOVE VERSUS SENECA AND BEN JONSON. 
ORLANDO AND HIS HORSE AT RONCESVALLES. 
MR. BURCHELL. THE PRINCE OF ORANGE. THE 
LORD KEEPER GUILDFORD. REV. MR. HAWTAYN. 
DR. THOMAS JACKSON. THE ELDER SCALIGER. 
EVELYN. AN ANONYMOUS AMERICAN. WALTER 
LANDOR, AND CAROLLNE BOWLES. 

■ Contented with an bumble theme 

I pour my stream of panegyric down 

The vale of Nature, where it creeps and winds 

Among her lovely works with a secure 

And unambitious course, reflecting clear, 

If not the virtues, yet the worth of brutes. Cowper. 

CHAPTER CXLYII. — p. 375. 

OLD TREES. SHIPS. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. 
LIFE AND PASSIONS ASCRIBED TO INANIMATE 
OBJECTS. FETISH WORSHIP. A LORD CHAN- 
CELLOR AND HIS GOOSE. 

Ce que fen ay escrit, c 'est pour une curiosite, qui plaira 
possible a aucuns : et non possible aux autres. 

Brantome. 

CHAPTER EXTRAORDINARY. — p. 379. 

PROCEEDINGS AT A BOOK CLUB. THE AUTHOR 

accused of " Lese delicatesse," or what is 

CALLED AT COURT " TUM-TI-TEE." HE UTTERS A 
MYSTERIOUS EXCLAMATION, AND INDIGNANTLY 
VINDICATES HIMSELF. 

Rem profeclo mirabilcm, longeque stupendam, rebusque 
veris veriorem describo. Hieuonymus Radiolensis. 

CHAPTER CXLYIII. — p. 384. 

WHEREIN A SUBSTITUTE FOR OATHS, AND OTHER 
PASSIONATE INTERJECTIONS IS EXEMPLIFIED. 

What have we to do with the times ? We cannot cure 'em : 
Let them go on : when they are swoln with surfeits 
They'll burst and stink : Then all the world shall smell 
'em. Beaomont and Fletcher. 

CHAPTER CXLIX — p. 887. 

A PARLOUS QUESTION ARISING OUT OF THE FORE- 
GOING CILVPTER. MR. IRVING AND THE UN- 
KNOWN TONGUES. TAYLOR THE WATER POET. 
POSSIBLE SCHEME OF INTERPRETATION PRO- 
POSED. OPINIONS CONCERNING THE GIFT OF 
TONGUES AS EXHIBITED IN MADMEN. 

Speak what terrible language you will, though you 
understand it not yourselves, no matter ! Chough's lan- 
guage, gabble enough and good enough. Shakespeare. 

CHAPTER CL. — p. 390. 

THE WEDDING PEAL AT ST. GEORGE'S, AND THE 

BRIDE'S APPEARANCE AT CHURCH. 
See how I have strayed ! and you'll not wonder when you 
reflect on the whence and the whither. 

Alexander Knox. 



CHAPTER CLL— p. 391. 

SOMETHING SERIOUS. 

If thou hast read all this Book, and art never the better, 
yet catch this flower before thou go out of the garden, 
and peradventure the scent thereof will bring thee back 
to smell the rest. Henry Smith. 

CHAPTER CLIL— p. 393. 

ODD OPINIONS CONCERNING BIOGRAPHY AND EDU- 
CATION. THE AUTHOR MAKES A SECOND HIATUS 
AS UNWILLINGLY AS HE MADE THE FIRST, AND 
FOR THE SAME COGENT REASON. 

Ya sabes — pero esforxoso 

Repetirlo, aunque lo sepas. Calderon. 

CHAPTER CLIII. — p. 394. 

MATRIMONY AND RAZORS. LIGHT SAYINGS LEAD- 
ING TO GRAVE THOUGHTS. USES OF SHAVLNG. 

I wonder whence that tear came, when I smiled 
In the production on't ! Sorrow's a thief 
That can when joy looks on, steal forth a grief. 

Massinger. 

CHAPTER CLIV. — p. 396. 

A POET'S CALCULATION CONCERNING THE TIME 
EMPLOYED IN SHAVING, AND THE USE THAT 
MIGHT BE MADE OF IT. THE LAKE POETS LAKE 
SHAVERS ALSO. A PROTEST AGAINST LAKE 
SHAVING. 

Intellect and industry are never incompatible. There 
is more wisdom, and will be more benefit, in combining 
them than scholars like to believe, or than the common 
world imagine. Life has time enough for both, and its 
happiness will be increased by the union. 

Sharon Turner. 

CHAPTER CLY. — p. 397. 

THE POET'S CALCULATION TESTED AND PROVED. 

Fiddle-faddle, don't tell of this and that, and every thing 
in the world, but give me mathematical demonstration. 

CONGREVE. 

CHAPTER CLYL— p. 399. 

AN ANECDOTE OF WESLEY, AND AN ARGUMENT 
ARISING OUT OF IT, TO SHOW THAT THE TIME 
EMPLOYED IN SHAVING IS NOT SO MUCH LOST 
TIME ; AND YET THAT THE POET'S CALCULATION 
REMAINS OF PRACTICAL USE. 

Questo medesimo anchor a con una allra gagliardis- 
sima ragione vi confermo. Lodovico Dominichi. 

CHAPTER CLVIL— p. 401. 

WHICH THE READER WILL FIND LIKE A ROASTED 

MAGGOT, SHORT AND SWEET. 

Malum quod minimum est, id minimum est malum. 

Plautus. 



CONTENTS. 



XXXI 



CHAPTER CLYIIL— p. 401. 

DB. DOVE'S PRECEPTORIAL PRESCRIPTION, TO BE 
TAKEN BY THOSE "WHO NEED IT. 

Some strange devise, I know, each youthful wight 

Would here expect, or lofty brave assay : 

But I'll the simple truth in simple wise convey. 

Henry More. 

CHAPTER CLIX. — p. 402. 

THE AUTHOR COMPARES HIMSELF AND THE DOCTOR 
TO CARDINAL WOLSEY AND KING HENRY VHI. 
AND SUGGESTS SUNDRY SIMILES FOR THE STYLE 
OF HIS BOOK. 

I doubt not but some will liken me to the Lover in a 
modern Comedy, who was combing his peruke and setting 
his cravat before his mistress ; and being asked by her 
when he intended to begin his court ? he replied, he had 
been doing it all this while. Dryden. 

CHAPTER CLX. — p. 404. 

MENTION OF ONE FOR WHOM THE GERMANS WOULD 
COIN A DESIGNATION WHICH MIGHT BE TRANS- 
LATED A ONCE READER. MANY MINDS IN THE 
SAME MAN. A POET'S UNREASONABLE REQUEST. 
THE AUTHOR OFFERS GOOD ADVICE TO HIS 
READERS, AND ENFORCES IT BY AN EPISCOPAL 
OPINION. 

Judge not before 

Thou know mine intent ; 
But read me throughout, 
And then say thy fill ; 
As thou in opinion 
Art minded and bent, 
Whether it be 
Either good or ill. E. P. 

CHAPTER CLXL— p. 405. 

WESLEY AND THE DOCTOR OF THE SAME OPINION 
UPON THE SUBJECT OF THESE CHAPTERS. A 
STUPENDOUS EXAMPLE OF CYCLOP-EDLVN STO- 
LIDITY. 

A good razor never hurts, or scratches. Neither would 
good wit, were men as tractable as their chins. But in- 
stead of parting with our intellectual bristles quietly, we 
set them up, and wriggle. Who can wonder then if we 
are cut to the bone ? Guesses at Truth. 

CHAPTER CLXII. — p. 406. 
amount of every individual's personal sins 
according to the estimate of mr. toplady. 
the doctor's opinion thereon. a bill for 
certain church repairs. a romish legend 
which is likely to be true, and part of a 
Jesuit's sermon. 

Mankind, tho' satirists with jobations weary us, 
Has only two weak parts if fairly rrckon'd ; 

The first of which, is trilling with things serious ; 
And seriousness in trifles is the second. 

Remove these little rubs, whoe'er knows how, 

And fools will be as scarce, — as wise men now. 

Bishop. 



CHAPTER CLXIIL — p. 409. 

AN OPINION OF EL VENERABLE PADRE MAESTRO 
FRAY LUIS DE GRANADA, AND A PASSAGE 
QUOTED FROM HIS WORKS, BECAUSE OF THE 
PECULIAR BENEFIT TO WHICH PERSONS OF A 
CERTAIN DENOMINATION WILL FIND THEM- 
SELVES ENTITLED UPON READING OR HEARING 
IT READ. 

Chacun tourne en realties 
Autant qu'ilpeut, ses propres songes ; 

L'homme est de glace aux verites, 
II est defeu pour les mensonges. La Fontaine. 

CHAPTER CLXIV. — p. 410. 

AN INQUIRY IN THE POULTRY YARD, INTO THE 
TRUTH OF AN OPINION EXPRESSED BY ARISTOTLE. 

This is some liquor poured out of his bottle ; 
A deadly draught for those of Aristotle. 

J. C. sometime of M. H. Oxon. 

CHAPTER CLXV. — p. 411. 

A QUESTION ASKED AND RIGHTLY ANSWERED, 
WITH NOTICES OF A GREAT IMPORTATION AN- 
NOUNCED IN THE LEITH COMMERCIAL LIST. 
" But tell me yet what followed on that But." Daniel. 

CHAPTER CLXYL— p. 412. 

A WISH CONCERNING WHALES, WITH SOME RE- 
MARKS UPON THEIR PLACE IN PHYSICAL AND 
MORAL CLASSIFICATION. DR. ABRAHAM REES. 
CAPTAIN SCORESBY. THE WHALE FISHERY. 

Your Whale he will swallow a hogshead for a pill : 
But the maker of the mouse-trap is he that hath skill. 

Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER CLXYIL— p. 416. 

A MOTTO WHICH IS WELL CHOSEN BECAUSE NOT 
BEING APPLICABLE IT SEEMS TO BE SO, THE 
AUTHOR NOT ERRANT HERE OR ELSEWHERE. 
PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER-OSOPHIES. 
Much from my theme and friend have I dig-essed, 

But poor as I am, poor in stuff for thought, 
And poor in thought to make of it the best, 

Blame me not, Gentles, if I soon am caught 
By this or that, when as my themes suggest 

Aught of collateral aid which may be wrought 
Into its service : Blame me not, I say; 
The idly musing often miss their way. 

Charles Lloyd. 

CHAPTER CLXYIII. — p. 416. 

NE -PLUS-ULTRA- WHALE-FISHING. AX OriNION OF 
CAPTAIN SCORESBY's. THE DOCTOR DENIES 
THAT ALL CREATURES WERE MADE FOB THE 
USE OF MAN. THE CONTRARY DEMONSTRATED 
IN PRACTICE BY RELLARM1NE. 
Scquar quo vocas, omnibus enim rebus omnibusque 

seitnonibus, alfqvid salutare miscendttm est. Seneca. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CLXIX. — p. 419. 

LINKS AND AFFINITIES. A MAP OF THE AUTHOR'S 
INTELLECTUAL COURSE IN THE FIVE PRECEDING 
CHAPTERS. 

r fi <p!ki $x7$et, noiln y,a.) xoQiv ; Plato. 



CHAPTER CLXX. — p. 422. 

THE AUTHOR REPEATS A REMARK OF HIS DAUGHTER 
UPON THE PRECEDING CHAPTER ; COMPLIMENTS 
THE LORD BROUGHAM AND VAUX UPON HIS 
LUNGS AND LARYNX; PHILOSOPHISES AND 
QUOTES, AND QUOTES AND PHILOSOPHISES AGAIN 
AND AGAIN. 

Fato, Fortuna, Predestinazione, 

Sorte, Caso, Ventura, son di quelle 
Cose che dan gran noja a le persone, 

E vi si dicon su di gran novelle. 
Ma in fine Iddio cV ogni cose 6 padrone : 

E chi e savio domina a le stelle j 
Chi non e savio paziente e forte, 

Lamentisi di se, non de la sorte. Orl. Inn. 



CHAPTER CLXXL — p.425. 

CONTAINING PART OF A SERMON, WHICH THE 
READER WILL FIND WORTH MORE THAN MOST 
WHOLE ONES THAT IT MAY BE HIS FORTUNE TO 
HEAR. 

Je fais une grande provision de bon sens en prenant ce 
que les autres en ont. Madame de Maintenon. 



INTERCHAPTER XVII. — p. 426. 

A POPULAR LAY NOTICED, WITH SUNDRY REMARKS 
PERTINENT THERETO, SUGGESTED THEREBY, OR 
DEDUCED THEREFROM. 

Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit: by and by 
it will strike. Tempest. 



IXTERCHAPTER XVIII. — p. 429. 

APPLICATION OF THE LAY. CALEB d'ANVERS. 
IRISH LAW. ICON BASILIKE. JUNIUS. THOMAS 
A K KM PIS. FELIX HEMMERLEN. A NEEDLE 
LARGER THAN GAMMER GURTON's AND A MUCH 
COARSER THREAD. THOMAS AVARTON AND 
BISHOP STILL. THE JOHN WEBSTERS, THE 
A LKXANDER CUNNINGHAMS, AND THE CURINAS 
AM) Till'; STEPHENS. 

L<> que soy, razona poco 
Porque dc sovibra a mi va nada, o poco. 

FuE^nrc Deseada. 



INTERCHAPTER XIX.— p. 437. 

THE AUTHOR DIFFERS IN OPINION FROM SIR EGER- 
TON BRYDGES AND THE EMPEROR JULIAN, 
SPEAKS CHARITABLY OF THAT EMPEROR, VINDI- 
CATES PROTEUS FROM HIS CENSURE, AND TALKS 
OF POSTHUMOUS TRAVELS AND EXTRA MUNDANE 
EXCURSIONS, AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN 
LIMBOLAND. 

Petulant. If he says black's black, — if I have a humour 
to say it is blue — let that pass. All's one 
for that. If I have a humour to prove it, it 
must be granted. 

Witwould. Not positively must, — But it may, it may. 

Petulant. Yes, it positively must, — upon proof positive. 

Witwould. Ay, upon proof positive it must ; but upon 
proof presumptive it only may. That's a 
logical distinction now. Congreve. 

CHAPTER CLXXIL — p. 439. 

DESCARTES' NOTION CONCERNING THE PROLON- 
GATION OF LIFE. A SICILIAN PROPOSAL FOR 
BREEDING UP CHILDREN TO BE IMMORTAL. 

ASGILL'S ARGUMENT AGAINST THE NECESSITY 
OF DYING. 

O harmless Death ! whom still the valiant brave, 
The wise expect, the sorrowful invite ; 

And all the good embrace, who know the Grave 
A short dark passage to eternal light. 

Sir William Davenant. 

CHAPTER CLXXIIL — p. 452. 

MORE CONCERNING ASGILL. HIS DEFENCE IN 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, HIS EXPULSION, 
FARTHER SPECULATIONS AND DEATH. 
Let not that ugly Skeleton appear ! 
Sure Destiny mistakes; this Death's not mine ! 

Dryden. 

CHAPTER CLXXIV. — p. 456. 

THE DOCTOR INDULGES IN THE WAY OF FANTASTIC 
AND TYPICAL SPECULATION ON HIS OWN NAME, 
AND ON THE POWERS OF THE LETTER D., 
WHETHER AS REGARDS DEGREES AND DIS- 
TINCTIONS, GODS AND DEMI-GODS, PRINCES 
AND KINGS, PHILOSOPHERS, GENERALS, OR 
TRAVELLERS. 
My mouth's no dictionary: it only serves as the needful 

interpreter of my heart. Quarles. 

CHAPTER CLXXV— p. 458. 

THE DOCTOR FOLLOWS UP HIS MEDITATIONS ON 
THE LETTER D. AND EXPECTS THAT THE 
READER WILL BE CONVINCED THAT IT IS A 
DYNAMIC LETTER, AND THAT THE HEBREWS 
DID NOT WITHOUT REASON CALL IT DALETII — 
THE DOOR — AS THOUGH IT WERE THE DOOR 
OF SPEECH. THE MYSTIC TRIANGLE. 
More authority, dear boy, name more ; and sweet my 

child let them be men of good repute and carriage. 

Love's Labour Lost. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CLXXVL — p. 461. 

THE DOCTOR DISCOVERS THE ANTIQUITY OF THE 
NAME OF DOVE FROM PERUSING JACOB BRY- 
ANT'S ANALYSIS OF ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY. 
CHRISTOPHER AND FERDINAND COLUMBUS. 
SOMETHING ABOUT PIGEON-PIE, AND THE 
REASON WHY THE DOCTOR WAS INCLINED TO 
THINK FAVOURABLY OF THE SAMARITANS. 

An' I take the humour of a thing once, I am like your 
tailor's needle ; I go through. Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER CLXXVIL — p. 462. 

SOMETHING ON THE SCIENCE AND MYSTERY OF 
NUMBERS WHICH IS NOT ACCORDING TO COCKER. 
REVERIES OF JEAN D'ESPAGNE, MINISTER OF 
THE FRENCH-REFORMED CHURCH IN WEST- 
MINSTER, AND OF MR. JOHN BELLAMY. A 
PITHY REMARK OF FULLER'S, AND AN EXTRACT 
FROM HIS PISGAH SIGHT OF PALESTINE, TO 
RECREATE THE READER. 

None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd, 
As wit turn'd fool: folly, in wisdom hatch'd, 
Hath wisdom's warrant, and the help of school, 
And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool. 

Love's Labour Lost. 

CHAPTER CLXXVIII. — p. 465. 

THE MYSTERY OF NUMBERS PURSUED, AND CER- 
TAIN CALCULATIONS GIVEN WHICH MAY RE- 
MIND THE READER OF OTHER CALCULATIONS 
EQUALLY CORRECT. ANAGRAMMATISING OF 

NAMES, AND THE DOCTOR'S SUCCESS THEREIN. 

" There is no efficacy in numbers, said the wiser Philo- 
sophers ; and very truly," — saith Bishop Hacket in 
repeating this sentence ; but he continues, — " some 
numbers are apt to enforce a reverent esteem towards 
them, by considering miraculous occurrences which fell 

out in holy Scripture on such and such a number Non 

potest fortuitb fieri, quod tarn swpefit, says Maldonatus, 
whom I never find superstitious in this matter. It falls 
out too often to be called contingent ; and the oftener it 
falls out, the more to be attended." 

CHAPTER CLXXIX.— p. 467. 

THE SUBJECT OF ANAGRAMS CONTINUED ; A TRUE 
OBSERVATION WHICH MANY FOR WANT OF OB- 
SERVATION WILL NOT DISCOVER TO BE SUCH, 
VIZ., THAT THERE IS A LATENT SUPERSTITION 
IN THE MOST RATIONAL OF MEN. LUCKY AND 
UNLUCKY — FITTING AND UNFITTING — ANA- 
GRAMS, AND HOW THE DOCTOR'S TASTE IN 
THIS LINE WAS DERIVED FROM OUR OLD AC- 
QUAINTANCE JOSHUA SILVESTER. 

Ha gran forza una vecchia opinione ; 
E bisogna grand' arte, e gran fatica, 
A cavarla del capo alle persone. 

BRONZINO PlTTORE. 



CHAPTER CLXXX.— p. 469. 
the doctor's ldeas of luck, chance, acci- 
dent, fortune and misfortune. the 
duchess of Newcastle's distinction be- 
tween CHANCE AND FORTUNE, WHEREIN 
NO- MEANING IS MISTAKEN FOR MEANING. 
AGREEMENT IN OPINION BETWEEN THE PHILO- 
SOPHER OF DONCASTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER 
OF NORWICH. DISTINCTION BETWEEN UN- 
FORTUNATELY UGLY, AND WICKEDLY UGLY. 
DANGER OF PERSONAL CHARMS. 

"Eo~rl yu.% ui; aXriQco? e5rt<p8iyf/.ac, to oc.vTOfjt.a.TOv , kvBquixiuv 
us 'irvxt ««' u.Xoyio'na? ^ovovvrotv, xki tov f6iv Xoyov ccvrSJv 
fA.vi xoL<rct?^KfA(3<x.yovTW , 'Bict, he r/iv cctrBivuctv vvis xex.ra.Xri'^iu;, 
uXoyws olofjcivtuv 'hioe.rtrocx^ at retZret, Sy rov Xoyov uniiv ova 
'ixovtnv. Constant. Orat. ad Sanct. Cet. c. vii. 

" Deformity is either natural, voluntary, or adven- 
titious, being either caused by God's unseen Providence, 
(by men nicknamed chance,) or by men's cruelty." 

Fuller's Holy State, B. iii. c. 15. 

CHAPTER CLXXXL— p. 471. 

NO DEGREE OF UGLINESS REALLY UNFORTUNATE. 
FIDUS CORNELIUS COMPARED TO A PLUCKED 
OSTRICH. WILKES' CLAIM TO UGLINESS CON- 
SIDERED AND NEGATIVED BY DR. JOHNSON, 
NOTWITHSTANDING HOGARTH'S PORTRAIT. 

CAST OF THE EYE A LA MONTMORENCY. ST. 
EVREMOND AND TURENNE. WILLIAM BLAKE 
THE PAINTER, AND THE WELSH TRIADS. 
CURIOUS EXTRACT FROM THAT VERY CURIOUS 
AND RARE BOOK, THE DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE 
OF HIS OWN PICTURES, — AND A PAINFUL ONE 
FROM HIS POETICAL SKETCHES. 
"If thou beest not so handsome as thou wouldest have 
been, thank God thou art not more unhandsome than thou 
art. 'Tis His mercy thou art not the mark for passenger's 
fingers to point at, an Heteroclite in nature, with some 
member defective or redundant. Be glad that thy clay 
cottage hath all the necessary forms thereto belonging, 
though the outside be not so fairly plaistered as some 
others." Fuller's Holy State, iii. c. 15. 

CHAPTER CLXXXIL— p. 476. 

AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE FORM OF THE HUMAN 
LEG SUGGESTED BY A PHYSICIAN. THE DOC- 
TOR'S CURE OF A BROKEN SHIN AND INVENTION 
OF A SHIN-SHIELD. 

Resfisci est, ubicunque natal. Whatsoever swims upon 
any water, belongs to this exchequer. 

Jeremy Taylor. Preface to the Duct. Bub. 

CHAPTER CLXXXIIL — p. 477. 

VIEWS OF OLD AGE. MONTAGNE, DANIEL COR- 
NEILLE, LANGUET, PASQUIER, DR. JOHNSON, 
LORD CHESTERFIELD, ST. EVREMOND. 
What is age 
But the holy place of life, the chapel of ease 



For all men's wearied miseries ? 



Massinger. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CLXXXIV.— p. 481. 

FURTHER OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING OLD AGE. 
BISHOP REYNOLDS. OPINION OF THE DOCTOR 
CONCERNING BEASTS AND MEN. M. DE CUSTINE. 
THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US. WORDS- 
WORTH. SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 
In these reflections, which are of a serious, and some- 
what of a melancholy cast, it is best to indulge ; because 
it is always of use to be serious, and not unprofitable 
sometimes to be melancholy. Freeman's Sermons. 

CHAPTER CLXXXV.— p. 483. 

EVOLVEMENTS. ANALOGIES. ANTICIPATIONS. 

I have heard, how true 
I know not, most physicians as they grow 
Greater in skill, grow less in their religion; 
Attributing so much to natural causes, 
That they have little faith in that they cannot 
Deliver reason for : this Doctor steers 
Another course. Massinger. 

CHAPTER CLXXXVL — p. 484. 

LEONE HEBREO'S DIALOGI DE AMORE. THE 

ELIXIR OF LIFE NO OBSTACLE TO DEATH. 
PARACELSUS. VAN HELMONT AND JAN MASS. 
DR. DOVE'S OPINION OF A BIOGRAPHER'S 
DUTIES. 

There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors ! 

OLJi FORTUNATUS. 

CHAPTER CLXXXVIL— p. 487. 

VAN HELMONT'S WORKS, AND CERTAIN SPECIA- 
LITIES IN HIS LIFE. 

Voild mon conte Je ne sgay s'il est vray ; mais,je 

fay ainsi ouy conter. — Possible que cela est faux, possible 

que non Je m'en rapporte d ce qui en est. II ne sera 

pas damne qui le croira, ou de" croira. Brantome. 

INTERCHAPTER XX.— p. 489. 

ST. PANTALEON OF NICOMEDIA IN BITHYNIA — 
HIS HISTORY, AND SOME FURTHER PARTICULARS 
NOT TO BE FOUND ELSEWHERE. 
Non, dicea le cose senza il quia ; 
Che il dritlo distingueva dal mancino, 
E dicea pane alpane, e vino al vino. Bertoldo. 

ARCH-CHAPTER.— p. 493. 

CHAPTER CLXXXVIIL — p. 495. 

FOLLY IN PRINT, REFERRED TO, BUT (N.B.) NOT 
EXEMPLIFIED. THE FAIR MAID OF DONCASTER. 
DOUBTS CONCERNING THE AUTHENTICITY OF 
HER STORY. THEVENARD, AND LOVE ON A 
NEW FOOTING. STARS AND GARTERS, A MONI- 
TORY ANECDOTE FOR OUR SEX, AND A WHOLE- 
SOME NOVELTY IN DRESS RECOMMENDED TO 
BOTH. 

They be at hand, Sir, with stick and fiddle, 

They can play a new dance, Sir, called hey, diddle, diddle. 
King Cambyses. 



CHAPTER CLXXXIX.— p. 498. 

THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF LATE HOURS. DANCING. 
FANATICAL OBJECTION OF THE ALBIGENSES J 
INJURIOUS EFFECT OF THAT OPINION WHEN 
TRANSMITTED TO THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. 
SIR JOHN DAVIES AND BURTON QUOTED TO 
SHOW THAT IT CAN BE NO DISPARAGEMENT 
TO SAY THAT ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, 
WHEN ALL THE SKY'S A BALL-ROOM. 

I could be pleased with any one 

Who entertained my sight with such gay shows, 

As men and women moving here and there, 

That coursing one another in their steps 

Have made their feet a tune. Dryden. 



CHAPTER CXC — p. 501. 

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM 
CLARKE. BURCHELL'S REMARKS ON THE UNI- 
VERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS 
REGARDED LN THE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

Non vipar adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza 
di questo f A bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo ; 
pur desidero io d' intendere qualche particolaritd anchor. 

Il Cortegiano. 



CHAPTER CXCL — p. 504. 

A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE OF 
THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN WHICH TIME IS 

MIS- SPENT. 

Time as he passes us, has a dove's wing, 
UnsoiPd, and swift, and of a silken sound ; 
But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade ! 
Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged, 
With motley plumes ; and where the peacock shews 
His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red 
With spots quadrangular of diamond form, 
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife, 
And spades, the emblem of untimely graves. 

Cowper. 



CHAPTER CXCIL— p.506. 

MORE OF THE DOCTOR'S PHILOSOPHY, WHICH WILL 
AND WILL NOT BE LIKED BY THE LADIES, AND 
SOME OF THE AUTHOR'S WHICH WILL AND WILL 
NOT BY THE GENTLEMEN. THE READER IS IN- 
TRODUCED TO COUNT CASTIGLIONE, AND TO SIR 
JOHN CHEKE. 

Ou tend Vauteur a cette heure ? 
Quefait-il? Revient-il? Va-t-il? Ou s'ildemeure? 

L'Auteur. 
Non,je ne reviens pas, carje n'ai pas eti j 
Je ne vais pas aussi, carje suis arrete" ; 
Et ne demeure point, car, tout de cepas meme 
Je pre - tens m'en alter. Moliere. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CXCIII. —p. 510. 

MASTER THOMAS MACE, AND THE TWO HISTORIANS 
OF HIS SCIENCE, SIR JOHN HAWKINS AND DR. 
BURNET. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE OLD LUTANIST 
AND OF HIS "MUSIC'S MONUMENT." 

This Man of Music hath more in his head 
Than mere crotchets. Sir W. Davenant. 



CHAPTER CXCIV. — p. 516. 

A MUSIC LESSON FROM MASTER THOMAS MACE TO 
BE PLAYED BT LADY FAIR : — A STORY, THAN 
WHICH THERE IS NONE PRETTIER LN THE HIS- 
TORY OF MUSIC. 

What shall I say ? Or shall I say no more ? 

I must go on ! I'm brim-full, running o'er. 

But yet I'll hold, because I judge ye wise ; 

And few words unto such may well suffice. 

But much — much more than this I could declare ; 

Yet for some certain reasons I'll forbear. 

But less than this I could not say ; because, 

If saying less, I should neglect my cause, 

For 'tis the Doctor's cause I plead so strong for, 

And 'tis his cause compleated that I long for, 

And 'tis true doctrine certainly I preach, 

And 'tis that doctrine every priest should teach. 

Thomas Mace, to all divine readers. 



CHAPTER CXCV.— p. 519. 

ANOTHER LESSON, WITH THE STORY AND MANNER 
OF ITS PRODUCTION. 

OvSih igu trod', ai; vto^X'^tov Xoyov, 

iXzl-cc;, atXXoe, t^j (ravrov <p£=veV. SOPHOCLES. 



CHAPTER CXCVL — p. 520. 

FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MASTER THOMAS MACE, — 
HIS LIGHT HEART, HIS SORROWS, AND HIS 
POVERTY, — " POORLY, POOR MAN, HE LIVED, 
POORLY, POOR MAN, HE DIED " — PHINEAS 
FLETCHER. 

The sweet and the sour, 

The nettle and the flower, 

The thorn and the rose, 

This garland compose. 
Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs. 

CHAPTER CXCVTL — p. 524. 

QUESTION PROPOSED, WHETHER A MAN BE MAG- 
NIFIED OR MINIFIED BY CONSIDERING HIMSELF 
UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE HEAVENLY 
BODIES, AND ANSWERED WITH LEARNING AND 
DISCRETION. 

I find by experience that Writing is like Building, 
wherein the undertaker, to supply some defect, or serve 
some convenience which at first he foresaw not, is usually 
forced to exceed his first model and proposal, and many 
times to double the charge and expence of it. 

Dr. John Scott. 



CHAPTER CXCYHL — p. 527. 

PETER HOPKINS' VIEWS OF ASTROLOGY. HIS 
SKILL IN CHIROMANCY, PALMISTRY, OR MANUAL 
DIVINATION WISELY TEMPERED. SPANISH PRO- 
VERB AND SONNET BY BARTOLOME LEONARDO 
DE ARGENSOLA. TIPPOO SULTAN. MAHO- 

METAN SUPERSTITION. W. Y. PLAYTES' PRO- 

SPECTUS FOR THE HORN BOOK FOR THE RE- 
MEMBRANCE OF THE SIGNS OF SALVATION. 

Seguite dunque con la mente lieta, 
Seguite, Monsignor, che co?n' io dico, 
Presto presto sarele in su la meta. 

Ludovico Dolce. 

CHAPTER CXCIX. — p. 530. 

CONCERNING THE GREAT HONOURS TO WHICH 
CERTAIN HORSES HAVE ATTAINED, AND THE 
ROYAL MERITS OF NOBS. 

Siento para contarlas que me llama 
El a mi, yo a mi pluma, ella a lafama. 

Balbuena. 

CHAPTER CC — p. 531. 

A CHAPTER OF KINGS. 

Fimbhl-fambi heitr 
Sd erfatt kann segia, 
That er osnotvrs athal. 

Fimbul-fambi (fatuus) vocatur 

Qui pauca novit narrate : 

Ea est hominis insciti proprietas . 

Edda, Hava Mai. 



INTERCHAPTER XXL— p. 536. 

MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 

Le Plebe e bestia 
Di cento teste, e non rinchiude in loro 
Pur oncia di saper. Chiabrera. 

INTERCHAPTER XXII. — p. 537. 

VARIETY OF STILES. 
Qualis vir, tab's oratio. Erasmi Adagia. 

INTERCHAPTER XXIII. — p. 538. 

A LITTLE ADVICE BESTOWED UPON THE SCORNFUL 
READER IN A SHORT INTERCHAPTER. 

No man is so foolish but may give another good 
counsel sometimes: and no man is so wise, but may 
easily err, if he will take no other's counsel but his own. 

Ben Jonson. 

PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH VOLUME. 

— p. 539. 

Invenias etiam disjccti membra Poetce. 



b 2 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CCI. — p. 539. 

QUESTION CONCERNING THE USE OF TONGUES. 
THE ATHANASIAN CONFESSORS. GIBBON'S RE- 
LATION OF THE SUPPOSED MIRACLE OF TONGUES. 
THE FACTS SHOWN TO BE TRUE, THE MIRACLE 
IMAGINARY, AND THE HISTORIAN THE DUPE OF 
HIS OWN UNBELIEF. 

Per sever emus, peraclis quce rem continebant, scrutari 
etiam ea quce, si vis verum, connexa sunt, non cohcerenlia j 
quce quisquis diligenter inspirit, necfacit cperce prcetium, 
nee tamen perdit operam. Seneca. 

CHAPTER CCIL — p.543. 

a law of Alfred's against lying tongues. 

observations on lax ones. 

As I have gained no small satisfaction to myself, — so I 
am desirous that nothing that occurs here may occasion 
the least dissatisfaction to others. And I think it will be 
impossible anything should, if they will be but pleased to 
take notice of my design. Henry More. 

CHAPTER CCIII. — p. 545. 

WHETHER A MAN AND HIMSELF BE TWO. MAXIM 
OF BAYLE'S. ADAM LITTLETON'S SERMONS, — 
A RIGHT-HEARTED OLD DIVINE WITH WHOM 
THE AUTHOR HOPES TO BE BETTER ACQUAINTED 
TN A BETTER WORLD. THE READER REFERRED 
TO HIM FOR EDIFICATION. WHY THE AUTHOR 
PURCHASED HIS SERMONS. 

Parolles. Go to, thou art a witty fool, I have found 
thee. 

Clown. Did you find me in yourself, Sir ? or were you 
taught to find me? The search, Sir, was profitable ; and 
much fool may you find in you, even to the world's plea- 
sure and the increase of laughter. 

All's well that ends well. 



CHAPTER CCI V.— p. 548. 
adam Littleton's statement that every man 
is made up of three egos, dean young — 
distance between a man's head and his 

HEART. 

Perhaps when the Reader considers the copiousness of 
the argument, he will rather blame me for being too brief 
than too tedious. Dit. John Scott. 

CHAPTER CCV. — p. 549. 

EQUALITY OF THE SEXES, — A POINT ON WHICH 
IT WAS NOT EASY TO COLLECT THE DOCTOR'S 
OPINION. THE SALIC LAW. DANIEL ROGERS'S 
TIM.ATISE OF MATRIMONIAL HONOUR. MISS 
J I AT FIELD'S LETTERS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF 
THE FEMALE SEX, AND LODOVICO DOMENICHl's 
DIALOGUE UPON THE NOBLENESS OF WOMEN. 

Mirths and toys 
To cozen time withal : for o* my troth, Sir, 
I can love, — I think well too, — well enough ; 



And think as well of women as they are, — 

Pretty fantastic things, some more regardful, 

And some few worth a service. I'm so honest 

I wish 'em all in Heaven, and you know how hard, Sir, 

'Twill be to get in there with their great farthingals. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 
And not much easier now with their great sleeves. 

Author, A. D. 1830. 



CHAPTER CCVI. 



552. 



THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. OPINIONS OF THE 
RABBIS. ANECDOTE OF LADY JEKYLL AND A 
TART REPLY OF WILLIAM WHISTON'S. JEAN 
D'ESPAGNE. QUEEN ELIZABETH OF THE QUORUM 
QUARUM QUORUM GENDER. THE SOCIETY OF 
GENTLEMEN AGREE WITH MAHOMET IN SUPPOS- 
ING THAT WOMEN HAVE NO SOULS, BUT ARE 
OF OPINION THAT THE DEVIL IS AN HERMA- 
PHRODITE. 

Sing of the nature of women, and then the song shall be 
surely full of variety, old crotchets, and most sweet closes : 
It shall be humourous, grave, fantastic, amorous, melan- 
choly, sprightly, one in all and all in one. Marston. 

CHAPTER CCVIL— p.554. 

FRACAS WITH THE GENDER FEMININE. THE 
doctor's DEFENCE. 

If there sit twelve women at the table, let a dozen of 
them be — as they are. Timon of Athens. 

CHAPTER CCVIIL — p. 555. 

VALUE OF WOMEN AMONG THE AFGHAUNS. LIGON's 
HISTORY OF BARBADOES, AND A FAVOURITE 
STORY OF THE DOCTOR'S THEREFROM. CLAUDE 
SEISSEL, AND THE SALIC LAW. JEWISH THANKS- 
GIVING. ETYMOLOGY OF MULIER, WOMAN, AND 
LASS ; — FROM WHICH IT MAY BE GUESSED HOW 
MUCH IS CONTAINED IN THE LIMBO OF ETYMO- 
LOGY. 

If thy name were known that writest in this sort, 

By womankind, unnaturally, giving evil report, 

Whom all men ought, both young and old, defend with all 

their might, 
Considering what they do deserve of every living wight, 
I wish thou should exiled be from women more and less, 
And not without just cause thou must thyself confess. 
Edward More. 

INTERCHAPTER XXIV. — p. 558. 

A TRUE STORY OF THE TERRIBLE KNITTERS e' 
DENT WHICH WILL BE READ WITH INTEREST BY 
HUMANE MANUFACTURERS, AND BY MASTERS OF 
SPINNING JENNIES WITH A SMILE. BETTY YEW- 
DALE. THE EXCURSION — AN EXTRACT FROM, 
AND AN ILLUSTRATION OF. 

voi clC avete gV intelletti sani, 

Mir ate la duttrina, che s' asconde 

Sotto 7 velame degli versi strani. Dante. 



CONTENTS. 



XXXVll 



CHAPTER CCIX.— p. 562. 

EARLY APPROXIMATION TO THE DOCTOR'S THEORY- 
GEORGE FOX. ZACHARIAH BEN MOHAMMED. 
COWPER. INSTITUTES OF MENU. BARDIC PHI- 
LOSOPHY. MILTON. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 

There are distinct degrees of Being as there are degrees 
of Sound ; and the whole world is but as it were a greater 
Gamut, or scale of music. Norris. 

CHAPTER CCX.~p.569. 

A QUOTATION FROM BISHOP BERKELEY, AND A HIT 
AT THE SMALL CRITICS. 
Plusieurs blameront Ve7itass ement de passages que Von 
vicnt de voir ; fai prevu leurs dedains, leurs degouts, et 
leurs censures magistrates ; et n'ai pas voulu y avoir 
eigard. Bayle. 

CHAPTER CCXL — p. 570. 

SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON. CUD- 
WORTH. JACKSON OF OXFORD AND NEWCASTLE. 
A BAXTERIAN SCRUPLE. 

S'il y a des lecteurs qui se soucient peu de cela, on les 
prie de se souvenir qu'un auteur n 'est pas oblige a ne rien 
dire que ce qui est de leur gout. Bayle. 

CHAPTER CCXIL — p. 571. 

SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOCTOR'S 
THEORY. DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES. 

Voila bien des mysteres, dira-t-on j fen conviens ; aussi 
le sujet le merite-t-il bien. Au reste, il est certain que 
ces mysteres ne cachent rien de mauvais. Gomgam. 

CHAPTER CCXIIL — p.574. 

birds of paradise. the ziz. story of the 
abbot of st. salvador de villar. holy 
Colette's nondescript pet. the animal- 
cular world. giordano bruno. 

And so 1 came to Fancy's meadows, strow'd 

With many a flower ; 
Fain would I here have made abode, 
But I was quickened by my hour. Herbert. 

CHAPTER CCX1V. — p. 577. 

FURTHER DIFFICULTIES. QUESTION CONCERNING 
INFERIOR APPARITIONS. BLAKE THE PAINTER, 
AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA. 

In amplissima causa, quasi magna mari, pluribusventis 
sumus vecti. Pliny. 

CHAPTER CCXV. — p. 579. 

FACTS AND FANCIES CONNECTING THE DOCTOR'S 
THEORY WITH THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 
We will not be too peremptory herein : and build 
standing structures of bold assertions on so uncertain a 
foundation ; rather with the Rechabites we will live in 
tents of conjecture, which on better reason we may easily 
alter and remove. Fuller. 



CHAPTER CCXVL — p. 581. 

A SPANISH AUTHORESS. HOW THE DOCTOR OB- 
TAINED HER WORKS FROM MADRID. THE PLEA- 
SURE AND ADVANTAGES WHICH THE AUTHOR 
DERIVES FROM HIS LANDMARKS LN THE BOOKS 
WHICH HE HAD PERUSED. 

Alex. Quel es D. Diego aquel Arbol, 

que time la copa en tierra 

y las raizes arriba ? 
Dieg. Elhombre. El Letrado del Cielo. 

Man is a Tree that hath no top in cares. 

No root in comforts. Chapman. 

CHAPTER CCXVII. — p. 583. 

SOME ACCOUNT OF D. OLIVA SABUCO'S MEDICAL 
THEORIES AND PRACTICE. 

Yo — volvere 

A nueva diligenciay paso largo, 

Que es breve el tiempo, 's grande le memoria 

Que para darla al mundo estd a mi cargo. 

Balbuena. 

CHAPTER CCXYIIL — p.586. 

THE MUNDANE SYSTEM AS COMMONLY HELD IN D. 
OLIVA'S AGE. MODERN OBJECTIONS TO A PLURA- 
LITY OF WORLDS BY THE REV. JAMES MILLER. 

Un cerchio immaginato ci bisogna, 

A voter ben la spera contemplare ; 
Cosi chi intender questa storia agogna 

Conviensi altro per altro immaginare ; 
Percke quinon si cania, efinge, e sagna; 

Venuto e il tempo dafilosofare. Pulci. 

CHAPTER CCXIX. — p. 588. 

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY DRAWN 
FROM A PLURALITY OF WORLDS SHOWN TO BE 
FUTILE: REMARKS ON THE OPPOSITE DISPOSI- 
TIONS BY WHICH MEN ARE TEMPTED TO INFI- 
DELITY. 

— ascolta 
Siccome suomo di verace lingua j 
E porgimi Vorccchio. Chiabrera . 

CHAPTER CCXX.--p.590. 

DONA OLIVA'S PHILOSOPHY, AND VIEWS OF POLI- 
TICAL REFORMATION. 

Non vipar adunque die habbiamo ragionato a bastanza 
di questo ? — A bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gaspar j 
par desidero io d 1 intendere qnalche particolarila anchor. 

Castiglione. 

CHAPTER CCXXI. — p. 593. 

THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF DONA OLIVA'S PRAC- 
TICE AND HUMANITY. 
Anchor dir si potrebber cose assai 
Che la materia e tanto plena et folia, 
Che non se ne verrebbe a capo mat, 
Dunquefia buono ch' io suoni a raccolta. 

Fr. Sansovino. 



CONTENTS. 



FRAGMENTS.— p. 594. 

— The prince 
Of Poets, Homer, sang long since, 
A skilful leech is better far 
Than half a huDdred men of war. 



INTERCHAPTER XXV.— p. 598. 

A WISHING INTERCHAPTER WHICH IS SHORTLY 
TERMINATED, ON SUDDENLY RECOLLECTING THE 
WORDS OF CLEOPATRA, — "WISHERS WERE 
EVER FOOLS." 

Begin betimes, occasion's bald behind, 
Stop not thine opportunity, for fear too late 
Thou seek'st for much, but canst not compass it. 

Marlowe. 



CHAPTER CCXXII. — p. 599. 

ETYMOLOGY. UN TOUR DE MAlTRE GONIN. ROMAN 
DE VAUDEMONT AND THE LETTER C. SHEN- 
STONE. THE DOCTOR'S USE OF CHRISTIAN NAMES. 

lively [/,«,, ■zeja.yi^ot. yAyx, xixiwirau, fjiiyot. 

Aristophanes. 



CHAPTER CCXXIIL — p. 602. 

TRUE PRONUNCIATION OF THE NAME OF DOVE. 
DIFFICULTIES OF PRONUNCIATION AND PRO- 
SODY. A TRUE AND PERFECT RHYME HIT UPON. 

Tal nombre, que a los siglos extendido, 

Se olvide de olvidarsele al Olvido. Lope de Vega. 



CHAPTER CCXXIV. — p. 605. 

CHARLEMAGNE, CASIMIR THE POET, MARGARET 
DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE, NOCTURNAL REMEM- 
BRANCER. THE DOCTOR NOT AMBITIOUS OF 
FAME. THE AUTHOR IS INDUCED BY MR. FOS- 
BROOKE AND NORRIS OF BEMERTON TO EJACU- 
LATE A HEATHEN PRAYER IN BEHALF OF HIS 
BRETHREN. 

Tulle le cose son rose et viole 

Cli 1 to dico d ch' io dirb de la virtute. 

Fr. Sansovino. 



CHAPTER CCXXV. — p. 606. 

TWO QUESTIONS GROWING OUT OF THE PRECEDING 
CHAPTER. 

A Taylor who has no objection to wear motley, may 
make himself a great coat with half a yard of his own stuff, 
by eking it out with cabbage from every piece that comes 
in his way. ROBERT Southey. 



CHAPTER CCXXVL — p.608. 

THE AUTHOR DIGRESSES A LITTLE, AND TAKES UP 
A STITCH WHICH WAS DROPPED IN THE EARLIER 
PART OF THIS OPUS. NOTICES CONCERNING 
LITERARY AND DRAMATIC HISTORY, BUT PERTI- 
NENT TO THIS PART OF OUR SUBJECT. 

Jam paululum digressus a speclanlibus, 
Doctis loquar, qui non adeo spectare quant 
Audire gestiunt, logosque ponderant, 
Examinant, dijudicantque pro suo 
Candore vel livore ; non latum tamen 
Culmum (quod aiunt) dum loquar sapientibus 
Loco movebor. Macropedius. 

CHAPTER CCXXVII. — p. 616. 

SYSTEM OF PROGRESSION MARRED ONLY BY MAN'S 
INTERFERENCE. THE DOCTOR SPEAKS SERIOUSLY 
AND HUMANELY, AND QUOTES JUVENAL. 

Montenegro. How now, are thy arrows feathered ? 

Velasco. Well enough for roving. 

Montenegro. Shoot home then. Shirley. 

CHAPTER CCXXVIIL — p. 617. 

RATS. PLAN OF THE LAUREATE SOUTHEY FOR 
LESSENING THEIR NUMBER. THE DOCTOR'S 
HUMANITY IN REFUSING TO SELL POISON TO 
KILL VERMIN, AFTER THE EXAMPLE OF PETER 
HOPKINS HIS MASTER. POLITICAL RATS NOT 
ALLUDED TO. RECIPE FOR KILLING RATS. 
I know that nothing can be so innocently writ, or 

carried, but may be made obnoxious to construction ; 

marry, whilst 1 bear mine innocence about me, I fear 

it not. Ben Jonson. 

CHAPTER CCXXIX — p. 618. 

RATS LIKE LEARNED MEN LIABLE TO BE LED BY 
THE NOSE. THE ATTENDANT UPON THE STEPS 
OF MAN, AND A SORT OF INSEPARABLE ACCI- 
DENT. SEIGNEUR DE HUMESESNE AND PANTA- 
GRUEL. 

Where my pen hath offended, 

I pray you it may be amended 

By discrete consideration 

Of your wise reformation : 

I have not offended, I trust, 

If it be sadly discust. Skelton. 

CHAPTER CCXXX. — p. 620. 

DISTINCTION BETWEEN YOUNG ANGELS AND YOUNG 
YAHOOS. FAIRIES, KILLCROPS, AND CHANGE- 
LINGS. LUTHER'S OPINIONS ON THE SUBJECT. 
HIS COLLOQUIA MENSALIA. DIFFERENCE BE- 
TWEEN THE OLD AND NEW EDITION. 

I think it not impertinent sometimes to relate such 
accidents as may seem no better than mere trifles ; for 
even by trifles are the qualities of great persons as well 
disclosed as by their great actions ; because in matters of 
importance they commonly strain themselves to the ob- 
servance of general commended rules ; in lesser things 
they follow the current of their own natures. 

Sir Walter Raleigh. 



V 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CCXXXL— p. 623. 

QUESTION AS TO WHETHER BOOKS UNDER THE 
TERMINATION OP " ANA " HAVE BEEN SERVICE- 
ABLE OR INJURIOUS TO LITERATURE CONSIDERED 
IN CONNECTION WITH LUTHER'S TABLE TALK. 
HISTORY OF THE EARLY ENGLISH TRANSLATION 
OF THAT BOOK, OF ITS WONDERFUL PRESERVA- 
TION, AND OF THE MARVELLOUS AND UNIM- 
PEACHABLE VERACITY OF CAPTAIN HENRY BELL. 



Prophecies, predictions 
Stories and fictions, 
Allegories, rhymes, 
And serious pastimes 
For all manner men, 
Without regard when, 



Or where they abide, 
On this or that side, 
Or under the mid line 
Of the Holland sheets fine, 
Or in the tropics fair 
Of sunshine and clear air; 
Or under the pole 
Of chimney and sea coal : 
Read they that list ; understand they that can ; 
Verbum satis est to a wise man. 

Book of Riddles. 



CHAPTER CCXXXIL— p. 626. 

THE DOCTOR'S FAMILY FEELING. 

It behoves the high 
For their own sakes to do things worthily. 

Ben Jonson. 



CHAPTER CCXXXIIL — p. 629. 

THE PETTY GERMAN PRINCES EXCELLENT PA- 
TRONS OF LITERATURE AND LEARNED MEN. 
THE DUKE OF SAXE WEIMAR. QUOTATION 
FROM BISHOP HACKET. AN OPINION OF THE 
EXCELLENT MR. BOYLE. A TENET OF THE 
DEAN OF CHALON, PIERRE DE ST. JULIEN, AND 
A VERITABLE PLANTAGENET. 

Ita nati estis, ut bona malaque vestra ad Rempublicam 
pertineant. Tacitus. 

CHAPTER CCXXX1V. — p. 631. 

opinion of a modern divine upon the where- 
about of newly-departed spirits. st. 
John's burial, one relic only of that 
saint, and wherefore. a tale concerning 
abraham, adam and eve. 

Je sqay qu'il y a plusieurs qui diront que je fais beau- 
coup de petits fats contes, dont je m'en passerois Men. 
Ouy, Men pour aucuns, — mat's non pour tnoy, me con- 
tentant de m'en renouveller le souvenance, et en tirer 
autant de plaisir. Brantome. 



CHAPTER CCXXXV. — p. 634. 

THE SHORTEST AND PLEASANTEST WAY FROM 
DONCASTER TO JEDDAH, WITH MANY MORE, 



TOO LONG. 



Tiovo; nova trovov $ieu, 
Ha, xoi <y«.g oux i(3oiv tyeo. 



Sophocles. 



CHAPTER CCXXXVL — p. 641. 

CHARITY OF THE DOCTOR IN HIS OPINIONS. 
MASON THE POET. POLITICAL MEDICINE. SIR 
WILLIAM TEMPLE. CERVANTES. STATE PHY- 
SICIANS. ADVANTAGE TO BE DERrVED FROM, 
WHETHER TO KING, CABINET, LORDS, OR COM- 
MONS. EXAMPLES. PHILOSOPHY OF POPULAR 
EXPRESSIONS. COTTON MATHER. CLAUDE PAJON 
AND BARNABAS OLEY. TIMOTHY ROGERS AND 
MELANCHOLY. 

Goto! 
You are a subtile nation, you physicians, 
And grown the only cabinets in court ! B. Jonson. 



CHAPTER CCXXXVIL— p. 646. 

MORE MALADIES THAN THE BEST PHYSICIANS CAN 
PREVENT BY REMEDIES. THE DOCTOR NOT 
GIVEN TO QUESTIONS, AND OF THE POCO- 
CURANTE SCHOOL AS TO ALL THE POLITICS OF 
THE DAY. 

A slight answer to an intricate and useless question is a 
fit cover to such a dish ; a cabbage leaf is good enough to 
cover a pot of mushrooms. Jeremy Taylor. 



CHAPTER CCXXXVIIL — p.647. 

SIMONIDES. FUNERAL POEMS. UNFEELING 

OPINION IMPUTED TO THE GREEK POET, AND 
EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE. SENECA. JEREMY 
TAYLOR AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH 
MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND, WERE MEN WHAT 
CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE. 

Intendale chi pub ; eke non I stretto 
Alcuno a creder piii di quel che vuole. 

Orlando Innamorato. 



CHAPTER CCXXXIX.— p. 648. 

THE DOCTOR DISSENTS FROM A PROPOSITION OF 
WARBURTON'S, AND SHOWS IT TO BE FAL- 
LACIOUS. Hutchinson's remarks on the 

POWERS OF BRUTES. LORD SHAFTESBURY 
QUOTED. APOLLONIUS AND THE KING OF 
BABYLON. DISTINCTION IN THE TALMUD BE- 
TWEEN AN INNOCENT BEAST AND A VICIOUS 
ONE. OPINION OF ISAAC LA PEYRESC. THE 
QUESTION DE ORIGINE ET NATURA ANIMARUM 
IN BRUTIS AS BROUGHT BEFORE THE THEOLO- 
GIANS OF SEVEN PROTESTANT ACADEMIES IN 
THE YEAR 1635 BY DANIEL SENNERTUS. 

Toutes veritex ne sont pas bonnes a dire serieusement. 

GOMGAM. 



xl 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER CCXL. — p. 655. 

THE JESUIT GARASSE'S CENSURE OF HUARTE AND 
BARCLAY. EXTRAORDINARY INVESTIGATION. 
THE TENDENCY OF NATURE TO PRESERVE ITS 
OWN ARCHETYPAL FORMS. THAT OF ART TO 
VARY THEM. PORTRAITS. MORAL AND PHY- 
SICAL CADASTRE. PARISH CHRONICLER AND 
PARISH CLERK THE DOCTOR THOUGHT MIGHT 
BE WELL UNITED. 

Is't you, Sir, that know things ? 
Sooth. In nature's infinite book of secresy, 

A little I can read. Shakspeare. 



CHAPTER CCXLL — p. 660. 

THE DOCTOR'S UTOPIA DENOMINATED COLUMBIA. 
HIS SCHEME ENTERED UPON — BUT "LEFT 
HALF TOLD " LIKE " THE STORY OF CAMBUS- 
CAN BOLD." 

I will to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of 
mine own, a new Atlantis, a poetical commonwealth of 
mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build cities, 
make laws, statutes, as I list myself. And why may I not ? 

Burton. 



CHAPTER CCXLII. 



p. 662. 



FARTHER REMARKS UPON THE EFFECTS OF SCHISM, 
AND THE ADVANTAGES WHICH IT AFFORDS TO 
THE ROMISH CHURCH AND TO INFIDELITY. 

— Io non ci ho tnterresso 
Nessun, ne vifui mat, ne manco chieggo 
Per quel cli 1 io ne vb dir, d? esservi messo. 
Vb dir, che senxa passion eleggo, 
E nonforxato, e senxa pigliar parte; 
Di dime tutto quel, ck' intendo e veggo. 

Bronzino Pittore. 



CHAPTER CCXLTIL — p. 664. 

BREVITY BEING THE SOUL OF WIT THE AUTHOR 
STUDIES CONCISENESS. 

You need not fear a surfeit, here is but little, and that 
light of digestion. Quarles. 



CHAPTER CCXLIV. — p. 664. 

THE AUTHOR VENTURES TO SPEAK A WORD ON 
CHRISTIAN CHEERFULNESS: — QUOTES BEN 
SJRACH, SOLOMON, BISHOP HACKET, WALTER 
SAVAGE LANDOR, BISnOP REYNOLDS, MILTON, 
ETC. 

— 'AXXa. ov raZru. fj.ot.0itv, (2iotou rcori ri^fMX. 

Wvxfi ran ocyxOiiy tXviOi %oc.£iZ6fu.fv6(. SlMONIDES. 



FRAGMENTS TO THE DOCTOR. — p. 669. 

A LOVE FRAGMENT FOR THE LADIES, INTRODUCED 
BY A CURIOUS INCIDENT WHICH THE AUTHOR 
BEGS THEY WILL EXCUSE. 

Now will ye list a little space, 

And I shall send you to solace ; 

You to solace and be blyth, 

Hearken ! ye shall hear belyve 

A tale that is of verity. 

ROSWALL AND LlLLIAN. 

A FRAGMENT ON BEARDS. — p. 671. 

Yet have I more to say which I have thought upon, for 
I am filled as the moon at the full ! Ecclesiasticus. 

FRAGMENT ON MORTALITY. — p. 673. 
FRAGMENT OF SIXTH VOLUME. — p. 674. 

FRAGMENT WHICH WAS TO HAVE ANSWERED THE 
QUESTION PROPOSED IN THE TWO HUNDRED 
AND FORTY-SECOND CHAPTER. — p. 676. 
Io udii gid. dire ad un valente uomo nostro vicino, gli 
uomini abbiano molte volte bisogno si di lagrimare, come 
di rider e; e per tal cagione egli affermava essere state da 
principio trovate le dolorose favole, che si chiamarono 
Tragedie, accioche raccontate ne' teatri, come in qual 
tempo si costumava difare, tirassero le lagrime agli occhi 
di coloro, che avevano di cib mestiere ; e cosi eglino pian- 
gendo delta loro infirmita guarissero. Ma come cib sia 
a noi non istd bene di contristare gli animi delle persone 
con cui favelliamo ; massimamente cold, dove si dimori 
per averfesta e sollazxo, e non per piagnere ; che se pure 
alcuno e, che infermi per vaghexxa di lagrimare, assai 
leggier cosafia di medicarlo con la mostarda forte, o porlo 
in alcun luogo alfumo. 

Galateo, del M. Giovanni della Casa. 

FRAGMENT ON HUTCHINSON'S WORKS. — p. 676. 

FRAGMENT RELATIVE TO THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 
AT DONCASTER AND THE LIVING OF ROSSING- 

ton. — p. 679. 

FRAGMENT OF INTERCHAPTER. — p. 680. 
MEMOIRS OF CAT'S EDEN. — p. 681. 

FRAGMENT OF INTERCHAPTER. — p. 681. 

More than prince of cats, I can tell you. 

Romeo and Juliet. 

MEMOIR OF THE CATS OF GRETA HALL. — p. 682. 



FRAGMENT OF INTERCHAPTER. 



•p. 686. 



EI2 TOTS ANAPIANTA2. — p.686. 

'O (/.h $iu.fioXos iviitvivai run •za.^a.vbix.ois ccvdeuvois, xat 
lU robs ruv (ZutrtXiuv vj3^nrocv o.v5^;«vrosj. 

Chrysost. Hom ad Popul. Antiochen. 

EPILUDE OF MOTTOES.— p. 691. 

L'ENVOY.— p.694. 



THE DOCTOR, 



ETC. 



CHAPTER VII. A. I. 

A FAMILY PARTY AT A NEXT DOOR NEIGH- 
BOUR'S. 

Good Sir, reject it not, although it bring 
Appearances of some fantastic thing 
At first unfolding ! 

George Wither to the King. 

I was in the fourth night of the story of the 
Doctor and his horse, and had broken it off, 
not like Scheherezade because it was time 
to get up, but because it was time to go to 
bed. It was at thirty-five minutes after ten 
o'clock, on the 20th of July, in the year of 
our Lord 1813. I finished my glass of punch, 
tinkled the spoon against its side, as if 
making music to my meditations, and having 
my eyes fixed upon the Bhow Begum, who 
was sitting opposite to me at the head of her 
own table, I said, " It ought to be written 
in a book ! " 

There had been a heavy thunder-storm in 
the afternoon ; and though the thermometer 
had fallen from 78 to 70, still the atmosphere 
was charged. If that mysterious power 
by which the nerves convey sensation and 
make their impulses obeyed, be (as experi- 
ments seem to indicate) identical with the 
galvanic fluid ; and if the galvanic and 
electric fluids be the same (as philosophers 
have more than surmised) ; and if the lungs 
(according to a happy hypothesis) elaborate 
for us from the light of heaven this pabulum 
of the brain, and material essence, or essen- 
tial matter of genius, — it may be that the 
ethereal fire which I had inhaled so largely 
during the day produced the bright concep- 
tion, or at least impregnated and quickened 
the latent seed. The punch, reader, had no 
share in it. 



I had spoken as it were abstractedly, and 
the look which accompanied the words was 
rather cogitative than regardant. The Bhow 
Begum laid down her snuff-box and replied, 
entering into the feeling, as well as echoing 
the words, " It ought to be written in a 
book, — certainly it ought." 

They may talk as they will of the dead 
languages. Our auxiliary verbs give us a 
power which the ancients, with all their 
varieties of mood, and inflections of tense, 
never could attain. " It must be written in 
a book," said I, encouraged by her manner. 
The mood was the same, the tense was the 
same ; but the gradation of meaning was 
marked in a way which a Greek or Latin 
grammarian might have envied as well as 
admired. 

" Pshaw ! nonsense ! stuff! " said my wife's 
eldest sister, who was sitting at the right 
hand of the Bhow Begum ; " I say, write it 
in a book indeed!" My wife's youngest 
sister was sitting diagonally opposite to the 
last speaker ; she lifted up her eyes and 
smiled. It was a smile which expressed the 
same opinion as the late vituperative tones ; 
there was as much of incredulity in it ; but 
more of wonder and less of vehemence. 

My wife was at my left hand, making a 
cap for her youngest daughter, and with her 
tortoiseshell-paper work-box before her. I 
turned towards her, and repeated the words, 
" It must be written in a book ! " But I 
smiled while I was speaking, and was con- 
scious of that sort of meaning in my eyes 
which calls out contradiction for the pleasure 
of sporting with it. 

" Write it in a book ! " she replied, " I 
am sure you won't ;" and she looked at me 
with a frown. Poets have written much 



THE DOCTOR. 



upon their ladies' frowns, but I do not re- 
member that they have ever described the 
thing with much accuracy. When my wife 
frowns, two perpendicular wrinkles, each 
three quarters of an inch in length, are 
formed in the forehead, the base of each 
resting upon the top of the nose, and equi- 
distant from each other. The poets have 
also attributed dreadful effects to the frown 
of those whom they love. I cannot say that 
I ever experienced any thing very formidable 
in my wife's. At present she knew her eyes 
would give the lie to it if they looked at me 
steadily for a moment; so they wheeled to 
the left about quick, off at a tangent, in a 
direction to the Bhow Begum, and then she 
smiled. She could not prevent the smile; 
but she tried to make it scornful. 

My wife's nephew was sitting diagonally 
with her, and opposite his mother, on the left 
hand of the Bhow Begum. " Oh ! " he ex- 
claimed, " it ought to be written in a book ! 
it will be a glorious book ! write it, uncle, I 
beseech you ! " My wife's nephew is a sen- 
sible lad. He reads my writings, likes my 
stories, admires my singing, and thinks as I 
do in politics : — a youth of parts and con- 
siderable promise. 

" He will write it ! " said the Bhow Begum, 
taking up her snuff-box, and accompanying 
the words with a nod of satisfaction and en- 
couragement. " He will never be so foolish ! " 
said my wife. My wife's eldest sister re- 
joined, "he is foolish enough for anything." 



CHAPTER VI. A. I. 

SHOWING THAT AN AUTHOR MAY MORE 
EASILY BE KEPT AWAKE BY HIS OWN 
IMAGINATIONS THAN PUT TO SLEEP BY 
THEM HIMSELF, WHATEVER MAY BE THEIR 
EFFECT UPON HIS READERS. 

Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced 
to take up her lodging in a cat's ear : a little infant that 
breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out as 
if thou wort the more unquiet bedfellow. Webster. 

Wiikn I ought to have been asleep the 
" unborn pages crowded on my soul." The 



Chapters ante-initial and post-initial ap- 
peared in delightful prospect "long drawn 
out : " the beginning, the middle and the end 
were evolved before me : the whole spread 
itself forth, and then the parts unravelled 
themselves and danced the hays. The very 
types rose in judgment against me, as if 
to persecute me for the tasks which during 
so many years I had imposed upon them. 
Capitals and small letters, pica and long- 
primer, brevier and bourgeois, English and 
nonpareil, minion and pearl, Romans and 
Italics, black-letter and red, passed over my 
inward sight. The notes of admiration ! ! ! 
stood straight up in view as I lay on the one 
side; and when I turned on the other to 
avoid them, the notes of interrogation cocked 
up their hump-backs ? ? ? Then came to re- 
collection the various incidents of the event- 
ful tale. " Visions of glory spare my aching 
sight ! " The various personages, like spectral 
faces in a fit of the vapours, stared at me 
through my eyelids. The Doctor oppressed 
me like an incubus; and for the Horse, — he 
became a perfect night-mare. " Leave me, 
leave me to repose ! " 

Twelve by the kitchen clock! — still rest- 
less ! — One ! O Doctor, for one of thy com- 
fortable composing draughts! — Two! here's 
a case of insomnolence ! I, who in summer 
close my lids as instinctively as the daisy 
when the sun goes down ; and who in winter 
could hybernate as well as Bruin, were I but 
provided with as much fat to support me 
during the season, and keep the wick of 
existence burning : — I, who, if my pedi- 
gree were properly made out, should be 
found to have descended from one of the 
Seven Sleepers, and from the Sleeping 
Beauty in the Wood ! 

I put my arms out of bed. I turned the 
pillow for the sake of applying a cold sur- 
face to my cheek. I stretched my feet into 
the cold corner. I listened to the river, and 
to the ticking of my watch. I thought of all 
sleepy sounds and all soporific things : the 
flow of water, ihe humming of bees, the 
motion of a boat, the waving of a field of 
corn, the nodding of a mandarine's head on 
the chimney-piece, a horse in a mill, the 



THE DOCTOR. 



opera, Mr. Humdrum's conversation, Mr. 
Proser's poems, Mr. Laxative's speeches, 
Mr. Lengthy's sermons. I tried the device 
of my own childhood, and fancied that the 
bed revolved with me round and round. 
Still the Doctor visited me as perseveringly 
as if I had been his best patient ; and, call 
up what thoughts I would to keep him off, 
the. Horse charged through them all. 

At last Morpheus reminded me of Dr. 
Torpedo's divinity lectures, where the voice, 
the manner, the matter, even the very at- 
mosphere, and the streamy candle-light were 
all alike somnific ; — where he who by strong 
effort lifted up his head, and forced open 
the reluctant eyes, never failed to see all 
around him fast asleep. Lettuces, cowslip- 
wine, poppy-syrup, mandragora, hop-pillows, 
spiders-web pills, and the whole tribe of 
narcotics, up to bang and the black drop, 
would have failed : but this was irresistible ; 
and thus twenty years after date I found 
benefit from having attended the course. 



CHAPTEK V. A. I. 

SOMETHING CONCERNING THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
DREAMS, AND THE AUTHOR'S EXPERIENCE 
IN AERIEL HORSEMANSHIP. 

If a dream should come in now to make you afear'd, 
With a windmill on his head and bells at his beard, 
Would you straight wear your spectacles here at your toes, 
And your boots on your brows and your spurs on your 
nose? Ben Jonson. 

The wise ancients held that dreams are from 
Jove. Virgil hath told us from what gate of 
the infernal regions they go out, but at 
which of the five entrances of the town of 
Mansoul they get in John Bunyan hath not 
explained. Some have conceited that unern- 
bodied spirits have access to us during sleep, 
and impress upon the passive faculty, by 
divine permission, presentiments of those 
things whereof it is fitting that we should be 
thus dimly forewarned. This opinion is held 
by Baxter, and to this also doth Bishop 
Newton incline. The old atomists supposed 
that the likenesses or spectres of corporeal 
things (excuvice scilicet rerum, vel effluvia, as 



they are called by Yaninus, when he takes 
advantage of them to explain the Fata Mor- 
gana), the atomists I say, supposed that these 
spectral forms which are constantly emitted 
from all bodies, 

Otnne genus quoniam passim simulacra feruntur *, 

assail the soul when she ought to be at rest ; 
according to which theory all the lathered 
faces that are created every morning in the 
looking-glass, and all the smiling ones that 
my Lord Simper and Mr. Smallwit contem- 
plate there with so much satisfaction during 
the day, must at this moment be floating up 
and down the world. Others again opine, 
as if in contradiction to those who pretend 
life to be a dream, that dreams are realities, 
and that sleep sets the soul free like a bird 
from a cage. John Henderson saw the spirit 
of a slumbering cat pass from her in pursuit 
of a visionary mouse ; — (I know not whether 
he would have admitted the fact as an argu- 
ment for materialism ;) and the soul of 
Hans Engelbrecht not only went to hell, but 
brought back from it a stench which proved 
to all the bystanders that it had been there. 
— Faugh ! 

Whether then my spirit that night found 
its way out at the nose (for I sleep with my 
mouth shut), and actually sallied out seeking 
adventures ; or whether the spectrum of the 
Horse floated into my chamber ; or some 
benevolent genius or daemon assumed the 
well-known and welcome form ; or whether 
the dream were merely a dream, — 

sifue en espiritu, dfue 
en cuerpo, no se j que yo 
solo se, que no lo se ; t 

so however it was that in the visions of the 
night I mounted Nobs. Tell me not of 
Astolfo's hippogriff, or Pacolet's wooden 
steed ; nor 

Of that wonderous horse of brass 
Whereon the Tartar King did pass ; 

nor of Alborak, who was the best beast for a 
night-journey that ever man bestrode. Tell 



Lucretius. 



t Caldeuon. 



THE DOCTOK. 



me not even of Pegasus ! I have ridden him 
many a time ; by day and by night have I 
ridden him ; high and low, far and wide, 
round the earth, and about it, and over it, 
and under it. I know all his earth-paces, 
and his sky-paces. I have tried him at a 
walk, at an amble, at a trot, at a canter, at 
a hand-gallop, at full gallop, and at full 
speed. I have proved him in the manege 
with single turns and the manege with double 
turns, his bounds, his curvets, his pirouettes, 
and his pistes, his croupade and his balotade, 
his gallop-galliard, and his capriole. I have 
been on him when he has glided through the 
sky with wings outstretched and motionless, 
like a kite or a summer cloud ; I have be- 
strode him when he went up like a bittern 
with a strong spiral flight, round, round, and 
round, and upward, upward, upward, cir- 
cling and rising still ; and again when he has 
gone full sail, or full fly, with his tail as 
straight as a comet's behind him. But for a 
hobby or a night horse, Pegasus is nothing 
to Nobs. 

Where did we go on that memorable 
night ? What did we see ? — What did we 
do ? — Or rather what did we not see ? and 
what did we not perform ? 



CHAPTER IV. A. I. 

A CONVERSATION AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE. 

Tel condamne inon Coq-a-Vdne qui unjour enjustificra 
e bon sens. La Pretieuse. 

I went down to breakfast as usual, over- 
flowing with joyous thoughts. For mirth 
and for music, the skylark is but a type of me. 
I warbled a few wood notes wild, and then, 
full of the unborn work, addressed myself to 
my wife's eldest sister, and asked if she 
would permit me to dedicate the Book to 
her. "What book?" she replied. "The 
History," said I, "of Doctor Daniel Dove, of 
Doncaster, and his Horse Nobs." She an- 
swered, " No, indeed ! I will have no such 
nonsense dedicated to me!" — and with that 
she drew up her upper lip, and the lower 
region of the nose. I turned to my wife's 



youngest sister : " Shall I have the pleasure 
of dedicating it to you ? " She raised her 
eyes, inclined her head forwards with a 
smile of negation, and begged leave to de- 
cline the honour. " Commandante," said I, 
to my wife and Commandress, " shall I dedi- 
cate it then to you ? " My Commandante 
made answer, "Not unless you have some- 
thing better to dedicate." 

" So Ladies ! " said 1 ; " the stone which the 
builders rejected," — and then looking at my 
wife's youngest sister — "Oh, it will be such 
a book ! " The manner and the tone were 
so much in earnest, that they arrested the 
bread and butter on the way to her mouth ; 
and she exclaimed, with her eyes full of 
wonder and incredulity at the same time, 
"Why, you never can be serious?" "Not 
serious," said I; "why I have done nothing 
but think of it and dream of it the whole 
night." " He told me so," rejoined my 
Commandante, " the first thing in the morn- 
ing." "Ah, Stupey!" cried my wife's eldest 
sister, accompanying the compliment with a 
protrusion of the head, and an extension of 
the lips, which disclosed not only the whole 
remaining row of teeth, but the chasms that 
had been made in it by the tooth drawer; 
hiatus valde lacrymabiles. 

" Two volumes," said I, " and this in the 
title-page!" So taking out my pencil, I 
drew upon the back of a letter the myste- 
rious monogram, erudite in its appearance 
as the diagamma of Mr. A. F. Valpy. 




It past from hand to hand. " Why, he is not 
in earnest;" said my wife's youngest sister. 
" He never can be," replied my wife. And 
yet beginning to think that peradventure I 
was, she looked at me with a quick turn of 



THE DOCTOR. 



the eye, — "a pretty subject, indeed, for you 
to employ your time upon! — You, — vema 
tvhehaJia yohu almad oteriba twandri athan- 
cod ! " I have thought proper to translate 
this part of my Commanclante's speech into 
the Garamna tongue. 



CHAPTER IH. A. I. 

THE UTILITY OF POCKETS. A COMPLIMENT 
PROPERLY RECEIVED. 

La tasca e proprio cosa da Christiani. 

Benedetto Varchi. 

My eldest daughter had finished her Latin 
lessons, and my son had finished his Greek; 
and I was sitting at my desk, pen in hand 
and in mouth at the same time, (a substitute 
for biting the nails which I recommend to 
all onygophagists), when the Bow Begum 
came in with her black velvet reticule, sus- 
pended as usual from her arm by its silver 
chain. 

Now, of all the inventions of the Tailor 
(who is of all artists the most inventive), I 
hold the pocket to be the most commodious, 
and, saving the fig leaf, the most indispensa- 
ble. Birds have their craw ; ruminating 
beasts their first or ante -stomach ; the mon- 
key has his cheek, the opossum her pouch ; 
and, so necessary is some convenience of this 
kind for the human animal, that the savage 
who cares not for clothing, makes for himself 
a pocket if he can. The Hindoo carries his 
snuff-box in his turban. Some of the inha- 
bitants of Congo make a secret fob in their 
woolly toupet, of which, as P. Labat says, the 
worst use they make is — to carry poison in 
it. The Matolas, a long-haired race, who 
border upon the Catfres, form their locks 
into a sort of hollow cylinder in which they 
bear about their little implements ; certes a 
more sensible bag than such as is worn at 
court. The New Zealander is less inge- 
nious ; he makes a large opening in his ear, 
and carries his knife in it. The Ogres, who 
are worse than savages, and whose ignorance 
and brutality is in proportion to their bulk, 
are said, upon the authority of tradition, 



when they have picked up a stray traveller 
or two more than they require for their sup- 
per, to lodge them in a hollow tooth, as a 
place of security till breakfast ; whence it 
may be inferred that they are not liable to 
tooth- ache, and that they make no use of 
tooth-picks. Ogres, savages, beasts, and 
birds, all require something to- serve the 
purpose of a pocket. Thus much for the 
necessity of the thing. Touching its anti- 
quity, much might be said ; for it would not 
be difficult to show, with that little assistance 
from the auxiliaries must and have and been, 
which enabled Whitaker, of Manchester, to 
write whole quartos of hypothetical history 
in the potential mood, that pockets are coeval 
with clothing : and, as erudite men have 
maintained that language and even letters 
are of divine origin, there might with like 
reason- be a conclusion drawn from the 
twenty-first verse of the third chapter of the 
book of Genesis, which it would not be easy 
to impugn. Moreover, nature herself shows 
us the utility, the importance, nay, the in- 
dispensability, or, to take a hint from the 
pure language of our diplomatists, the sine- 
quanonniness of pockets. There is but one 
organ which is common to all animals what- 
soever : some are without eyes, many with- 
out noses ; some have no heads, others no 
tails ; some neither one nor the other ; some 
there are who have no brains, others very 
pappy ones ; some no hearts, others very 
bad ones ; but all have a stomach, — and 
what is the stomach but a live inside pocket ? 
Hath not Yan Helmont said of it, " Saccus 
vel pera est, ut ciborum olla ? " 

Dr. Towers used to have his coat pockets 
made of capacity to hold a quarto volume 
— a wise custom ; but requiring stout cloth, 
good buckram, and strong thread well waxed. 
I do not so greatly commend the humour of 
Dr. Ingenhouz, whose coat was lined with 
pockets of all sizes, wherein, in his latter 
years, when science had become to him as 
a plaything, he carried about various mate- 
rials for chemical experiments : among the 
rest, so many compositions for fulminating 
powders in glass tubes, separated only by a 
cork in the middle of the tube, that, if any 



THE DOCTOR. 



person had unhappily given him a blow with 
a stick, he might have blown up himself and 
the Doctor too. For myself, four coat 
pockets of the ordinary dimensions content 
me; in these a sufficiency of conveniences 
may be carried, and that sufficiency me- 
thodically arranged. For mark me, gentle 
or ungentle reader ! there is nothing like 
method in pockets, as well as in composition : 
and what orderly and methodical man would 
have his pocket-handkerchief, and his pocket- 
book, and the key of his door (if he be a 
batchelor living in chambers), and his knife, 
and his loose pence and half-pence, and the 
letters which peradventure he might just 
have received, or peradventure he may in- 
tend to drop in the post-office, two-penny 
or general, as he passes by, and his snuff, if 
he be accustomed so to regale his olfactory 
conduits, or his tobacco-box if he prefer the 
masticable to the pulverized weed, or his 
box of lozenges if he should be troubled 
with a tickling cough ; and the sugar-plumbs, 
and the gingerbread nuts which he may be 
carrying home to his own children, or to any 
other small men and women upon whose 
hearts he may have a design ; — who, I say, 
would like to have all this in chaos and con- 
fusion, one lying upon the other, and the 
thing which is wanted first fated alway to 
be undermost ! (Mr. Wilberforce knows the 
inconvenience) — the snuff working its way 
out to the gingerbread, the sugar-plumbs in- 
sinuating themselves into the folds of the 
pocket-handkerchief, the pence grinding the 
lozenges to dust for the benefit of the pocket- 
book, and the door key busily employed in 
unlocking the letters ? 

Now, forasmuch as the commutation of 
female pockets for the reticule leadeth to 
inconveniences like this (not to mention that 
the very name of commutation ought to be 
held in abhorrence by all who hold day-light 
and fresh air essential to the comfort and 
salubrity of dwelling-houses), I abominate 
that bag of the Bhow Begum, notwithstand- 
ing the beauty of the silver chain upon the 
black velvet. And perceiving at this time 
that the clasp of its silver setting was broken, 
BO thai the mouth of the bag was gaping 



pitiably, like a sick or defunct oyster, I con- 
gratulated her as she came in upon this 
farther proof of the commodiousness of the 
invention ; for here, in the country, there is 
no workman who can mend that clasp, and 
the bag must therefore either be laid aside, 
or used in that deplorable state. 

When the Bhow Begum had seated herself 
I told her how my proffered dedication had 
been thrice rejected with scorn, and repeat- 
ing the offer I looked for a more gracious 
reply. But, as if scorn had been the in- 
fluenza of the female mind that morning, she 
answered, " No ; indeed she would not have 
it after it had been refused by every body 
else." " Nay, nay," said I ; " it is as much 
in your character to accept, as it was in 
theirs to refuse." While I was speaking she 
took a pinch of snuff; the nasal titillation 
co-operated with my speech, for when any 
one of the senses is pleased, the rest are not 
likely to continue out of humour. " Well," 
she replied, " I will have it dedicated to me, 
because I shall delight in the book." And 
she powdered the carpet with tobacco dust as 
she spake. 



CHAPTER II. A.I. 

CONCERNING DEDICATIONS, PRINTERS' TYPES, 
AND IMPERIAL INK. 

II y aura des clefs, et des ouverlures de mes secrets. 

La Pretieuse. 

Monsieur Dellon, having been in the In- 
quisition at Goa, dedicated an account of 
that tribunal, and of his own sufferings to 
Mademoiselle du Cambout de Coislin, in 
these words : 

Mademoiselle, 

Taurois tort de me plaindre des rigueurs 
de V Inquisition, et des mauvais traitements que 
fay eprouvez de la part de ses ministres, 
puisqiien me fournissant la matiere de cet 
ouvrage, Us rnont procure Vavantage de vous 
le dcdier. 

This is the book which that good man 
Claudius Buchanan with so much propriety 



THE DOCTOE. 



put into the hands of the Grand Inquisitor 
of India, when he paid him a visit at the 
Inquisition, and asked him his opinion of 
the accuracy of the relation upon the spot ! 

The Frenchman's compliment may truly 
be said to have been far-fetched and dearly 
bought. Heaven forefend that I should 
either go so far for one, or purchase it at 
such a price ! 

A dedication has oftentimes cost the 
unhappy author a greater consumption of 
thumb and finger nail than the whole book 
besides, and all varieties of matter and 
manner have been resorted to. Mine must 
be so far in character with the delectable 
history which it introduces, that it shall be 
unlike all which have ever gone before it. 
I knew a man (one he was who would have 
been an ornament to his country if me- 
thodism and madness had not combined to 
overthrow a bright and creative intellect), 
who, in one of his insaner moods, printed a 
sheet and a half of muddy rhapsodies with 
the title of the " Standard of God Dis- 
played : " and he prefaced it by saying that 
the price of a perfect book, upon a perfect 
subject, ought to be a perfect sum in a 
perfect coin ; that is to say, one guinea. Now 
as Dr. Daniel Dove was a perfect Doctor, 
and his horse Nobs was a perfect horse, and 
as I humbly hope their history will be a 
perfect history, so ought the Dedication 
thereunto to be perfect in its kind. Perfect 
therefore it shall be, as far as kalotypo- 
graphy can make it. " For though it would 
be hopeless to exceed all former Dedications 
in the turn of a compliment or of a sentence, 
in the turn of the letters it is possible to 
exceed them all. It was once my fortune to 
employ a printer who had a love for his art ; 
and having a taste that way myself, we 
discussed the merits of a new font one day 
when I happened to call in upon him. I 
objected to the angular inclination of a 
capital italic A which stood upon its pins as 
if it were starting aghast from the next 
letter on the left, and was about to tumble 
upon that to the right ; in which case down 
would go the rest of the word, like a row of 
soldiers which children make with cards. 



My printer was too deeply enamoured with 
the beauties of his font, to have either < ar 
or eye for its defects ; and hastily waving 
that point he called my attention to a capital 
R in the same line, which cocked up its tail 
just as if it had been nicked ; that cock of 
the tail had fascinated him. " Look Sir," 
said he, while his eyes glistened with all the 
ardour of an amateur ; " look at that turn ! 
— that's sweet, Sir ! " and drawing off the 
hand with the forefinger of which he had 
indicated it, he described in the air the turn 
that had delighted him, in a sort of heroic 
flourish, his head with a diminished axis, 
like the inner stile of a Pentegraph, follow- 
ing the movement. I have never seen 

that R since without remembering him. 
** *** ** **** ** *** ******** ** *** 
***** ******* ** ******* **+ ********* 
***** *** *** ** *** ******* ***** ** 

********** *** *** ******* TT W ]lQ pop 

read the stars, may read in them the secret 
which he seeketh. 

But the turns of my Dedication to the 
Bhow Begum shall not be trusted to the 
letter founders, a set of men remarkable for 
involving their craft in such mystery that no 
one ever taught it to another, every one who 
has practised it having been obliged either 
surreptitiously to obtain the secret, or to 
invent a method for himself. It shall be in 
the old English letter, not only because that 
alphabet hath in its curves and angles, its 
frettings and redundant lines, a sort of 
picturesque similitude with Gothic architec- 
ture, but also because in its breadth and 
beauty it will display the colour of the ink 
to most advantage. For the Dedication 
shall not be printed in black after the 
ordinary fashion, nor in white like the 
Sermon upon the Excise Laws, nor in red 
after the mode of Mr. Dibdin's half titles, 
but in the colour of that imperial encaustic 
ink, which by the laws of the Roman Em- 
pire it was death for any but the Roman 
Emperor himself to use. We Britons live 
in a free country, wherein every man may 
use what coloured ink seemeth good to him, 
and put as much gall in it as he pleases, or 
any other ingredient whatsoever. Moreover 



THE DOCTOR. 



this is an imperial age, in which to say- 
nothing of M. Ingelby, the Emperor of the 
Conjurors, we have seen no fewer than four 
new Emperors. He of Russia, who did not 
think the old title of Peter the Great good 
enough for him ; he of France, for whom 
any name but that of Tyrant or Murderer 
is too good; he of Austria, who took up one 
imperial appellation to cover over the humi- 
liating manner in which he laid another 
down ; and he of Hayti, who if he be wise 
will order all public business to be carried 
on in the talkee-talkee tongue, and make it 
high treason for any person to speak or 
write French in his dominions. We also 
must dub our old Parliament imperial 
forsooth ! that we may not be behindhand 
with the age. Then we have Imperial 
Dining Tables ! Imperial Oil for nourish- 
ing the hair ! Imperial Liquid for Boot 
Tops ! Yea, and, by all the Caesars deified, 
and damnified, Imperial Blacking ! For 
my part I love to go with the stream, so I 
will have an Imperial Dedication. 

Behold it, Reader. Therein is mystery. 

&0 
EJ)e 3SI)0fo Sfcgum 



$£&3SflHjH$. 



CHAPTER I. A. I. 

NO BOOK CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A 
PREFACE. 

I see no cause but men may pick their teeth, 
Though Urutus with a sword did kill himself. 

Taylor, the Water Poet. 

Who was the Inventor of Prefaces? I shall 
1/' obliged to the immortal Mr. Urban 
(immortal, because like the king in law he 
aever dies,) if he will propound this question 
for me in his Magazine, that great lumber- 
room wherein small ware of all kinds has 
been laid up higgledy-piggledy by half-penny- 
worths or farthing-worths at a time for four- 
score years, till, like broken glass, rags, or 
rubbish, it Ims acquired value by mere 



accumulation. To send a book like this 
into the world without a Preface would be 
as impossible as it is to appear at Court with- 
out a bag at the head and a sword at the 
tail ; for as the perfection of dress must be 
shown at Court, so in this history should the 
perfection of histories be exhibited. The 
book must be omni genere dbsolutum ; it must 
prove and exemplify the perfectibility of 
books : yea, with all imaginable respect for 
the " Delicate Investigation," which I leave 
in undisputed possession of an appellation so 
exquisitely appropriate, I conceive that the 
title of the Book, as a popular designation 
kclt' i£oxi)v, should be transferred from the 
edifying report of that Inquiry, to the pre- 
sent unique, unrivalled, and unrivalable pro- 
duction ; — a production the like whereof 
hath not been, is not, and will not be. Here 
however let me warn my Greek and Arabian 
translators how they render the word, that 
if they offend the Mufti or the Patriarch, 
the offence as well as the danger may be 
theirs : I wash my hands of both. I write 
in plain English, innocently and in the sim- 
plicity of my heart : what may be made of 
it in heathen languages concerns not me. 



ANTE-PREFACE. 

I here present thee with a hive of bees, laden some with 
wax, and some with honey. Fear not to approach ! There 
are no Wasps, there are no Hornets here. If some wanton 
Bee should chance to buzz about thine ears, stand thy 
ground and hold thy hands : there's none will sfing thee 
if thou strike not first. If any do, she hath honey in her 
bag will cure thee too. Quarles. 

"Prefaces," said Charles Blount, Gent., who 
committed suicide because the law would 
not allow him to marry his brother's widow, — 
(a law, be it remarked in passing, which is 
not sanctioned by reason, and which, instead 
of being in conformity with scripture, is in 
direct opposition to it, being in fact the 
mere device of a corrupt and greedy church) 
—"Prefaces," said this flippant, ill-opinioned 
and unhappy man, "ever were, and still 
are but of two sorts, let other modes and 
fashions vary as they please. Let the pro- 



THE DOCTOR. 



fane long peruke succeed the godly cropt 
hair ; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, po- 
pery ; and popery presbytery again, yet still 
the author keeps to his old and wonted 
method of prefacing ; when at the beginning 
of his book he enters, either with a halter 
about his neck, submitting himself to his 
reader's mercy whether he shall be hanged, 
or no ; or else in a huffing manner he ap- 
pears with the halter in his hand, and threat- 
ens to hang his reader, if he gives him not 
his good word. This, with tlfe excitement 
of some friends to his undertaking, and some 
few apologies for want of time, books, and 
the like, are the constant and usual shams 
of all scribblers as well ancient as modern." 
This was not true then, nor is it now ; but 
when he proceeds to say, " for my part I 
enter the lists upon another score," — so say 
I with him ; and my Preface shall say the 
rest. 



PREFACE. 

Oh for a quill pluck'd from a Seraph's wing ! 

Young. 

So the Poet exclaimed ; and his exclamation 
may be quoted as one example more of the 
vanity of human wishes ; for, in order to get 
a Seraph's quill it would be necessary, ac- 
cording to Mrs. Glasse's excellent item in 
her directions for roasting a hare, to begin 
by catching a Seraph. A quill from a 
Seraph's wing is, I confess, above my ambi- 
tion ; but one from a Peacock's tail was 
within my reach ; and be it known unto all 
people, nations and languages, that with a 
Peacock's quill this Preface hath been pen- 
ned — literally — truly, and bona-fidely speak- 
ing. And this is to write, as the learned 
old Pasquier says, pavonesquement, which in 
Latin minted for the nonce may be rendered 
pavonice, and in English peacockically or 
peacockishly, whichever the reader may like 
best. That such a pen has verily and indeed 
been used upon this occasion I affirm. I 
affirm it upon the word of a true man ; and 
here is a Captain of his Majesty's Navy at 
my elbow, who himself made the pen, and 



who, if evidence were required to the fact, 
would attest it by as round an oath as ever 
rolled over a right English tongue. Nor 
will the time easily escape his remembrance, 
the bells being at this moment ringing, June 4. 
1814, to celebrate the King's birth-day, and 
the public notification that peace has been 
concluded with France. 

I have oftentimes had the happiness of 
seeing due commendation bestowed by gentle 
critics, unknown admirers and partial friends 
upon my pen, which has been married to all 
amiable epithets: — classical, fine, powerful, 
tender, touching, pathetic, strong, fanciful, 
daring, elegant, sublime, beautiful. I have 
read these epithets with that proper satis- 
faction which, when thus applied, they could 
not fail to impart, and sometimes qualified 
the pride which they inspired by looking at 
the faithful old tool of the Muses beside me, 
worn to the stump in their service : the one 
end mended up to the quick in that spirit 
of economy which becomes a son of the 
Lackland family, and shortened at the other 
by the gradual and alternate processes of 
burning and biting, till a scant inch only is 
left above the finger place. Philemon Hol- 
land was but a type of me in this respect. 
Indeed I may be allowed to say that I have 
improved upon his practice, or at least that 
I get more out of a pen than he did, for in 
the engraved title-page to his Cyrupasdia, 
where there appears the Portrait of the 
Interpres marked by a great D inclosing the 
Greek letter $ (which I presume designates 
Doctor Philemon) cetatis sua 80. A . 1632, 
it may be plainly seen that he used his pen 
only at one end. Peradventure he delighted 
not, as I do, in the mitigated ammoniac 
odour. 

But thou, O gentle reader, who in the 
exercise of thy sound judgment and natural 
benignity wilt praise this Preface, thou may- 
est with perfect propriety bestow the richest 
epithets upon the pen wherewith its immor- 
tal words were first clothed in material 
forms. Beautiful, elegant, fine, splendid, 
fanciful, will be to the very letter of truth : 
versatile it is as the wildest wit ; flexible as 
the most monkey-like talent ; and shouldst 



10 



THE DOCTOR 



thou call it tender, I will whisper in thine 
ear — that it is only too soft. Yet softness 
may be suitable ; for of my numerous readers 
one half will probably be soft by sex, and of 
the other half a very considerable proportion 
soft by nature. Soft therefore be the Pen 
and soft the strain. 

I have drawn up the window-blinds (though 
sunshine at this time acts like snuff upon 
the mucous membrane of my nose) in order 
that the light may fall upon this excellent 
Poet's wand as I wave it to and fro, making 
cuts five and six of the broad-sword exercise. 
Every feather of its fringe is now lit up by 
the sun; the hues of green and gold and 
amethyst are all brought forth ; and that 
predominant lustre which can only be likened 
to some rich metallic oxyd ; and that spot 
of deepest purple, the pupil of an eye for 
whose glorious hue neither metals nor flowers 
nor precious stones afford a resemblance : its 
likeness is only to be found in animated 
life, in birds and insects whom nature seems 
to have formed when she was most prodigal 
of beauty * : I have seen it indeed upon the 
sea, but it has been in some quiet bay when 
the reflection of the land combined with the 
sky and the ocean to produce it. 

And what can be more emblematic of the 
work which I am beginning than the splendid 
instrument wherewith the Preface is traced ? 
What could more happily typify the com- 
bination of parts, each perfect in itself when 
separately considered, yet all connected into 
one harmonious whole ; the story running 
through like the stem or back-bone, which 
the episodes and digressions fringe like so 
many featherlets, leading up to that cata- 
strophe, the gem or eye-star, for which the 
whole was formed, and in which all terminate. 

They who are versed in the doctrine of 
sympathies and the arcana of correspond- 
ences as revealed to the Swedish Emanuel, 
will doubtless admire the instinct or inspira- 
tion which directed my choice to the pavo- 
nian Pen. The example should be followed 
by all consumers of ink and quill. Then 
would the lover borrow a feather from the 

* " Framed in the prodigality of nature." 

Richard III. 



turtle dove. The lawyer would have a large 
assortment of kite, hawk, buzzard and vul- 
ture : his clients may use pigeon or gull. 

Poets according to their varieties. Mr. , 

the Tom Tit. Mr. , the Water-wag- 
tail. Mr. , the Crow. Mr. , the 

Mocking-bird. Mr. , the Magpie. Mr. 

, the Sky-lark. Mr. , the Eagle. 

Mr. , the Swan. Lord , the Black 

Swan. Critics some the Owl, others the 
Butcher Bird. Your challenger must indite 
with one from the wing of a game cock : he 
who takes advantage of a privileged situation 
to offer the wrong and shrink from the atone- 
ment will find a white feather. Your dealers 
in public and private scandal, whether Jaco- 
bins or Anti- Jacobins, the pimps and pan- 
ders of a profligate press, should use none 
but duck feathers, and those of the dirtiest 
that can be found in the purlieus of Pimlico 
or St. George's Fields. But for the Editor 
of the Edinburgh Review, whether he dic- 
tates in morals or in taste, or displays his 
peculiar talent in political prophecy, he must 
continue to use goose quills. Stick to the 
goose, Mr. Jeffrey ; while you live, stick to 
the Goose ! 



INITIAL CHAPTEE. 

'E£ oj hri rot, xgooTCt Homer. 

They who remember the year 1800 will re- 
member also the great controversy whether 
it was the beginning of a century, or the 
end of one ; a controversy in which all Maga- 
zines, all Newspapers, and all persons took 
part. Now as it has been deemed expedient 
to divide this work, or to speak more empha- 
tically this Opus, or more emphatically still 
this Ergon, into Chapters Ante-Initial and 
Post-Initial, a dispute of the same nature 
might arise among the commentators in after 
ages, if especial care were not now taken to 
mark distinctly the beginning. This there- 
fore, is the Initial Chapter, neither Ante nor 
Post, but standing between both ; the point 
of initiation, the goal of the Antes, the start- 
ing place of the Posts; the mark at which 
the former end their career, and from whence 
the latter take their departure. 



THE DOCTOR, 



ETC. 



Eccoti il libro ; mettivi ben cura, 
Iddio V ajuti e dia buona ventura. 



Orl. Innam. 



CHAPTER I. P. I. 

THE SUBJECT OF THIS HISTORY AT HOME 
AND AT TEA. 

If thou be a severe sour complexionedman, then I here 
disallow thee to be a competent judge. 

Izaak Walton. 

The clock of St. George's had struck five. 
Mrs. Dove had just poured out the Doctor's 
seventh cup of tea. The Doctor was sitting 
in his arm-chair. Sir Thomas was purring 
upon his knees ; and Pornpey stood looking 
up to his mistress, wagging his tail, some- 
times whining with a short note of im- 
patience, and sometimes gently putting his 
paw against her apron to remind her that he 
wished for another bit of bread and butter. 
Barnaby was gone to the farm : and Nobs 
was in the stable. 



CHAPTER H. P. I. 

WHEREIN CERTAIN QUESTIONS ARE PROPOSED 
CONCERNING TIME, PLACE, AND PERSONS. 

Quisf quid? ubif quibus auxiliis? cur? quoviodo? 
quando ? Technical Verse. 

Thus have I begun according to the most 
approved forms ; not like those who begin 
the Trojan War from Leda's egg, or the 
History of Great Britain from Adam, or the 
Life of General Washington from the Dis- 
covery of the New World ; but in confor- 
mity to the Horatian precept, rushing into 



the middle of things. Yet the Giant Mouli- 
neau's appeal to his friend the story-telling 
Ram may well be remembered here ; Belier, 
mon ami, si tu voulois commencer par le com- 
mencement, tu me ferois grand plaisir. For 
in the few lines of the preceding chapter how 
much is there that requires explanation ? — 
Who was Nobs ? — Who was Barnaby ? — 
Who was the Doctor ? — Who was Mrs. 
Dove ? — The place, where ? — The time, 
when ? — The persons, who ? — 

I maie not tell you all at once ; 
But as I maie and can, I shall 
By order tellen you it all. 

So saith Chaucer ; and in the same mind, 
facilius discimus quce congruo dicuntur ordine 
quam quce sparsim et confusim, saith Erasmus. 
Think a moment I beseech thee, Reader, 
what order is ! Not the mere word which 
is so often vociferated in the House of 
Commons or uttered by the Speaker ore 
rotundo, when it is necessary for him to 
assume the tone of Zct/g v^itpm^mQ', but 
order in its essence and truth, in itself and 
in its derivatives. 

Waving the Orders in Council, and the 
Order of the Day, a phrase so familiar in the 
disorderly days of the French National Con- 
vention, think, gentle Reader, of the order of 
Knighthood, of Holy Orders, of the orders of 
architecture, the Linnasan orders, the orderly 
Serjeant, the ordinal numbers, the Ordinary 
of Newgate, the Ordinary on Sundays at 
2 o'clock in the environs of the Metropolis, 
the ordinary faces of those who partake of 
what is ordinarily provided for them there ; 



12 



THE DOCTOR. 



and under the auspices of Government itself, 
and par excellence the Extraordinary Ga- 
zette. And as the value of health is never 
truly and feelingly understood except in 
sickness, contemplate for a moment what the 
want of order is. Think of disorder in things 
remote, and then as it approaches thee. In 
the country wherein thou livest, bad ; in the 
town whereof thou art an inhabitant, worse ; 
in thine own street, worser; in thine own 
house, worst of all. Think of it in thy 
family, in thy fortune, in thine intestines. 
In thy affairs, distressing ; in thy members, 
painful ; in thy conduct, ruinous. Order is 
the sanity of the mind, the health of the 
body, the peace of the city, the security of 
the state. As the beams to a house, as the 
bones to the microcosm of man, so is order 
to all things. Abstract it from a Dictionary, 
and thou may est imagine the inextricable 
confusion which would ensue. Reject it 
from the Alphabet, and Zerah Colburne 
himself could not go through the chriscross 
row. How then should I do without it in 
this history ? 

A Quaker, by name Benjamin Lay, (who 
was a little cracked in the head though 
sound at heart,) took one of his compositions 
once to Benjamin Franklin that it might be 
printed and published. Franklin, having 
looked over the manuscript, observed that it 
was deficient in arrangement ; it is no matter, 
replied the author, print any part thou 
pleasest first. Many are the speeches and 
the sermons and the treatises and the poems 
and the volumes which are like Benjamin 
Lay's book ; the head might serve for the 
tail, and the tail for the body, and the body 
for the head, — either end for the middle, 
and I he middle for either end ; — nay, if you 
could turn them inside out like a polypus, 
or a glove, they would be no worse for the 
operation. 

When the excellent Hooker was on his 
death-bed, he expressed his joy at the pros- 
pect of entering a World of Order. 



CHAPTER III. P. I. 

WHOLESOME OBSERVATIONS UPON THE 
VANITY OE FAME. 

Whosoever shall address himself to write of matters of 
instruction, or of any other argument of importance, it 
behoveth that before he enter thereinto, he should reso- 
lutely determine with himself in what order he will handle 
the same ; so shall he best accomplish that he hath under- 
taken, and inform the understanding, and help the 
memory of the Reader. 

Gwillim's Display of Heraldry. 

Who was the Doctor ? 

We will begin with the persons for sundry 
reasons, general and specific. Doth not the 
Latin grammar teach us so to do, wherein 
the personal verbs come before the imper- 
sonal, and the Propria quce maribus precede 
all other nouns ? Moreover by replying to 
this question all needful explanation as to 
time and place will naturally and of neces- 
sity follow in due sequence. 

Truly I will deliver and discourse 
The sum of all. * 

Who was the Doctor ? 

Can it then be necessary to ask ? — Alas 
the vanity of human fame ! Vanity of vani- 
ties, all is Vanity ! " How few," says Bishop 
Jeremy Taylor, " have heard of the name of 
Veneatapadino Ragium ! He imagined that 
that there was no man in the world that 
knew him not : how many men can tell me 
that he was the King of Narsinga ? " When 
I mention Arba, who but the practised 
textualist can call to mind that he was " a 
great man among the Anakim," that he was 
the father of Anak, and that from him Kir- 
jath-Arba took its name ? A great man 
among the Giants of the earth, the founder 
of a city, the father of Anak I — and now 
there remaineth nothing more of him or his 
race than the bare mention of them in one 
of the verses of one of the chapters of the 
Book of Joshua : except for that only record 
it would not now be known that Arba had 
ever lived, or that Hebron was originally 
called after his name. Vanitas vanitatum! 
Omnia vanitas. An old woman in a village 
in the West of England was told one day 



THE DOCTOR. 



13 



that the King of Prussia was dead, such a 
report having arrived when the great Fre- 
deric was in the noon-day of his glory. Old 
Mary lifted up her great slow eyes at the 
news, and fixing them in the fulness of 
vacancy upon her informant, replied, " Is a ! 
is a ! — The Lord ha' marcy ! — Well, well ! 
The King of Prussia ! And who's he ? " — 
The "Who's he" of this old woman might 
serve as text for a notaole sermon upon am- 
bition. " Who's he " may now be asked of 
men greater as soldiers in their day than 
Frederic, or Wellington; greater as disco- 
verers than Sir Isaac, or Sir Humphrey. 
Who built the Pyramids? Who ate the 
first Oyster ? Vanitas vanitatum ! Omnia 
vanitas. 

Why then doth flesh, a bubble-glass of breath, 
Hunt after honour and advancement vain, 

And rear a trophy for devouring Death, 
With so great labour and long-lasting pain, 
As if his days for ever should remain ? 

Sith all that in this world is great or gay, 

Doth as a vapour vanish and decay. 

Look back who list unto the former ages, 
And call to count what is of them become ; 

Where be those learned wits and antique sages 
Which of all wisdom knew the perfect sum ? 
Where those great warriors which did overcome 

The world with conquest of their might and main, 

And made one mear * of the earth and of their reign ? t 

Who was the Doctor ? 
Oh that thou hadst known him, Reader ! 
Then should I have answered the question, 

— if orally, by an emphasis upon the article, 

— the Doctor ; or if in written words, THE 
DOCTOR — thus giving the word that 
capital designation to which, as the head of 
his profession within his own orbit, he was 
so justly entitled. But I am not writing to 
those only who knew him, nor merely to the 
inhabitants of the West Riding, nor to the 
present generation alone : — No ! to all York- 
shire, — all England ; all the British Empire ; 
all the countries wherein the English tongue 
is, or shall be, spoken or understood ; yea 
to all places, and all times to come. Para 
todos, as saith the famous Doctor Juan Perez 



* A mear 01 meer- stone, still means a boundary stone. 
The word is used in our Homilies. See fourth part of 
the Sermon for Rogation Week. 

\ Spenser. 



de Montalvan, Natural de Madrid, which is, 
being interpreted, a Spanish Cockney — 
para todos ; porque es un aparato de varias 
materias, donde el Filosofo, el Cortesano, el 
Humanista, el Poeta, el Predicador, el Teo- 
logo, el Soldado, el Devoto, el Jurisconsulto, 
el Matematico, el Medico, el Soltero, el Ca- 
sado, el Religioso, el Minislro, el Plebeyo, el 
Sehor, el Oficial, y el Entretenido, hallaran 
juntamente utilidad y gusto, erudicion y diver- 
timiento, doctrina y desahogo, recreo y ense- 
nanza, moralidad y alivio, ciencia y descanso, 
provecho y passatiempo, alabanzas y repre- 
hensiones, y ultimamente exemplos y donaires, 
que sin ofender las costumbres delecten el 
animo, y sazonen el entendimiento. 
Who was the Doctor ? 
The Doctor was Doctor Daniel Dove. 



CHAPTER IV. P. I. 

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF DOCTOR DOVE, 
WITH THE DESCRIPTION OP A YEOMAN'S 
HOUSE IN THE WEST RIDING OP YORK- 
SHIRE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 

Non possidentem multa vocavcris 
Recte beatum ; rectius occupat 
Nomen beati, qui Beorum 
Muneribus sapienter uti, 
Duramque collet pauperiem pati, 
Pejusque letho flagitium timet. 

Horat. Od. 

Daniel, the son of Daniel Dove and of 
Dinah his wife, was born near Ingleton in 
the West Riding of Yorkshire, on Monday 
the twenty-second of April, old style, 1723, 
nine minutes and three seconds after three 
in the afternoon ; on which day Marriage 
came in and Mercury was with the Moon ; 
and the aspects were □ 1? ? • a week 
earlier, it would have been a most glorious 
Trine of the Sun and Jupiter; — circum- 
stances which were all duly noted in the 
blank leaf of the family Bible. 

Daniel, the father, was one of a race of 
men who unhappily are now almost extinct. 
He lived upon an estate of six and twenty 
acres which his fathers had possessed before 
him, all Doves and Daniels, in uninterrupted 
succession from time immemorial, farther 



14 



THE DOCTOE. 



than registers or title deeds could ascend. 
The little church, called Chapel le Dale, 
stands about a bow-shot from the family 
house. There they had all been carried to 
the font ; there they had each led his bride 
to the altar ; and thither they had, each in 
his turn, been borne upon the shoulders of 
their friends and neighbours. Earth to earth 
they had been consigned there for so many 
generations, that half of the soil of the 
churchyard consisted of their remains. A 
hermit who might wish his grave to be as 
quiet as his cell, could imagine no fitter 
resting place. On three sides there was an 
irregular low stone wall, rather to mark the 
limits of the sacred ground, than to inclose 
it; on the fourth it was bounded by the 
brook whose waters proceed by a subter- 
raneous channel from Wethercote cave. 
Two or three alders and rowan trees hung 
over the brook, and shed their leaves and 
seeds into the stream. Some bushy hazels 
grew at intervals along the lines of the wall ; 
and a few ash trees, as the winds had sown 
them. To the east and west some fields 
adjoined it, in that state of half cultivation 
which gives a human character to solitude : 
to the south, on the other side the brook, 
the common with its limestone rocks peering 
every where above ground, extended to the 
foot of Ingleborough. A craggy hill, fea- 
thered with birch, sheltered it from the 
north. 

The turf was as soft and fine as that of 
the adjoining hills ; it was seldom broken, 
so scanty was the population to which it was 
appropriated ; scarcely a thistle or a nettle 
deformed it, and the few tomb-stones which 
bad been placed there were now themselves 
Ii;tlf buried. The sheep came over the wall 
when they listed, and sometimes took shelter 
in the porch from the storm. Their voices, 
and the cry of the kite wheeling above, were 
tli'- only sounds which were heard there, 
excepl when the single bell which hung in 
it- niche Over the entrance tinkled for ser- 
vice (in tin: Sabbath day, or with a slower 
tongue gave notice that one of the children 
of the soil whs returning to the earth from 
which he sprung. 



The house of the Doves was to the east of 
the church, under the same hill, and with the 
same brook in front ; and the intervening 
fields belonged to the family. It was a low 
house, having before it a little garden of 
that size and character which showed that 
the inhabitants could afford to bestow a 
thought upon something more than mere 
bodily wants. You entered between two 
yew trees dipt to the fashion of two pawns. 
There were hollyhocks and sunflowers dis- 
playing themselves above the wall ; roses 
and sweet peas under the windows, and the 
everlasting pea climbing the porch. Over 
the door was a stone with these letters. 

D 
D + M 

A.D. 

1608. 

The A. was in the Saxon character. The 
rest of the garden lay behind the house, 
partly on the slope of the hill. It had a 
hedge of gooseberry-bushes, a few apple- 
trees, pot-herbs in abundance, onions, cab- 
bages, turnips and carrots; potatoes had 
hardly yet found their way into these re- 
mote parts : and in a sheltered spot under 
the crag, open to the south, were six bee- 
hives which made the family perfectly inde- 
pendent of West India produce. Tea was 
in those days as little known as potatoes, 
and for all other things honey supplied the 
place of sugar. 

The house consisted of seven rooms, the 
dairy and cellar included, which were both 
upon the ground floor. As you entered the 
kitchen there was on the right one of those 
open chimneys which afford more comfort in 
a winter's evening than the finest register 
stove ; in front of the chimney stood a 
wooden bee-hive chair, and on each side 
was a long oak seat with a back to it, the 
seats serving as chests in which the oaten 
bread was kept. They were of the darkest 
brown, and well polished by constant use. 
On the back of each were the same initials 
as those over the door, with the date 1610 
The great oak table, and the chest in the 
best kitchen which held the house-linen, 



THE DOCTOR. 



15 



bore the same date. The chimney was well 
hung with bacon, the rack which covered 
half the ceiling bore equal marks of plenty ; 
mutton hams were suspended from other 
parts of the ceiling ; and there was an odour 
of cheese from the adjoining dairy, which the 
turf fire, though perpetual as that of the 
Magi, or of the Vestal Virgins, did not over- 
power. A few pewter dishes were ranged 
above the trenchers, opposite the door, on a 
conspicuous shelf. The other treasures of 
the family were in an open triangular cup- 
board, fixed in one of the corners of the best 
kitchen, half way from the floor, and touch- 
ing the ceiling. They consisted of a silver 
saucepan, a silver goblet, and four apostle 
spoons. Here also King Charles's Golden 
Rules were pasted against the wall, and a 
large print of Daniel in the Lion's Den. 
The Lions were bedaubed with yellow, and 
the Prophet was bedaubed with blue, with a 
red patch upon each of his cheeks : if he had 
been like his picture he might have fright- 
ened the Lions; but happily there were no 
"judges" in the family, and it had been 
bought for its name's sake. The other print 
which ornamented the room had been pur- 
chased from a like feeling, though the cause 
was not so immediately apparent. It re- 
presented a Ship in full sail, with Joseph, 
and the Virgin Mary, and the Infant on 
board, and a Dove flying behind as if to fill 
the sails with the motion of its wings. Six 
black chairs were ranged along the wall, 
where they were seldom disturbed from their 
array. They had been purchased by Daniel 
the grandfather upon his marriage, and were 
the most costly purchase that had ever been 
made in the family; for the goblet was a 
legacy. The backs were higher than the 
head of the tallest man when seated; the 
seats flat and shallow, set in a round 
frame, unaccommodating in their material, 
more unaccommodating in shape ; the backs 
also were of wood rising straight up, and 
ornamented with balls and lozenges and 
embossments ; and the legs and cross bars 
were adorned in the same taste. Over the 
chimney were two Peacocks' feathers, some 
of the dry silky pods of the honesty flower, 



and one of those large " sinuous shells " so 
finely thus described by Landor : — 

Of pearly hue 
Within, and they that lustre have imbib'd 
In the sun's palace porch ; where, when unyok'd, 
His chariot wheel stands midway in the wave. 
Shake one, and it awakens ; then apply 
Its polish'd lips to your attentive ear, 
And it remembers its august abodes, 
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there. 

There was also a head of Indian corn there, 
and a back scratcher, of which the hand was 
ivory and the handle black. This had been 
a present of Daniel the grandfather to his 
wife. The three apartments above served 
equally for store-rooms and bed-chambers. 
William Dove the brother slept in one, and 
Agatha the maid, or Haggy as she was called, 
in another. 



CHAPTER V. P. I. 

EXTENSION OF THE SCIENCE OF PHYSIOG- 
NOMY, WITH SOME REMARKS UPON Tk.E 
PRACTICAL USES OF CRANIOEOGY. 

Hanc ergo scientiam blande excipiamus, hilariterque 
amplectamur, ut vere nostrum et de nobismet ipsis trac- 
tantem ; quain qui non a?nat, quam qui non amplectitur, 
nee philosophiam amat, neque suce vitce discrimina curat. 

Baptista Porta. 

They who know that the word physiognomy 
is not derived from phiz, and infer from that 
knowledge that the science is not confined to 
the visage alone, have extended it to hand- 
writings also, and hence it has become 
fashionable in this age of collectors to collect 
the autographs of remarkable persons. But 
now that Mr. Rapier has arisen, " the Re- 
former of illegible hands," he and his rival 
Mr. Carstairs teach all their pupils to write 
alike. The countenance however has fairer 
play in our days than it had in old times, for 
the long heads of the sixteenth century were 
made by the nurses, not by nature. Elon- 
gating the nose, flattening the temples, and 
raising the forehead are no longer performed 
by manual force, and the lace undergoes 
now no other artificial modelling than such 
as may be impressed upon it by the aid of 



16 



THE DOCTOR. 



the looking-glass. So far physiognomy be- 
comes less difficult, the data upon which it 
has to proceed not having been falsified db 
initio ; but there arises a question in what 
state ought they to be examined ? Dr. Gall 
is for shaving the head, and overhauling it 
as a Turk does a Circassian upon sale, that 
he may discover upon the outside of the skull 
the organs of fighting, murder, cunning, and 
thieving (near neighbours in his mappa 
cerebri), of comparing colours, of music, of 
sexual instinct, of philosophical judgment, 
&c. &c, all which, with all other qualities, 
have their latitudes and longitudes in the 
brain, and are conspicuous upon the outward 
skull, according to the degree in which they 
influence the character of the individual. 

It must be admitted that if this learned 
German's theory of craniology be well 
founded, the Gods have devised a much 
surer, safer, and more convenient means for 
discovering the real characters of the Lords 
and Ladies of the creation, than what Mo- 
mus proposed, when he advised that a window 
should be placed in the breast. For if his 
advice had been followed, and there had 
actually been a window in the sternum, — 
it is, I think, beyond all doubt that a window- 
shutter would soon have been found indis- 
pensably necessary in cold climates, more 
especially in England, where pulmonary com- 
plaints are so frequent; and, secondly, the 
wind would not be more injurious to the 
lungs in high latitudes, than the sun would 
be to the liver in torrid regions ; indeed, 
every where during summer it would be im- 
possible to exist without a green curtain, or 
Venetian blinds to the window ; and after 
all, take what precautions we might, the 
world would be ten times more bilious than 
it is. Another great physical inconvenience 
would also have arisen; for if men could 
prep into their insides at any time, and see 
the motions and the fermentations which are 
continually going on, and the rise and pro- 
of every malady distinctly marked in 
tli" changes it produced, so many nervous 
diseases would be brought on by frequent 
inspection, and bo many derangements from 
attempting to regulate the machine, that the 



only way to prevent it from making a full 
stop would be to put a lock upon the shutter, 
and deliver the key to the Physician. 

But upon Dr. Gall's theory how many and 
what obvious advantages result! Nor are 
they merely confined to the purposes of 
speculative physiognomy ; the uses of his 
theory as applied to practice offer to us 
hopes scarcely less delightful than those 
which seemed to dawn upon mankind with 
the discovery of the gasses, and with the 
commencement of the French Revolution, 
and in these later days with the progress of 
the Bible Society. In courts of Justice, for 
instance, how beautifully would this new 
science supply any little deficiency of evi- 
dence upon trial ! If a man were arraigned 
for murder, and the case were doubtful, but 
he were found to have a decided organ for the 
crime, it would be of little matter whether 
he had committed the specific fact in the in- 
dictment or not ; for hanging, if not ap- 
plicable as punishment, would be proper for 
prevention. Think also in State Trials what 
infinite advantages an Attorney General 
might derive from the opinion of a Regius 
Professor of Craniology ! Even these are 
but partial benefits. Our Generals, Mi- 
nisters, and Diplomatists would then un- 
erringly be chosen by the outside of the 
head, though a criterion might still be 
wanted to ascertain when it was too thick 
and when too thin. But the greatest ad- 
vantages are those which this new system 
would afford to education ; for by the joint 
efforts of Dr. Gall and Mr. Edgeworth we 
should be able to breed up men according 
to any pattern which Parents or Guardians 
might think proper to bespeak. The Doctor 
would design the mould, and Mr. Edgeworth, 
by his skill in mechanics, devise with charac- 
teristic ingenuity the best means of making 
and applying it. As soon as the child was 
born the professional cap, medical, military, 
theological, commercial, or legal, would be 
put on, and thus he would be perfectly pre- 
pared for Mr. Edgeworth's admirable system 
of professional education. I will pursue this 
subject no farther than just to hint that the 
materials of the mould may operate sympa- 



THE DOCTOR. 



17 



thetically, and therefore that for a lawyer 
in rus the cap should be made of brass, for 
a divine of lead, for a politician of base- 
metal, for a soldier of steel, and for a sailor 
of heart of English oak. 

Dr. Gall would doubtless require the 
naked head to be submitted to him for judge- 
ment. Contrariwise I opine, — and all the 
Ladies will agree with me in this opinion, — 
that the head ought neither to be stript, nor 
even examined in undress, but that it should 
be taken with all its accompaniments, when 
the owner has made the best of it, the ac- 
companiments being not unfrequently more 
indicative than the features themselves. 
Long ago the question whether a man is 
most like himself drest or undrest, was pro- 
pounded to the British Apollo ; and it was 
answered by the Oracle that a man of God 
Almighty's making is most like himself when 
undrest ; but a man of a tailor's, periwig- 
maker's, and sempstress's making, when 
drest. The Oracle answered rightly ; for 
no man can select his own eyes, nose, or 
mouth, — but his wig and his whiskers are of 
his own choosing. And to use an illustrious 
instance, how much of character is there in 
that awful wig which alway in its box ac- 
companies Dr. Parr upon his visits of cere- 
mony, that it may be put on in the hall, with 
all its feathery honours thick upon it, not a 
curl deranged, a hair flattened, or a particle 
of powder wasted on the way ! 

But if we would form a judgement of the 
interior of that portentous head which is 
thus formidably obumbrated, how could it 
be done so well as by beholding the Doctor 
among his books, and there seeing the food 
upon which his terrific intellect is fed. 
There we should see the accents, quantities, 
dialects, digammas, and other such small 
gear as in these days constitute the complete 
armour of a perfect scholar ; and by thus 
discovering what goes into the head we might 
form a fair estimate of what was likely to 
come out of it. This is a truth which, with 
many others of equal importance, will be 
beautifully elucidated in this nonpareil his- 
tory. For Daniel Dove, the Father, had a 
collection of books ; they were not so nu- 



merous as those of his contemporary Harley, 
famous for his library, and infamous for the 
Peace of Utrecht ; but he was perfectly 
conversant with all their contents, which is 
more than could be said of the Earl of 
Oxford. 

Reader, whether thou art man, woman, or 
child, thou art doubtless acquainted with 
the doctrine of association as inculcated by 
the great Mr. Locke and his disciples. But 
never hast thou seen that doctrine so richly 
and so entirely exemplified as in this great 
history, the association of ideas being, in 
oriental phrase, the silken thread upon which 
its pearls are strung. And never wilt thou 
see it so clearly and delightfully illustrated, 
not even if the ingenious Mr. John Jones 
should one day give to the world the whole 
twelve volumes in which he has proved the 
authenticity of the Gospel History, by bring- 
ing the narratives of the Four Evangelists 
to the test of Mr. Locke's metaphysics. 

" Desultoriness," says Mr. Danby, " may 
often be the mark of a full head ; connection 
must proceed from a thoughtful one." 



CHAPTER VI. P. I. 

A COLLECTION OF BOOKS NONE OF WHICH 
ARE INCLUDED AMONGST THE PUBLICA- 
TIONS OF ANY SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION 

OF KNOWLEDGE RELIGIOUS OR PROFANE. 

HAPPINESS IN HUMBLE LIFE. 

Felix tile animi, divisque simillimus ipsi.t, 
Quern non mordaci resplcndens gloria fuco 
Solicitat, nonfastosi mala gaiuiia luxus, 
Sed tacitos sinit ire dies, et paupere cullu 
Exigit innocua? tranquilla silentia vilce. 

POLITIAN. 

Happily for Daniel, he lived before the age 
of Magazines, Reviews, Cyclopaedias, Elegant 
Extracts and Literary Newspapers, so that 
he gathered the fruit of knowledge for him- 
self, instead of receiving it from the dirty 
fingers of a retail vender. His books were 
few in number, but they were all weighty 
either in matter or in size. They consisted 
of the Morte d' Arthur in the fine black- 
letter edition of Copeland ; Plutarch's Morals 



18 



THE DOCTOR, 



and Pliny's Natural History, two goodly 
folios, full as an egg of meat, and both trans- 
lated by that old worthy Philemon, who for 
the service which he rendered to his con- 
temporaries and to his countrymen deserves 
to be called the best of the Hollands, without 
disparaging either the Lord or the Doctor 
of that appellation. The whole works of 
Joshua Sylvester (whose name, let me tell 
the reader in passing, was accented upon the 
first syllable by his contemporaries, not as 
now upon the second); — Jean Petit' s His- 
tory of the Netherlands, translated and con- 
tinued by Edward Grimeston, another 
worthy of the Philemon order ; Sir Kenelm 
Digby's Discourses ; Stowe's Chronicle ; 
Joshua Barnes's Life of Edward III. ; 
" Ripley Revived by Eirenaeus Philalethes, 
an Englishman styling himself Citizen of the 
World," with its mysterious frontispiece re- 
presenting the Domus Natures, to which, Nil 
deest, nisi clavis : the Pilgrim's Progress : 
two volumes of Ozell's translation of Rabe- 
lais ; Latimer's Sermons ; and the last volume 
of Fox's Martyrs, which latter book had 
been brought him by his wife. The Pilgrim's 
Progress was a godmother's present to his 
son : the odd volumes of Rabelais he had 
picked up at Kendal, at a sale, in a lot with 
Ripley Revived and Plutarch's Morals : the 
others he had inherited. 

Daniel had looked into all these books, 
read most of them, and believed all that he 
read, except Rabelais, which he could not tell 
what to make of. He was not, however, one 
of those persons who complacently suppose 
every thing to be nonsense, which they do 
not perfectly comprehend, or flatter them- 
selves that they do. His simple heart 
judged of books by what they ought to be, 
little knowing what they are. It never oc- 
curred to him that any thing would be 
printed which was not worth printing, any 
thing which did not convey either reasonable 
delight or useful instruction : and he was no 
more disposed to doubt the truth of what he 
read, than to question the veracity of his 
neighbour, or any one who had no interest 
in deceiving him. A book carried with it to 
him authority in its very aspect. TheMorte 



d' Arthur therefore he received for authentic 
history, just as he did the painful chronicle 
of honest John Stowe, and the Barnesian 
labours of Joshua the self-satisfied : there 
was nothing in it indeed which stirred his 
English blood like the battles of Cressy and 
Poictiers and Najara; yet on the whole, he 
preferred it to Barnes's story, believed in 
Sir Tor, Sir Tristram, Sir Lancelot and Sir 
Lamorack as entirely as in Sir John Chandos, 
the Captal de Buche and the Black Prince, 
and liked them better. 

Latimer and Du Bart as he used some- 
times to read aloud on Sundays ; and if the 
departed take cognizance of what passes on 
earth, and poets derive any satisfaction from 
that posthumous applause which is generally 
the only reward of those who deserve it, 
Sylvester might have found some compensa- 
tion for the undeserved neglect into which 
his works had sunk, by the full and devout 
delight which his rattling rhymes and quaint 
collocations afforded to this reader. The 
silver-tongued Sylvester, however, was re- 
served for a Sabbath book ; as a week-day 
author Daniel preferred Pliny, for the same 
reason that bread and cheese, or a rasher of 
hung mutton, contented his palate better 
than a syllabub. He frequently regretted 
that so knowing a writer had never seen or 
heard of Wethercote and Yordas caves ; the 
ebbing and flowing spring at Giggleswick, 
Malham Cove, and Gordale Scar, that he 
might have described them among the 
wonders of the world. Omne ignotum pro 
magnijico is a maxim which will not in all 
cases hold good. There are things which 
we do not undervalue because we are 
familiar with them, but which are admired 
the more the more thoroughly they are 
known and understood ; it is thus with the 
grand objects of nature and the finest works 
of art, — with whatsoever is truly great and 
excellent. Daniel was not deficient in ima- 
gination ; but no description of places which 
he had never seen, however exaggerated (as 
such things always are) impressed him so 
strongly as these objects in his own neigh- 
bourhood, which he had known from child- 
hood. Three or four times in his life it had 



THE DOCTOR. 



19 



happened that strangers with a curiosity 
as uncommon in that age as it is general in 
this, came from afar to visit these wonders of 
the AYest Riding, and Daniel accompanied 
them with a delight such as he never ex- 
perienced on any other occasion. 

But the Author in whom he delighted 
most was Plutarch, of whose works he was 
lucky enough to possess the worthier half: 
if the other had perished Plutarch would not 
have been a popular writer, but he would 
have held a higher place in the estimation of 
the judicious. Daniel could have posed a 
candidate for university honours, and perhaps 
the examiner too, with some of the odd 
learning which he had stored up in his 
memory from these great repositories of an- 
cient knowledge. Refusing all reward for 
such services, the strangers to whom he 
officiated as a guide, though they perceived 
that he was an extraordinary person, were 
little aware how much information he had 
acquired, and of how strange a kind. His 
talk with them did not go beyond the sub- 
jects which the scenes they came to visit 
naturally suggested, and they wondered more 
at the questions he asked, than at any thing 
which he advanced himself. For his dispo- 
sition was naturally shy, and that which had 
been bashfulness in youth assumed the ap- 
pearance of reserve as he advanced in life ; 
for having none to communicate with upon 
his favourite studies, he lived in an intellec- 
tual world of his own, a mental solitude as 
complete as that of Alexander Selkirk or 
Robinson Crusoe. Even to the Curate his 
conversation, if he had touched upon his 
books, would have been heathen Greek ; and 
to speak the truth plainly, without knowing 
a letter of that language, he knew more about 
the Greeks, than nine-tenths of the clergy 
at that time, including all the dissenters, and 
than nine-tenths of the schoolmasters also. 

Our good Daniel had none of that con- 
fidence which so usually and so unpleasantly 
characterizes self-taught men. In fact he 
was by no means aware of the extent of his 
acquirements, all that he knew in this kind 
having been acquired for amusement not for 
use. He had never attempted to teach him- 



self any thing. These books had lain in his 
way in boyhood, or fallen in it afterwards, 
and the perusal of them, intently as it was 
followed, was always accounted by him to be 
nothing more than recreation. None of his 
daily business had ever been neglected for 
it ; he cultivated his fields and his garden, 
repaired his walls, looked to the stable, 
tended his cows and salved his sheep, as 
diligently and as contentedly as if he had 
possessed neither capacity nor inclination for 
any higher employments. Yet Daniel was 
one of those men, who, if disposition and 
aptitude were not overruled by circum- 
stances, would have grown pale with study, 
instead of being bronzed and hardened by 
sun and wind and rain. There were in him 
undeveloped talents which might have raised 
him to distinction as an antiquary, a vir- 
tuoso of the Royal Society, a poet, or a 
theologian, to whichever course the bias in 
his ball of fortune had inclined. But he had 
not a particle of envy in his composition. 
He thought indeed that if he had had 
grammar learning in his youth like the 
curate, he would have made more use of it ; 
but there was nothing either of the sourness 
or bitterness (call it which you please) of 
repining in this natural reflection. 

Never indeed was any man more con- 
tented with doing his duty in that state of 
life to which it had pleased God to call him. 
And well he might be so, for no man ever 
passed through the world with less to dis- 
quiet or to sour him. Bred up in habits 
which secured the continuance of that 
humble but sure independence to which he 
was born, he had never known what it was 
to be anxious for the future. At the age of 
twenty-five he had brought home a wife, the 
daughter of a little landholder like himself, 
with fifteen pounds for her portion : and the 
true-love of his youth proved to him a faith- 
ful helpmate in those years when the dream 
of life is over, and we live in its realities. 
If at any time there had been some alloy in 
his happiness, it was when there appeared 
reason to suppose that in him his family 
would be extinct ; for though no man knows 
what parental feelings are till he has ex- 



20 



THE DOCTOR. 



perienced them, and Daniel therefore knew 
not the whole value of that which he had 
never enjoyed, the desire of progeny is 
natural to the heart of man; and though 
Daniel had neither large estates, nor an illus- 
trious name to transmit, it was an unwel- 
come thought that the little portion of the 
earth which had belonged to his fathers time 
out of mind, should pass into the possession 
of some stranger, who would tread on their 
graves and his own without any regard to 
the dust that lay beneath. That uneasy ap- 
prehension was removed after he had been 
married fifteen years, when to the great joy 
of both parents, because they had long 
ceased to entertain any hope of such an 
event, their wishes were fulfilled in the birth 
of a son. This their only child was healthy, 
apt and docile, to all appearance as happily 
disposed in mind and body as a father's 
heart could wish. If they had fine weather 
for winning their hay or shearing their corn, 
they thanked Ged for it; if the season 
proved unfavourable, the labour was only a 
little the more and the crop a little the 
worse. Their stations secured them from 
want, and they had no wish beyond it. What 
more had Daniel to desire ? 

The following passage in the divine Du 
Bartas he used to read with peculiar satis- 
faction, applying it to himself : — 

O thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares 
Of city troubles, and of state-affairs ; 
And, serving Ceres, tills with his own team, 
His own free land, left by his friends to him ! 

Never pale Envy's poisony heads do hiss 
To gnaw his heart : nor Vulture Avarice: 
His fields' bounds, bound his thoughts : he never sups 
For nectar, poison mixed in silver cups ; 
Neither in golden platters doth he lick 
For sweet ambrosia deadly arsenic : 
His hand's his bowl (better than plate or glass) 
The silver brook his sweetest hippocrass : 
Milk cheese and fruit, (fruits of his own endeavour) 
Drest without dressing, hath he ready ever. 

False counsellors (concealers of the law) 
Turncoat attorneys that with both hands draw ; 
Sly pettifoggers, wranglers at the bar, 
1'roud purse-leeches, harpies of Westminster 
With feigned-chiding, and foul jarring noise, 
Break not his brain, nor interrupt his joys ; 
But cheerful birds chirping him sweet good-morrows 
With nature's music do beguile his sorrows ; 
Teaching the fragrant forests day by day 
The diapason of their heavenly lay. 



His wandering vessel, reeling to and fro 
On th' ireful ocean (as the winds do blow) 
With sudden tempest is not overwhurled, 
To seek his sad death in another world : 
But leading all his life at home in peace, 
Always in sight of his own smoke, no seas 
No other seas he knows, no other torrent, 
Than that which waters with its silver current 
His native meadows : and that very earth 
Shall give him burial which first gave him birth. 

To summon timely sleep, he doth not need 
JEthiop's cold rush, nor drowsy poppy-seed ; 
Nor keep in consort (as Mecaenas did) 
Luxurious Villains — (Viols 1 should have said) ; 
But on green carpets thrum'd with mossy bever, 
Fringing the round skirts of his winding river, 
The stream's mild murmur, as it gently gushes, 
His healthy limbs in quiet slumber hushes. 

Drum fife and trumpet, with their loud alarms, 
Make him not start out of his sleep, to arms ; 
Nor dear respect of some great General, 
Him from his bed unto the block doth call. 
The crested cock sings *' Hunt-is-up " * to him, 
Limits his rest, and makes him stir betime, 
To walk the mountains and the flow'ry meads 
ImpearPd with tears which great Aurora sheds. 

Never gross air poisoned in stinking streets, 
To choke his spirit, his tender nostril meets ; 
But th' open sky where at full breath he lives, 
Still keeps him sound, and still new stomach gives. 
And Death, dread Serjeant of the Eternal Judge, 
Comes very late to his sole-seated lodge. 



CHAPTER VII. P. I. 

RUSTIC PHILOSOPHY. AN EXPERIMENT UPON 
MOONSHINE. 

Quien comienza en juventud 
A bien obrar, 
Serial es dc no error 
En senetud. 

Proverbios del Marques de Santillana. 

It is not, however, for man to rest in abso- 
lute contentment. He is born to hopes and 
aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless 
he has brutified his nature and quenched 
the spirit of immortality which is his por- 
tion. Having nothing to desire for himself, 
Daniel's ambition had taken a natural direc- 
tion and fixed upon his son. He was resolved 
that the boy should be made a scholar ; not 
with the prospect of advancing him in the 



* See Drayton's Poems, and Nare's Gloss, in v. 

J. W. W. 



THE DOCTOR. 



21 



world, but in the hope that he might become 
a philosopher, and take as much delight in 
the books which he would inherit as his 
father had done before him. Riches and rank 
and power appeared in his judgment to be 
nothing when compared to philosophy ; and 
herein he was as true a philosopher as if he 
had studied in the Porch, or walked the 
groves of Academus. 

It was not however for this, — for he was 
as little given to talk of his opinions as to 
display his reading, — but for his retired 
habits, and general character, and some odd 
practices into which his books had led him, 
that he was commonly called Flossofer 
Daniel by his neighbours. The appellation 
was not affixed in derision, but respectfully 
and as his due ; for he bore his faculties too 
meekly ever to excite an envious or an ill- 
natured feeling in any one. Rural Flossofers 
were not uncommon in those days, though 
in the progress of society they have dis- 
appeared like Crokers, Bowyers, Lorimers, 
Armourers, Running Footmen, and other 
descriptions of men whose occupations are 
gone by. But they were of a different order 
from our Daniel. They were usually Phi- 
lomaths, Students in Astrology, or the 
Ccelestial Science, and not unfrequently 
Empirics or downright Quacks. Between 
twenty and thirty almanacs used to be pub- 
lished every year by men of this description, 
some of them versed enough in mathematics 
to have done honour to Cambridge, had the 
fates allowed ; and others such proficients in 
roguery, that they would have done equal 
honour to the whipping-post. 

A man of a different stamp from either 
came in declining life to settle at Ingleton 
in the humble capacity of schoolmaster, a 
little before young Daniel was capable of 
more instruction than could be given him 
at home. Richard Guy was his name ; he 
is the person to whom the lovers of old 
rhyme are indebted for the preservation of 
the old poem of Flodden Field, which he 
transcribed from an ancient manuscript, and 
which was printed from his transcript by 
Thomas Gent of York. In his way through 
the world, which had not been along the 



King's high Dunstable road, Guy had picked 
up a competent share of Latin, a little Greek, 
some practical knowledge of physic, and 
more of its theory; astrology enough to 
cast a nativity, and more acquaintance with 
alchemy than has often been possessed by 
one who never burnt his fingers in its pro- 
cesses. These acquirements were grafted 
on a disposition as obliging as it was easy ; 
and he was beholden to nature for an under- 
standing so clear and quick that it might 
have raised him to some distinction in the 
world if he had not been under the influence 
of an imagination at once lively and credu- 
lous. Five and fifty years had taught him 
none of the world's wisdom; they had sobered 
his mind without maturing it ; but he had a 
wise heart, and the wisdom of the heart is 
worth all other wisdom. 

Daniel was too far advanced in life to fall 
in friendship ; he felt a certain degree of 
attractiveness in this person's company ; 
there was, however, so much of what may 
better be called reticence than reserve in his 
own quiet habitual manners, that it would 
have been long before their acquaintance 
ripened into any thing like intimacy, if- an 
accidental circumstance had not brought out 
the latent sympathy which on both sides 
had till then rather been apprehended than 
understood They were walking together 
one day when young Daniel, who was then 
in his sixth year, looking up in his father's 
face, proposed this question : "Will it be any 
harm, Father, if I steal five beans when next 
I go into Jonathan Dowthwaites, if I can do 
it without any one's seeing me ? " 

"And what wouldst thou steal beans for ? " 
was the reply, " when any body would give 
them to thee, and when thou knowest there 
are plenty at home ? " 

" But it won't do to have them given, 
Father," the boy replied. " They are to 
charm away my warts. Uncle William says 
I must steal five beans, a bean for every 
wart, and tie them carefully up in paper, 
and carry them to a place where two roads 
cross, and then drop them, and walk away 
without ever once looking behind me. And 
then the warts will go away from me, and 



22 



THE DOCTOR. 



come upon the hands of the person that 
picks up the beans." 

"Nay boy," the Father made answer; 
" that charm was never taught by a white 
witch ! If thy warts are a trouble to thee, 
they would be a trouble to any one else ; 
and to get rid of an evil from ourselves 
Daniel, by bringing it upon another, is 
against our duty to our neighbour. Have 
nothing to do witli a charm like that ! " 

" May I steal a piece of raw beef then," 
rejoined the boy, " and rub the warts with 
it and bury it ? For Uncle says that will 
do, and as the beef rots, so the warts will 
waste away." 

" Daniel," said the Father, " those can be 
no lawful charms that begin with stealing ; 
I could tell thee how to cure thy warts in a 
better manner. There is an infallible way, 
which is by washing the hands in moonshine, 
but then the moonshine must be caught in a 
bright silver basin. You wash and wash in 
the basin, and a cold moisture will be felt 
upon the hands, proceeding from the cold 
and moist rays of the moon." 

" But what shall we do for a silver basin ? " 
said little Daniel. 

The Father answered, " a pewter dish 
might be tried if it were made very bright ; 
but it is not deep enough. The brass kettle 
perhaps might do better." 

" Nay," said Guy, who had now begun to 
attend with some interest, " the shape of a 
kettle is not suitable. It should be a con- 
cave vessel, so as to concentrate the rays. 
Joshua Wilson I dare say would lend his 
brass basin, which he can very well spare at 
the hour you want it, because nobody comes 
to be shaved by moonlight. The moon rises 
early enough to serve at this time. If you 
come in this evening at six o'clock I will 
speak to Joshua in the mean time, and have 
the basin as bright and shining as a good 
scouring can make it. The experiment is 
curious and I should like to see it tried. 
WImic Daniel didst thou learn it?" "I 
read it," replied Daniel, "in Sir Kenelm 
Digby's Discourses, and he says it never 
fails." 

Accordingly (he parties met at the ap- 



pointed hour. Mambrino's helmet, when 
new from the armourer's, or when furbished 
for a tournament, was not brighter than Guy 
had rendered the inside of the barber's 
basin. Schoolmaster, Father and Son re- 
tired to a place out of observation, by the 
side of the river, a wild stream tumbling 
among the huge stones which it had brought 
down from the hills. On one of these stones 
sate Daniel the elder, holding the basin in 
such an inclination toward the moon that 
there should be no shadow in it ; Guy di- 
rected the boy where to place himself so as 
not to intercept the light, and stood looking 
complacently on, while young Daniel re- 
volved his hands one in another within the 
empty basin, as if washing them. " I feel 
them cold and clammy, Father ! " said the 
boy. (It was the beginning of November) 
" Ay," replied the father, " that's the cold 
moisture of the moon ! " " Ay ! " echoed 
the schoolmaster, and nodded his head in 
confirmation. 

The operation was repeated on the two 
following nights ; and Daniel would have 
kept up his son two hours later than his 
regular time of rest to continue it on the 
third if the evening had not set in with 
clouds and rain. In spite of the patient's 
belief that the warts would waste away and 
were wasting, (for Prince Hohenlohe could 
not require more entire faith than was given 
on this occasion,) no alteration could be per- 
ceived in them at a fortnight's end. Daniel 
thought the experiment had failed because 
it had not been repeated sufficiently often, 
nor perhaps continued long enough. But 
the Schoolmaster was of opinion that the 
cause of failure was in the basin : for that 
silver being the lunar metal would by 
affinity assist the influential virtues of the 
moonlight, which finding no such affinity in 
a mixed metal of baser compounds, might 
contrariwise have its potential qualities 
weakened, or even destroyed when received 
in a brasen vessel, and reflected from it. 
Flossofer Daniel assented to this theory. 
Nevertheless as the child got rid of his 
troublesome excrescences in the course of 
three or four months, all parties disregard- 



THE DOCTOR. 



23 



ing the lapse of time at first, and afterwards 
fairly forgetting it, agreed that the remedy 
had been effectual, and Sir Kenelm, if he 
had been living, might have procured the 
solemn attestation of men more veracious 
than himself that moonshine was an infal- 
lible cure for warts. 



CHAPTER VIII. P. I. 

A KIND SCHOOLMASTER AND A HAPPY 
SCHOOLBOY. 

Though happily thou wilt say that wands be to be 
wrought when they are green, lest they rather break than 
bend when they be dry, yet know also that he that 
bendeth a twig because he would see if it would bow by 
strength may chance to have a crooked tree when he 
would have a straight. Eophues. 

From this time the two Flossofers were 
friends. Daniel seldom went to Ingleton 
without looking in upon Guy, if it were 
between school hours. Guy on his part 
would walk as far with him on the way 
back, as the tether of his own time allowed, 
and frequently on Saturdays and Sundays 
he strolled out and took a seat by Daniel's 
fireside. Even the wearying occupation of 
hearing one generation of urchins after 
another repeat a-b-ab, hammering the first 
rules of arithmetic into leaden heads, and 
pacing like a horse in a mill the same dull 
dragging round day after day, had neither 
diminished Guy's good-nature, nor lessened 
his love for children. He had from the first 
conceived a liking for young Daniel, both be- 
cause of the right principle which was evinced 
by the manner in which he proposed the 
question concerning stealing the beans, and 
of the profound gravity (worthy of a Flos- 
sofer's son) with which he behaved in the 
affair of the moonshine. All that he saw 
and heard of him tended to confirm this 
favourable prepossession ; and the boy, who 
had been taught to read in the Bible and in 
Stowe's Chronicle, was committed to his 
tuition at seven years of age. 

Five days in the week (for in the North 
of England Saturday as well as Sunday is 
a Salbbath to the Schoolmaster) did young 



Daniel, after supping his porringer of oat- 
meal pottage, set off to school, with a little 
basket containing his dinner in his hand. 
This provision usually consisted of oat-cake 
and cheese, the latter in goodly proportion, 
but of the most frugal quality, whatever 
cream the milk afforded having been con- 
signed to the butter tub. Sometimes it was 
a piece of cold bacon or of cold pork ; and in 
winter there was the luxury of a shred pie, 
which is a coarse north country edition of 
the pie abhorred by puritans. The distance 
was in those days called two miles ; but 
miles of such long measure that they were 
for him a good hour's walk at a cheerful 
pace. He never loitered on the way, being 
at all times brisk in his movements, and 
going to school with a spirit as light as when 
he returned from it, like one whose blessed 
lot it was never to have experienced, and 
therefore never to stand in fear of severity 
or unkindness. For he was not more a 
favourite with Guy for his docility, and 
regularity and diligence, than he was with 
his schoolfellows for his thorough good- 
nature and a certain original oddity of 
humour. 

There are some boys who take as much 
pleasure in exercising their intellectual 
faculties, as others do when putting forth 
the power of arms and legs in boisterous 
exertion. Young Daniel was from his 
childhood fond of books. William Dove 
used to say he was a chip of the old block ; 
and this hereditary disposition was regarded 
with much satisfaction by both parents, 
Dinah having no higher ambition nor better 
wish for her son, than that he might prove 
like his father in all things. This being the 
bent of his nature, the boy having a kind 
master as well as a happy home, never 
tasted of what old Lily calls (and well might 
call) the wearisome bitterness of the scholar's 
learning. He was never subject to the 
brutal discipline of the Udals and Busbys 
and Bowyers, and Parrs, and other less no- 
torious tyrants who have trodden in their 
steps ; nor was any of that inhuman injustice 
ever exercised upon him to break his spirit, 
for which it is to be hoped Dean Colet has 



24 



THE DOCTOR. 



paid in Purgatory ; — to be hoped, I say, 
because if there be no Purgatory, the Dean 
may have gone farther and fared worse. 
Being the only Latiner in the school, his 
lessons were heard with more interest and 
less formality. Guy observed his progress 
with almost as much delight and as much 
hope as Daniel himself. A schoolmaster 
who likes his vocation feels toward the 
boys who deserve his favour something 
like a thrifty and thriving father toward 
the children for whom he is scraping 
together wealth ; he is contented that his 
humble and patient industry should produce 
fruit not for himself, but for them, and looks 
with pride to a result in which it is im- 
possible for him to partake, and which in all 
likelihood he may never live to see. Even 
some of the old Phlebotomists have had this 
feeling to redeem them. 



" Sir," says the Compositor to the Cor- 
rector of the Press, "there is no heading 
in the Copy for this Chapter. What must I 
do?" 

" Leave a space for it," the Corrector 
replies. "It is a strange sort of book; but 
I dare say the Author has a reason for every 
thing that he says or does, and most likely 
you will find out his meaning as you set 
up." 

Right, Mr. Corrector ! you are a judicious 
person, free from the common vice of finding 
fault with what you do not understand. My 
meaning will be explained presently. And 
having thus prologized, we will draw a line 
if you please, and begin. 



Ten measures of garrulity, says the Talmud, 
were sent down upon the earth, and the 
women took nine. 

I have known in my time eight terrific 
talkers; and five of them were of the mas- 
culine gender. 

I'.ni supposing that the I Jul this were right 
in allotting to the women a ninefold propor- 



tion of talkativeness, I confess that I have 
inherited my mother's share. 

I am liberal of my inheritance, and the 
Public shall have the full benefit of it. 

And here if my gentle Public will consider 
to what profitable uses this gift might have 
been applied, the disinterestedness of my 
disposition in having thus benevolently de- 
dicated it to their service, will doubtless be 
appreciated as it deserves by their discrimi- 
nation and generosity. Had I carried it to 
the pulpit, think how I might have filled the 
seats, and raised the prices of a private 
chapel ! Had I taken it to the bar, think 
how I could have mystified a judge, and 
bamboozled a jury ! Had I displayed it in 
the senate, think how I could have talked 
against time, for the purpose of delaying a 
division, till the expected numbers could be 
brought together ; or how efficient a part I 
could have borne in the patriotic design of 
impeding the business of a session, prolong- 
ing and multiplying the debates, and worry- 
ing a minister out of his senses and his life. 

Diis aliter visum, — I am what I was to 
be, — what it is best for myself that I should 
be, — and for you, my Public, also. The 
rough-hewn plans of my destination have 
been better shaped for me by Providence 
than I could have shaped them for myself. 

But to the purpose of this chapter, which 
is as headless as the Whigs — Observe, my 
Public, I have not said as brainless. . . If it 
were, the book would be worth no more 
than a new Tragedy of Lord Byron's ; or an 
old number of Mr. Jeffrey's Review, when 
its prophecies have proved false, its blunders 
have been exposed, and its slander stinks. 

Every thing here shall be in order. The 
digressions into which this gift of discourse 
may lead me must not interrupt the arrange- 
ment of our History. Never shall it be 
said of the Unknown that " he draweth out 
the thread of his verbosity finer than the 
staple of his argument." We have a journey 
to perform from Dan to Beersheba, and we 
must halt occasionally by the way. Matter 
will arise contingent to the story, correlative 
to it, or excrescent from it ; not necessary 
to its progress, and yet indispensable for 



THE DOCTOR. 



25 



your delight, my gentle Public, and for mine 
own ease. My Public would not have me 
stifle the afflatus when I am labouring with 
it, and in the condition of Elihu as described 
by himself in the 18th and 19th verses of 
the xxxii. chapter of the book of Job. 

Quemadmodum ccelator oculos diu intentos 
ac fatigatos remittit atque avocat, et, ut did 
solet, pascit ; sic nos animum aliquando debe- 
mus relaxare et quibusdam oblectamentis re- 
ficere. Sed ipsa oblectamenta opera sint ; ex 
his quoque si observaveris, sumes quod possit 
fieri salutare* 

But that the beautiful structure of this 
history may in no wise be deranged, such 
matter shall be distributed into distinct 
chapters in the way of intercalation ; a 
device of which as it respects the year, 
Adam is believed to have been the inventor ; 
but according to the Author of the book of 
Jalkut, it was only transmitted by him to 
his descendants, being one of the things 
which he received by revelation. 

How then shall these Chapters be annorai- 
nated? Intercalary they shall not. That 
word will send some of my readers to John- 
son's Dictionary for its meaning ; and others 
to Sheridan, or Walker for its pronuncia- 
tion. Besides, I have a dislike to all mongrel 
words, and an especial dislike for strange 
compounds into which a preposition enters. 
I owe them a grudge. They make one of 
the main difficulties in Greek and German. 

From our own Calendars we cannot 
borrow an appellation. In the Republican 
one of our neighbours, when the revolu- 
tionary fever was at its height, the supple- 
mental days were called Sans-culottedes. The 
Spaniards would call them Dias Descami- 
sados. The holders of liberal opinions in 
England would term them Radical Days. 
A hint might be taken hence, and we might 
name them radical chapters, as having the 
root of the matter in them ; — or ramal, if 
there were such a word, upon the analogy 
of the Branch Bible societies. Or ramage 
as the king of Cockayne hath his Foliage. 
But they would not be truly and philosophi- 

* Seneca, Epist. 58. 



cally designated by these names. They are 
not branches from the tree of this history, 
neither are they its leaves ; but rather choice 
garlands suspended there to adorn it on 
festival days. They may be likened to the 
waste weirs of a canal, or the safety valves 
of a steam engine ; (my gentle Public would 
not have me stifle the afflatus /) — interludes ; 
— symphonies between the acts ; — volun- 
taries during the service ; — resting places 
on the ascent of a church tower ; angular 
recesses of an old bridge, into which foot 
passengers may retire from carriages or 
horsemen ; — houses-of-call upon the road ; 
seats by the way side, such as those which 
were provided by the Man of Ross, or the 
not less meritorious Woman of Chippenham, 
Maud Heath of Langley Burrel, — Hospices 
on the passages of the Alps, — Capes of 
Good Hope, or Isles of St. Helena, — yea, 
Islands of Tinian or Juan Fernandez, upon 
the long voyage whereon we are bound. 

Leap-chapters they cannot properly be 
called ; and if we were to call them Ha 
Has ! as being chapters which the Reader 
may leap if he likes, the name would appear 
rather strained than significant, and might 
be justly censured as more remarkable for 
affectation than for aptness. For the same 
reason I reject the designation of Inter- 
means, though it hath the sanction of great 
Ben's authority. 

Among the requisites for an accomplished 
writer Steele enumerates the skill whereby 
common words are started into new signifi- 
cations. I will not presume so far upon that 
talent ( — modesty forbids me — ) as to call 
these intervening chapters either Interpella- 
tions or Interpositions, or Interlocations, or 
Intervals. Take this, Reader, for a general 
rule, that the readiest and plainest style is 
the most forcible (if the head be but pro- 
perly stored ;) and that in all ordinary cases 
the word which first presents itself is the 
best ; even as in all matters of right and 
wrong, the first feeling is that which the 
heart owns and the conscience ratifies. 

But for a new occasion, a new word or a 
new composite must be formed. Therefore 
I will strike one in the mint of analogy, in 



26 



THE DOCTOR 



which alone the king's English must be 
coined, and call them Interchapters — and 
thus endeth 

INTERCHAPTER I. 

REMARKS IN THE PRINTING OFFICE. THE 
AUTHOR CONFESSES A DISPOSITION TO 
GARRULITY. PROPRIETY OF PROVIDING 
CERTAIN CHAPTERS FOR THE RECEPTION 
OF HIS EXTRANEOUS DISCOURSE. CHOICE 
OF AN APPELLATION FOR SUCH CHAPTERS. 

Perque vices aliquid, quod tempore, longa videri 
~Non sinal, in medium vacuus refer amus ad aures. 

Ovid 



CHAPTER IX. P. 1. 

EXCEPTIONS TO ONE OF KING SOLOMONS 
RULES — A WINTER'S EVENING AT DANIEL'S 
FIRESIDE. 

These are my thoughts ; I might have spun them out 
into a greater length, but I think a 1'ttle plot of ground, 
thick sown, is better than a great field which, for the 
most part of it, lies fallow. Norris. 

" Train up a child in the way he should 
go, and when he is old his feet will not 
depart from it." Generally speaking it will 
be 'found so ; but is there any other rule to 
which there are so many exceptions ? 

Ask the serious Christian as he calls him- 
self, or the Professor (another and moie 
fitting appellative which the Christian Pha- 
risees have chosen for themselves) — ask 
him whether he has found it hold good? 
Whether his sons when they attained to 
years of discretion (which are the most in- 
discreet years in the course of human life) 
have profited as he expected by the long 
extemporaneous prayers to which they lis- 
tened night and morning, the sad sabbaths 
which they were compelled to observe, and 
the soporific sermons which closed the do- 
mestic religiosities of those melancholy days? 
Ask him if this discipline has prevented 
them from running headlong into the follies 
and vices of the age ? from being birdlimed 
by dissipation? or caught in the spider's 
wcl) of sophistry and unbelief? "It is no 
doubt a true observation," says Bishop 



Patrick*, " that the ready way to make the 
minds of youth grow awry, is to lace them too 
hard, by denying them their just freedom." 

Ask the old faithful servant of Mammon, 
whom Mammon has rewarded to his heart's 
desire, and in whom the acquisition of riches 
has only increased his eagerness for acquir- 
ing more — ask him whether he has suc- 
ceeded in training up his heir to the same 
service ? He will tell you that the young 
man is to be found upon race-grounds, and 
in gaming-houses, that he is taking his swing 
of extravagance and excess, and is on the 
high road to ruin. 

Ask the wealthy Quaker, the pillar of the 
meeting — most orthodox in heterodoxy, — 
who never wore a garment of forbidden cut 
or colour, never bent his body in salutation, 
or his knees in prayer, — never uttered the 
heathen name of a day or month, nor ever 
addressed himself to any person without 
religiously speaking illegitimate English, — 
ask him how it has happened that the tailor 
has converted his sons ? He will fold his 
hands, and twirl his thumbs mournfully in 
silence. It has not been for want of train- 
ing them in the way wherein it was his wish 
that they should go. 

You are about, Sir, to send your son to 
a public school ; Eton or Westminster ; 
Winchester or Harrow ; Rugby or the 
Charter House, no matter which. He may 
come from either an accomplished scholar 
to the utmost extent that school education 
can make him so ; he may be the better 
both for its discipline and its want of disci- 
pline; it may serve him excellently well as 
a preparatory school for the world into 
which he is about to enter. But also he 
may come away an empty coxcomb or a 
hardened brute — a spendthrift — a profli- 
gate — a blackguard or a sot. 

To put a boy in the way he should go, is like 
sending out a ship well found, well manned 
and stored, and with a careful captain ; but 
there are rocks and shallows in her course, 



* Fuller has the same remark in his notes on Jonah. 
" As for cards to play with, let us not wholly condemn 
them, lest lacing our consciences too straight, we make 
them to grow awry on the wrong side." p. 40. 



THE DOCTOE. 



27 



winds and currents to be encountered, and 
all the contingencies and perils of the sea. 

How often has it been seen that sons, not 
otherwise deficient in duty toward their 
parents, have, in the most momentous con- 
cerns of life, taken the course most opposite 
to that in which they were trained to go, 
going wrong where the father would have 
directed them aright, or taking the right 
path in spite of all inducements and endea- 
vours for leading them wrong ! The son of 
Charles Wesley, born and bred in Me- 
thodism and bound to it by all the strongest 
ties of pride and prejudice, became a papist. 
This indeed was but passing from one erro- 
neous persuasion to another, and a more in- 
viting one. But Isaac Casaubon also had 
the grief of seeing a son seduced into the 
Romish superstition, and on the part of that 
great and excellent man, there had been no 
want of discretion in training him, nor of 
sound learning and sound wisdom. Arch- 
bishop Leighton, an honour to his church, 
his country, and his kind, was the child of 
one of those firebrands who kindled the 
Great Rebellion. And Franklin had a son, 
who notwithstanding «the example of his 
father (and such a father !) continued sted- 
fast in his duty as a soldier and a subject,- 
he took the unsuccessful side — but 

nunquam successu crescat honestum.* 

No such disappointment was destined to 
befal our Daniel. The way in which he 
trained up his son was that into which the 
bent of the boy's own nature would have led 
him ; and all circumstances combined to 
favour the tendency of his education. The 
country abounding in natural objects of sub- 
limity and beauty (some of these singular in 
their kind) might have impressed a duller 
imagination than had fallen to his lot ,- and 
that imagination had time enough for its 
workings during his solitary walks to and 
from school morning and evening. His 
home was in a lonely spot ; and having nei- 
ther brother nor sister, nor neighbours near 
enough in any degree to supply their place 
as playmates, he became his father's com- 

* Lt'CAN. 



panion imperceptibly as he ceased to be his 
fondling. And the effect was hardly less 
apparent in Daniel than in the boy. He 
was no longer the same taciturn person as 
of yore ; it seemed as if his tongue had been 
loosened, and when the reservoirs of his 
knowledge were opened they flowed freely. 
Their chimney corner on a winter's even- 
ing presented a group not unworthy of Sir 
Joshua's pencil. There sate Daniel, richer 
in marvellous stories than ever traveller 
who in the days of mendacity returned from 
the East ; the peat fire shining upon a coun- 
tenance which weather-hardened as it was, 
might have given the painter a model for a 
Patriarch, so rare was the union which it 
exhibited of intelligence, benevolence and 
simplicity. There sate the boy with open 
eyes and ears, raised head, and fallen lip, in 
all the happiness of wonder and implicit 
belief. There sate Dinah, not less proud of 
her husband's learning than of the towardly 
disposition and promising talents of her son, 
— twirling the thread at her spinning-wheel, 
but attending to all that past ; and when 
there was a pause in the discourse, fetching 
a deep sigh, and exclaiming, "Lord bless 
us ! what wonderful things there are in the 
world ! " There also sate Haggy, knitting 
stockings, and sharing in the comforts and 
enjoyments of the family when the day's 
work was done. And there sate "William 
Dove; — but William must have a chapter 
to himself. 



CHAPTER X. P. I. 

ONE WHO WAS NOT SO WISE AS HTS FRIENDS 
COULD HAVE WISHED, AND YET QUITE AS 
HAPPY AS IP HE HAD BEEN WISER. NE- 
POTISM NOT CONFINED TO POPES. 

There are of madmen as there are of tame, 

All humoured not alike. ■ Some 

Apish and fantastic ; 

And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image 

So blemished and defaced, yet do they act 

Such antic and such pretty lunacies, 

That spite of sorrow, they will make you smile. 

Dekker. 

William Dove was Daniel's only surviving 
brother, seven years his junior. He was 



28 



THE DOCTOR. 



born with one of those heads in which 
the thin partition that divides great wits 
from folly is wanting. Had he come into 
the world a century sooner, he would have 
been taken nolens volens into some Baron's 
household, to wear motley, make sport for 
the guests and domestics, and live in fear of 
the rod. But it was his better fortune to 
live in an age when this calamity rendered 
him liable to no such oppression, and to be 
precisely in that station which secured for 
him all the enjoyments of which he was 
capable, and all the care he needed. In 
higher life, he would probably have been 
consigned to the keeping of strangers who 
would have taken charge of him for pay ; in 
a humbler degree he must have depended 
upon the parish for support; or have been 
made an inmate of one of those moral lazar- 
houses in which age and infancy, the harlot 
and the idiot, the profligate and the unfor- 
tunate are herded together. 

William Dove escaped the:<e aggravations 
of calamity. He escaped also that persecu- 
tion to which he would have been exposed 
in populous places where boys run loose in 
packs, and harden one another in impudence, 
mischief and cruelty. Natural feeling, when 
natural feeling is not corrupted, leads men 
to regard persons in his condition with a 
compassion not unmixed with awe. It is 
common with the country people when they 
speak of such persons to point significantly 
at the head and say His not all there; — 
words denoting a sense of the mysterious- 
ness of our nature which perhaps they feel 
more deeply on this than on any other occa- 
sion. No outward and visible deformity 
can make them so truly apprehend how fear- 
fully and wonderfully we are made. 

William Dove's was not a case of fatuity. 
Though all was not there, there was a great 
deal. He was what is called half -saved. 
Some of his faculties were more than ordi- 
narily acute, but the power of self conduct 
wa& entirely wanting in him. Fortunately 
it was supplied by a sense of entire depend- 
ence which produced entire docility. A 
dog due.-, not obey his master more dutifully 
than William obeyed his brother; and in 



this obedience there was nothing of fear ; 
with all the strength and simplicity of a 
child's love, it had also the character and 
merit of a moral attachment. 

The professed and privileged fool was 
generally characterised by a spice of kna- 
very, and not unfrequently of maliciousness : 
the unnatural situation in which he was 
placed, tended to excite such propensities 
and even to produce them. William had 
shrewdness enough for the character, but 
nothing of this appeared in his disposition ; 
ill-usage might perhaps have awakened it, 
and to a fearful degree, if he had proved as 
sensible to injury as he was to kindness. 
But he had never felt an injury. He could 
not have been treated with more tenderness 
in Turkey (where a degree of holiness is 
imputed to persons in his condition) than 
was uniformly shown him within the little 
sphere of his perambulations. It was sur- 
prising how much he had picked up within 
that little sphere. Whatever event occurred, 
whatever tale was current, whatever tradi- 
tions were preserved, whatever superstitions 
were believed, William knew them all ; and 
all that his insatiable ear took in, his me- 
mory hoarded. Half the proverbial sayings 
in Ray's volume were in his head, and as 
many more with which Ray was unac- 
quainted. He knew many of the stories 
which our children are now receiving as 
novelties in the selections from Grimm's 
Kinder und Haus-Marchen, and as many of 
those which are collected in the Danish 
Folk-Sagn. And if some zealous lover of 
legendary lore, (like poor John Leyden, or 
Sir Walter Scott,) had fallen in with him, 
the Shakesperian commentators might per- 
haps have had the whole story of St. With- 
old ; the Wolf of the World's End might 
have been identified with Fenris and found 
to be a relic of the Scalds : and Rauf Col- 
Iyer and John the Reeve might still have 
been as well known as Adam Bell, and Clym 
of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie. 

William had a great fondness for his 
nephew. Let not Protestants suppose that 
Nepotism is an affection confined to the dig- 
nitaries of the Roman Catholic Church. In 



THE DOCTOR. 



29 



its excess indeed it is peculiarly a Papal 
vice, — - which is a degree higher than a 
Cardinal one ; but like many other sins it 
grows out of the corruption of a good feel- 
ing. It may be questioned whether fond 
uncles are not as numerous as unkind ones, 
notwithstanding our recollections of King 
Richard and the Children in the Wood. We 
may use the epithet nepotious for those who 
carry this fondness to the extent of doting, 
and as expressing that degree of fondness it 
may be applied to William Dove : he was a 
nepotious uncle. The father regarded young 
Daniel with a deeper and more thoughtful, 
but not with a fonder affection, not with 
such a doting attachment. Dinah herself, 
though a fond as well as careful mother, did 
not more thoroughly 

delight to hear 

Her early child mis-speak half-uttered words ;* 

and perhaps the boy, so long as he was in- 
capable of distinguishing between their 
moral qualities, and their relative claims to 
his respect and love and duty, loved his uncle 
most of the three. The father had no idle 
hours; in the intervals when he was not 
otherwise employed, one of his dear books 
usually lay open before him, and if he was 
not feeding upon the page, he was ruminat- 
ing the food it had afforded him. But Wil- 
liam Dove, from the time that his nephew 
became capable of noticing and returning 
caresses seemed to have concentred upon 
him all his affections. With children affec- 
tion seldom fails of finding its due return ; 
and if he had not thus won the boy's heart 
in infancy, he would have secured it in 
childhood by winning his ear with these mar- 
vellous stories. But he possessed another 
talent which would alone have made him a 
favourite with children, — the power of 
imitating animal sounds with singular per- 
fection. A London manager would have 
paid him well for performing the cock in 
Hamlet. He could bray in octaves to a 
nicety, set the geese gabbling by addressing 
them in their own tongue, and make the 
turkey-cock spread his fan, brush his wing 



against the ground, and angrily gob -gobble 
in answer to a gobble of defiance. But he 
prided himself more upon his success with 
the owls, as an accomplishment of more dif- 
ficult attainment. In this I\Ir. Wordsworth's 
boy of Winander was not more perfect. 
Both hands were used as an instrument in 
producing the notes; and if Pope could 
have heard the responses which came from 
barn and doddered oak and ivied crag, he 
would rather, (satirist as he was,) have left 
Ralph unsatirised, than have vilified one 
of the wildest and sweetest of nocturnal 
sounds. 

He was not less expert to a human ear in 
hitting off the wood-pigeon's note, though 
he could not in this instance provoke a 
reply. This sound he used to say ought to 
be natural to him, and it was wrong in the 
bird not to acknowledge his relation. Once 
when he had made too free with a lass's 
lips, he disarmed his brother of a reprehen- 
sive look, by pleading that as his name was 
William Dove it behoved him both to bill 
and to coo. 



CHAPTER XL P. I. 

A WORD TO THE READER, SHOWING WHERE 
WE ARE, AND HOW WE CAME HERE, AND 
WHEREFORE ; AND WHITHER WE ARE 
GOING. 

'Tis my venture 
On your retentive wisdom. 

Ben Jonson. 

Reader, you have not forgotten where we 
are at this time : you remember I trust, 
that we are neither at Dan nor Beersheba ; 
nor anywhere between those two celebrated 
places ; nor on the way to either of them : 
but that we are in the Doctor's parlour, that 
Mrs. Dove has just poured out his seventh 
cup of tea, and that the clock of St. George's 
has struck five. In what street, parade, 
place, square, row, terrace or lane, and in 
what town, and in what county ; and on what 
day, and in what month, and in what year, 
will be explained in due time. You cannot 
but remember what was said in the second 



30 



THE DOCTOR. 



chapter post initium concerning the import- 
ance and the necessity of order in an under- 
taking like this. " All things," says Sir 
Thomas Brown, " began in order ; so shall 
they end, and so shall they begin again ; ac- 
cording to the ordainer of order, and mys- 
tical mathematics of the City of Heaven : " 
This awful sentence was uttered by the 
Philosopher of Norwich upon occasion of a 
subject less momentous than that whereon 
we have entered, for what are the mysteries 
of the Quincunx compared to the delineation 
of a human mind ? Be pleased only at pre- 
sent to bear in mind where we are. Place 
but as much confidence in me as you do in 
your review, your newspaper, and your 
apothecary ; give me but as much credit as 
you expect from your tailor ; and if your 
apothecary deserves that confidence as well, 
it will be well for you, and if your credit is 
as punctually redeemed, it will be well for 
your tailor. It is not without cause that I 
have gone back to the Doctor's childhood 
and his birth-place. Be thou assured, O 
Reader! that he never could have been 
seated thus comfortably in that comfortable 
parlour where we are now regarding him, — 
never by possibility could have been at that 
time in that spot, and in those circum- 
stances; — never could have been the Doc- 
tor that he was, — nay, according to all 
reasonable induction, all tangible or imagi- 
nable probabilities, — never would have been 
a Doctor at all, — consequently thou never 
couldst have had the happiness of reading 
this delectable history, nor I the happiness 
of writing it for thy benefit and information 
and delight, — had it not been for his father's 
character, his father's books, his schoolmaster 
Guy, and his Uncle William, with all whom 
and which, it was therefore indispensable 
that thou shouldst be made acquainted. 

A metaphysician, or as some of my con- 
temporaries would afi'ect to say a psychologist, 
if he were at all a master of his art bablative 
(for it is as much an ars bablativa as the 
law, which was defined to be so by that old 
traitor and time-server Serjeant Maynard) 
— a metaphysician I say, would not require 
more than three such octavo volumes as 



those of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population, 
to prove that no existing circumstance could 
at this time be what it is, unless all preced- 
ing circumstances had from the beginning 
of time been precisely what they were. 
But, my good reader, I have too much re- 
spect for you, and too much regard for your 
precious time, and too much employment, 
or amusement (which is a very rational kind 
of employment) for my own, to waste it in 
demonstrating a truism. No man knows 
the value of time more feelingly than I do ! 

Man's life, Sir, being 
So short, and then the way that leads unto 
The knowledge of ourselves, so long and tedious, 
Each minute should be precious.* 

It is my wish and intention to make you 
acquainted with a person most worthy to be 
known, for such the subject of this history 
will be admitted to be : one whom when 
you once know him it will be impossible 
that you should ever forget : one for whom 
I have the highest possible veneration and 
regard ; (and though it is not possible that 
your feelings towards him should be what 
mine are) one who, the more he is known, 
will and must be more and more admired. 
I wish to introduce this person to you. 
Now, Sir, I appeal to your good sense, and 
to your own standard of propriety, should I 
act with sufficient respect either to yourself 
or him, if, without giving you any previous 
intimation, any information, concerning his 
character and situation in life ; or in any 
way apprising you who and what he was, I 
were to knock at your door and simply pre- 
sent him to you as Doctor Dove ? No, my 
dear Sir ! it is indispensable that you should 
be properly informed who it is whom I thus 
introduce to your acquaintance ; and if you 
are the judicious person that I suppose you 
to be, you will be obliged to me as long as 
you live. " For why," as old Higgins hath 
it,— 

For why, who writes such histories as these 
Doth often bring the Reader's heart such ease 
As when they sit and see what he doth note, 
Well fare his heart, say they, this book that wrote ! 

Ill fare that reader's heart who of this 

* Beaumont and Fletcher. 



THE DOCTOR. 



31 



book says otherwise ! " Tarn suavia dicam 
facinora, ut male sit ei qui talibus non delec- 
teturV said a very different person from old 
Higgins, writing in a different vein. I have 
not read his book, but so far as my own is 
concerned, I heartily adopt his malediction. 

Had I been disposed, as the Persians say, 
to let the steed of the pen expatiate in the 
plains of prolixity, I should have carried 
thee farther back in the generations of the 
Doves. But the good garrulous son of Garci- 
lasso my Lord (Heaven rest the soul of the 
Princess who bore him, — for Peru has 
never produced any thing else half so pre- 
cious as his delightful books,) — the Inca- 
blooded historian himself, I say, was not 
more anxious to avoid that failing than I 
am. Forgive me, Reader, if I should have 
fallen into an opposite error ; forgive me if 
in the fear of saying too much I should have 
said too little. I have my misgivings : — I 
may have run upon Scylla while striving to 
avoid Charybdis. Much interesting matter 
have I omitted ; much have I passed by on 
which I " cast a longing lingering look be- 
hind ; " — much which might worthily find a 
place in the History of Yorkshire ; — or of 
the West Riding (if that history were tri- 
partitively distributed ;) — or in the Gentle- 
man's Magazine ; — or in John Nichols's Il- 
lustrations of the Literary History of the 
Eighteenth Century : (I honour John Ni- 
chols, I honour Mr. Urban!) — much more 
might it have had place — much more might 
it be looked for here ! 

I might have told thee, Reader, of Daniel 
the Grandfather, and of Abigail his second 
wife, who once tasted tea in the house- 
keeper's apartments at Skipton Castle ; and 
of the Great Grandfather who at the age of 
twenty-eight died of the small-pox, and was 
the last of the family that wore a leathern 
jerkin ; and of his father Daniel the atavus, 
who was the first of the family that shaved, 
and who went with his own horse and arms 
to serve in that brave troop, which during 
the wreck of the King's party the heir of 
Lowther raised for the loyal cause : and of 
that Daniel's Grandfather, (the tritavus) 
who going to Kenttnere to bring home a 



wife was converted from the Popish super- 
stition by falling in with Bernard Gilpin on 
the way. That apostolic man was so well 
pleased with his convert, that he gave him 
his own copy of Latimer's sermons, — that 
copy which was one of our Daniel's Sunday 
books, and which was religiously preserved 
in reverence for this ancestor, and for the 
Apostle of the North (as Bernard Gilpin 
was called), whose autograph it contained. 

The history of any private family, how- 
ever humble, could it be fully related for 
five or six generations, would illustrate the 
state and progress of society better than 
could be done by the most elaborate disser- 
tation. And the History of the Doves 
might be rendered as interesting and as in- 
structive as that of the Seymours or the 
Howards. Frown not, my Lord of Norfolk, 
frown not, your Grace of Somerset, when I 
add, that it would contain less for their de- 
scendants to regret. 



CHAPTER XII. P. I. 

A HISTORY NOTICED WHICH IS WRITTEN 
BACKWARD. THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES 
AN ESPECIAL EVLL FOR SCHOOLBOYS. 

For never in the long and tedious tract 
Of slavish grammar was I made to plod ; 

No tyranny of Rules my patience rackt ; 
I served no prenticehood to any Rod ; 

But in the freedom of the Practic way 

Learnt to go right, even when I went astray. 

Dr. Beaumont. 

It has been the general practice of his- 
torians, from the time of Moses, to begin at 
the beginning of their subject : but as a 
river may be traced either from its sources 
or its mouth, so it appears that a history 
may be composed in the reversed order of 
its chronology; and a French author of very 
considerable ability and great learning has 
actually written a history of the Christian 
religion from his own times upwards. It 
forms part of an elaborate and extensive 
work entitled Parallele des Religions, which 
must have been better known than it ap- 
pears to be at present if it had not happened 
to be published in Paris during the most 



32 



THE DOCTOR. 



turbulent year of the Revolution. Perhaps 
if I had carried back the memoirs of the 
Dove family, I might have followed his ex- 
ample in choosing the up-hill way, and have 
proceeded from son to father in the ascend- 
ing line. But having resolved (whether 
judiciously or not) not to go farther back in 
these family records than the year of our 
Lord 1723, being the year of the Doctor's 
birth, I shall continue in the usual course, 
and pursue his history ah incundbulis down 
to that important evening on which we find 
him now reaching out his hand to take that 
cup of tea which Mrs. Dove has just creamed 
and sugared for him. After all the beaten 
way is usually the best, and always the 
safest. "He ought to be well mounted," 
says Aaron Hill, " who is for leaping the 
hedges of custom." For myself I am not 
so adventurous a horseman as to take the 
hazards of a steeple chace. 

Proceeding, therefore, afW the model of 
a Tyburn biography, which being an ancient 
as well as popular form is likely to be the 
best, — we come after birth and parentage 
to education. " That the world from Babel 
was scattered into divers tongues, we need 
not other proof," says a grave and good 
author, " than as Diogenes proved that there 
is motion, — by walking ; — so we may see 
the confusion of languages by our confused 
speaking. Once all the earth was of one 
tongue, one speech and one consent ; for 
they all spake in the holy tongue wherein 
the world was created in the beginning. 
But pro peccato dissentionis humance (as saith 
St. Austin,) — for the sin of men disagree- 
ing, — not only different dispositions but 
also different languages came into the world. 
— They came to Babel with a disagreeing 
agreement ; and they came away punished 
with a speechless speech. They disagree 
among themselves, while every one strives 
for dominion. They agree against God in 
their Nagnavad Ian Liguda, — we will make 
< mi-si 'Ives a rendezvous for idolatry. But 
they come away speaking to each other, but 
Dot understood of each other; and so speak 
to no more purpose than if they spake not 
:if all. This punishment of theirs at Babel 



is like Adam's corruption, hereditary to us ; 
for we never come under the rod at the 
Grammar School, but we smart for our 
ancestor's rebellion at Babel." 

Light lie the earth upon the bones of 
Richard Guy, the Schoolmaster of Ingleton ! 
He never consumed birch enough in his 
vocation to have made a besom ; and his 
ferule was never applied unless when some 
moral offence called for a chastisement that 
would be felt. There is a closer connection 
between good-nature and good sense than 
is commonly supposed. A sour ill-tem- 
pered pedagogue would have driven Daniel 
through the briars and brambles of the 
Grammar and foundered him in its sloughs ; 
Guy led him gently along the green-sward. 
He felt that childhood should not be made 
altogether a season of painful acquisition, 
and that the fruits of the sacrifices then 
made are uncertain as to the account to 
which they may be turned, and are also 
liable to the contingencies of life at least, if 
not otherwise jeopardized. " Puisque le 
jour pent lui manquer, laissons le un peu 
jouir de VAurore ! " The precept which 
warmth of imagination inspired in Jean 
Jacques was impressed upon Guy's practice 
by gentleness of heart. He never crammed 
the memory of his pupil with such horrific 
terms as Prothesis, Aphaeresis, Epenthesis, 
Syncope, Paragoge, and Apocope ; never 
questioned him concerning Appositio, Evo- 
catio, Syllepsis, Prolepsis, Zeugma, Syn- 
thesis, Antiptosis, and Synecdoche ; never 
attempted to deter him (as Lily says boys 
are above all things to be deterred) from 
those faults which Lily also says, seem al- 
most natural to the English, — the heinous 
faults of Iotacism, Lambdacism, (which Al- 
cibiades affected,) — Ischnotesism, Trauli'sm 
and Plateasm. But having grounded him 
well in the nouns and verbs, and made him 
understand the concords, he then followed 
in part the excellent advice of Lily thus 
given in his address to the Reader : 

"When these concords be well known 
unto them (an easy and pleasant pain, if the 
foregrounds be well and thoroughly beaten 
in) let them not continue in learning of the 



THE DOCTOR. 



rules orderly, as they lie in their Syntax, 
but rather learn some pretty book wherein 
is contained not only the eloquence of the 
tongue, but also a good plain lesson of 
honesty and godliness ; and thereof take 
some little sentence as it lieth, and learn to 
make the same first out of English into 
Latin, not seeing the book, or construing it 
thereupon. And if there fall any necessary 
rule of the Syntax to be known, then to 
learn it, as the occasion of the sentence 
giveth cause that day ; which sentence once 
made well, and as nigh as may be with the 
words of the book, then to take the book 
and construe it ; and so shall he be less 
troubled with the parsing of it, and easiliest 
carry his lesson in mind." 

Guy followed this advice in part ; and in 
part he deviated from it, upon Lily's own 
authority, as "judging that the most suffi- 
cient way which he saw to be the readiest 
mean ; " while, therefore, he exercised his 
pupil in writing Latin pursuant to this plan, 
he carried him on faster in construing, and 
promoted the boy's progress by gratifying 
his desire of getting forward. When he had 
done with Cordery, Erasmus was taken up, 
— for some of Erasmus's colloquies were in 
those days used as a school book, and the 
most attractive one that could be put into a 
boy's hands. After he had got through this, 
the aid of an English version was laid aside. 
And here Guy departed from the ordinary 
course, not upon any notion that he could 
improve upon it r but merely because he hap- 
pened to possess an old book composed for 
the use of Schools, which was easy enough 
to suit young Daniel's progress in the lan- 
guage, and might therefore save the cost of 
purchasing Justin or Phasdrus or Cornelius 
Nepos, or Eutropius, — to one or other of 
which he would otherwise have been intro- 
duced. 



CHAPTER XIII. P. I. 

A DOUBT CONCERNING SCHOOL BOOKS, WHICH 
WLLE BE DEEMED HERETICAL : AND SOME 
ACCOUNT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY SUBSTI- 
TUTE FOR OVID OR VIRGIL. 

They say it is an ill mason that refuseth any stone ; and 
there is no knowledge but in a skilful hand serves, either 
positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other know- 
ledge. Herbert's Remains. 

I am sometimes inclined to think that pigs 
are brought up upon a wiser system, than 
boys at a grammar school. The Pig is 
allowed to feed upon any kind of offal, how- 
ever coarse, on which he can thrive, till the 
time approaches when pig is to commence 
pork, or take a degree as bacon ; and then 
he is fed daintily. Now it has sometimes 
appeared to me that in like manner, boys 
might acquire their first knowledge of Latin 
from authors very inferior to those which 
are now used in all schools ; provided the 
matter was unexceptionable and the Latinity 
good ; and that they should not be intro- 
duced to the standard works of antiquity 
till they are of an age in some degree to 
appreciate what they read. 

Understand me, Reader, as speaking 
doubtfully, — and that too upon a matter 
of little moment ; for the scholar will return 
in riper years to those authors which are 
worthy of being studied, and as for the 
blockhead — it signifies nothing whether the 
book which he consumes by thumbing it in 
the middle and dog-earing it at the corners 
be worthy or not of a better use. Yet if 
the dead have any cognizance of posthum- 
ous fame, one would think it must abate 
somewhat of the pleasure with which Virgil 
and Ovid regard their earthly immortality, 
when they see to what base purposes their 
productions are applied. That their verses 
should be administered to boys in regular 
doses, as lessons or impositions, and some 
dim conception of their meaning whipt into 
the tail when it has failed to penetrate the 
head, cannot be just the sort of homage to 
their genius which they anticipated or de- 
sired. 



34 



THE DOCTOR. 



Not from any reasonings or refinements 
of this kind, but from the mere accident of 
possessing the book, Guy put into his pupil's 
hands the Dialogues of Johannes Ravisius 
Textor. Jean Tixier, Seigneur de Ravisy, 
in the Nivernois, who thus latinised his 
name, is a person whose works, according to 
Baillet's severe censure, were buried in the 
dust of a few petty colleges and unfre- 
quented shops, more than a century ago. 
He was, however, in his day a person of no 
mean station in the world of letters, having 
been Rector of the University of Paris, at 
the commencement of the sixteenth cen- 
tury ; and few indeed are the writers whose 
books have been so much used; for perhaps 
no other author ever contributed so largely 
to the manufacture of exercises whether in 
prose or verse, and of sermons also. Textor 
may be considered as the first compiler of 
the Gradus ad Parnassum ; and that collec- 
tion of Apophthegms was originally formed 
by him, which Conrade Lycosthenes enlarged 
and re- arranged ; which the Jesuits adopted 
after expurgating it ; and which, during 
many generations, served as one of the 
standard common-place books for common- 
place divines in this country as well as on 
the continent. 

But though Textor was continually work- 
ing in classical literature with a patience 
and perseverance which nothing but the 
delight he experienced in such occupations 
could have sustained, he was without a 
particle of classical taste. His taste was 
that of the age wherein he flourished, 
and these his Dialogues are Moralities in 
Latin verse. The designs and thoughts 
which would have accorded with their lan- 
guage, had they been written either in old 
French or old English, appear, when pre- 
sented in Latinity, which is always that of 
a scholar, and largely interwoven with 
scraps from familiar classics, as strange as 
Harlequin and Pantaloon would do in he- 
roic costume. 

Earth opens the first of these curious 
compositions with a bitter complaint for the 
misfortunes which it is her lot to witness. 
Age (MtoM) overhears the lamentation and 



inquires the cause ; and after a dialogue in 
which the author makes the most liberal use 
of his own common-places, it appears that 
the perishable nature of all sublunary things 
is the cause of this mourning. JEtas en- 
deavours to persuade Terra that her grief 
is altogether unreasonable by such brief and 
cogent observations as Fata jubeut, Fata 
volunt, Ita Diis placitum. Earth asks the 
name of her philosophic consoler, but upon 
discovering it, calls her falsa virago, and 
meretrix, and abuses her as being the very 
author of all the evils that distress her. 
However JEtas succeeds in talking Terra 
into better humour, advises her to exhort 
man that he should not set his heart upon 
perishable things, and takes her leave as 
Homo enters. After a recognition between 
mother and son, Terra proceeds to warn 
Homo against all the ordinary pursuits of 
this world. To convince him of the vanity 
of glory she calls up in succession the ghosts 
of Hector, Achilles, Alexander, and Sam- 
son, who tell their tales and admonish him 
that valour and renown afford no protection 
against Death. To exemplify the vanity of 
beauty Helen, Lais, Thisbe and Lucretia 
are summoned, relate in like manner their 
respective fortunes, and remind him that 
pulvis et umbra sumus. Virgil preaches to 
him upon the emptiness of literary fame. 
Xerxes tells him that there is no avail in 
power, Nero that there is none in tyranny, 
Sardanapalus that there is none in voluptu- 
ousness. But the application which Homo 
makes of all this, is the very reverse to what 
his mother intended: he infers that seeing 
he must die at last, live how he will, the 
best thing he can do is to make a merry 
life of it, so away he goes to dance and revel 
and enjoy himself: and Terra concludes 
with the mournful observation that men 
will still pursue their bane, unmindful of 
their latter end. 

Another of these Moralities begins with 
three Worldlings (Tres Mundani) ringing 
changes upon the pleasures of profligacy, in 
Textor's peculiar manner, each in regular 
succession saying something to the same 
purport in different words. As thus — 



THE DOCTOR. 



35 



Primus Mundanus. 

Si breve tempus abit, 

Secundus Mundanus. 

Si vita caduca recedit; 
Tertius Mundanus. 

Si cadit hora. 

Primus Mundanus. 

Dies abeunt, 
Secundus Mundanus. 
Perit Omne, 
Tertius Mundanus. 
Venit Mors, 
Primus Mundanus. 

Quidnam prodesset jati meminisse futuri ? 
Secundus Mundanus. 

Quidnam prodesset lachrymis consumere vitam f 
Tertius Mundanus. 

Quidnam prodesset tantis incumbere curis ? 

Upon which an unpleasant personage who 
has just appeared to interrupt their tria- 
logue observes, 

Si breve tempus abit, si vita caduca recedit, 

Si cadit hora, dies abeunt, perit omne, venit Mors, 

Quidnam lethijerce Mortis meminisse nocebitf 

It is Mors herself who asks the question. 
The three Worldlings, however, behave as 
resolutely as Don Juan in the old drama ; 
they tell Death that they are young, and 
rich, and active, and vigorous, and set all 
admonition at defiance. Death, or rather 
Mrs. Death, (for Mors, being feminine, is 
called lama, and meretrix, and vi?*ago,) takes 
all this patiently, and letting them go off in 
a dance, calls up Human Nature, who has 
been asleep meantime, and asks her how she 
can sleep in peace while her sons are lead- 
ing a life of dissipation and debauchery? 
Nature very coolly replies by demanding 
why they should not? and Death answers, 
because they must go to the infernal regions 
for so doing. Upon this Nature, who ap- 
pears to be liberally inclined, asks if it is 
credible that any should be obliged to go 
there ? and Death, to convince her, calls up 
a soul from bale to give an account of his 
own sufferings. A dreadful account this 
Damnatus gives ; and when Nature, shocked 
at what she hears, inquires if he is the only 
one who is tormented in Orcus, Damnatus 
assures her that hardly one in a thousand 
goes to Heaven, but that his fellow-sufferers 
are in number numberless ; and he specifies 
among them Kings and Popes, and Senators, 
and severe Schoolmasters, — a class of men 
whom Textor seems to have held in great 



and proper abhorrence — as if like poor 
Thomas Tusser he had suffered under their 
inhuman discipline. 

Horrified at this, Nature asks advice of 
Mors, and Mors advises her to send a Son 
of Thunder round the world, who should 
reprove the nations for their sins, and sow 
the seeds of virtue by his preaching. Pere- 
grinus goes upon this mission and returns to 
give an account of it. Nothing can be worse 
than the report. As for the Kings of the 
Earth, it would be dangerous, he says, to 
say what they were doing. The Popes suf- 
fered the ship of Peter to go wherever the 
winds carried it. Senators were won by in- 
tercession or corrupted by gold. Doctors 
spread their nets in the temples for prey, 
and Lawyers were dumb unless their tongues 
were loosened by money. — Had he seen the 
Italians ? — Italy was full of dissensions, 
ripe for war, and defiled by its own infamous 
vice. The Spaniards?— They were suckled 
by Pride. The English ? — 

Gens tacitis prcegnans arcanis, ardua tentans, 
Edita tartareis mihi creditur esse tenebris. 

In short the Missionary concludes that he 
has found every where an abundant crop of 
vices, and that all his endeavours to pro- 
duce amendment have been like ploughing 
the sea shore. Again afflicted Nature asks 
advice of Mors, and Mors recommends that 
she should call up Justice and send her 
abroad with her scourge to repress the 
wicked. But Justice is found to be so fast 
asleep that no calling can awaken her. 
Mors then advises her to summon Veritas ; 
alas ! unhappy Veritas enters complaining 
of pains from head to foot and in all the in- 
termediate parts, within and without ; she 
is dying and entreats that Nature will call 
some one to confess her. But who shall be 
applied to ? — Kings? They will not come. 
— Nobles ? Veritas is a hateful personage to 
them. — Bishops, or mitred Abbots ? They 
have no regard for Truth. — Some Saint 
from the desert ? Nature knows not where 
to find one ! Poor Veritas therefore dies 
"unhouseled, disappointed, unanealed;" and 
forthwith three Demons enter rejoicing that 
Human Nature is left with none to help her, 



36 



THE DOCTOR. 



and that they are Kings of this world. They 
call in their Ministers, Caro and Voluptas 
and Vitium, and send them to do their work 
among mankind. These successful mission- 
aries return, and relate how well they have 
sped every where ; and the Demons being 
by this time hungry, after washing in due 
form, and many ceremonious compliments 
among themselves, sit down to a repast 
which their ministers have provided. The 
bill of fare was one which Beelzebub's Court 
of Aldermen might have approved. There 
were the brains of a fat monk, — a roasted 
Doctor of Divinity who afforded great satis- 
faction, — a King's sirloin, — some broiled 
Pope's fle-h, and part of a Schoolmaster ; 
the joint is not specified, but I suppose it to 
have been the rump. Then came a Senator's 
lights and a Lawyer's tongue. 

When they have eaten of these dainties 
till the distended stomach can hold no more, 
Virtus comes in, and seeing them send off the 
fragments to their Tartarean den, calls upon 
mankind to bestow some sustenance upon 
her, for she is tormented with hunger. The 
Demons and their ministers insult her and 
drive her into banishment ; they tell Nature 
that to-morrow the great King of Orcus will 
come and carry her away in chains ; off they 
go in a dance, and Nature concludes the 
piece by saying that what they have threat- 
ened must happen, unless Justice shall be 
awakened, Virtue fed, and Veritas restored 
to life by the sacred book. 

There are several other Dialogues in a 
similar strain of fiction. The rudest and 
perhaps oldest specimen of this style is to 
be found in Pierce Ploughman, the most 
polished in Cahleron, the most popular in 
John Ijunyan's Holy War, and above all in 
his Pilgrim's Progress. It appears from the 
Dialogues that they were not composed for 
the use of youth alone as a school book, but 
were represented at College ; and poor as 
they are in point of composition, the oddity 
of their combinations, and the wholesome 
honesty of their satire, were well adapted to 
strike young imaginations and make an im- 
pression there which better and wiser works 
uii.-lit have failed to leave. 



A schoolmaster who had been regularly 
bred would have regarded such a book with 
scorn, and discerning at once its obvious 
faults, would have been incapable of per- 
ceiving any thing which might compensate 
for them. But Guy was not educated well 
enough to despise a writer like old Textor. 
What he knew himself, he had picked up 
where and how he could, in bye ways and 
corners. The book was neither in any re- 
spect above his comprehension, nor below 
his taste ; and Joseph Warton, never rolled 
off the hexameters of Virgil or Homer, ore 
rotunda, with more delight, when expatiating 
with all the feelings of a scholar and a poet 
upon their beauties, to such pupils as Head- 
ley and Russell and Bowles, than Guy para- 
phrased these rude but striking allegories to 
his delighted Daniel. 



CHAPTER XIV. P. I. 

AN OBJECTION ANSWERED. 

Is this then your wonder ? 
Nay then you shall under- 
stand more of my skill. Ben Jonson. 

" This account of Textor's Dialogues," says 
a critical -Reader, " might have done very 
well for the Retrospective Review, or one of 
the Magazines, or DTsraeli's Curiosities of 
Literature. But no one would have looked 
for it here, where it is completely out of 
place." 

" My good Sir, there is quite enough left 
untouched in Textor to form a very amusing- 
paper for the journal which you have men- 
tioned, and the Editor, may thank you for 
the hint. But you are mistaken in thinking 
that what has been said of those Dialogues 
is out of place here. May I ask what you 
expected in these volumes ? " 

" What the Title authorised me to look 
for," 

>' Do you know, Sir, what mutton broth 
means at a city breakfast on the Lord 
Mayor's Day, mutton broth being the ap- 
pointed breakfast for that festival? It 
means according to established usage — by 



THE DOCTOR. 



37 



liberal interpretation — mutton broth and 
every thing else that can be wished for at a 
breakfast. So, Sir, you have here not only 
■what the title seems to specify, but every 
thing else that can be wished for in a book. 
In treating of the Doctor, it treats de omnibus 
rebus et quibusdam aliis. It is the Doctor 
&c, and that &c, like one of Lyttleton's, 
implies every thing that can be deduced 
from the words preceding. 

But I maintain that the little which has 
been said of comical old Textor (for it is 
little compared to what his Dialogues con- 
tain) strictly relates to the main thread of 
this most orderly and well-compacted work. 
You will remember that I am now replying 
to the question proposed in the third chap- 
ter P. I. " Who was the Doctor ? " And 
as he who should undertake to edite the 
works of Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespear 
would not be qualified for the task, unless 
he had made himself conversant with the 
writings of those earlier authors, from whose 
storehouses (as far as they drew from books) 
their minds were fed ; so it behoved me (as 
far as my information and poor abilitj ex- 
tend) to explain in what manner so rare a 
character as Dr. Dove's was formed. 

Quo semel est imbuta recens, — you know 
the rest of the quotation, Sir. And perhaps 
you may have tasted water out of a beery 
glass, — which it is not one or two rinsings 
that can purify. 

You have seen yew trees cut into the 
forms of pyramids, chess-kings, and pea- 
cocks : — nothing can be more unlike their 
proper growth — and yet no tree except the 
yew could take the artificial figures so well. 
The garden passes into the possession of 
some new owner who has no taste for such 
ornaments : the yews are left to grow at 
their own will; they lose the preposterous 
shape which had been forced upon them, 
without recovering that of their natural 
growth, and what was formal becomes gro- 
tesque — a word which may be understood 
as expressing the incongruous combination 
of formality with extravagance or wildness. 

The intellectual education which young 
Daniel received at home was as much out of 



the ordinary course as the book in which he 
studied at school. Robinson Crusoe had not 
yet reached Ingleton. Sandford and Merton 
had not been written, nor that history of 
Pecksey and Flapsey and the Robin's Nest, 
which is the prettiest fiction that ever was 
composed for children, and for which its 
excellent authoress will one day rank high 
among women of genius when time shall 
have set its seal upon desert. The only 
book within his reach, of all those which 
now come into the hands of youth, was the 
Pilgrim's Progress, and this he read at first 
without a suspicion of its allegorical import. 
What he did not understand was as little 
remembered as the sounds of the wind, or 
the motions of the passing clouds ; but the 
imagery and the incidents took possession of 
his memory and his heart. After a while 
Textor became an interpreter of the im- 
mortal Tinker, and the boy acquired as 
much of the meaning by glimpses as was 
desirable, enough to render some of the per- 
sonages more awful by spiritualising them, 
while the tale itself remained as a reality. 
Oh ! what blockheads are those wise persons 
who think it necessary that a child should 
comprehend every thing it reads ! 



CHAPTER XV. P. I. 

THE AUTHOR VENTURES AN OPINION AGAINST 
THE PREVAILING WISDOM OP MAKING 
CHILDREN PREMATURELY WISE. 

Pray you, use your freedom ; 
And so far, if you please allow me mine, 
To hear you only ; not to be compelled 
To take your moral potions. Massinger. 

" What, Sir," exclaims a Lady, who is 
bluer than ever one of her naked and woad- 
stained ancestors appeared at a public 
festival in full dye, — " what, Sir, do you 
tell us that children are not to be made to 
understand what they are taught?" And 
she casts her eyes complacently toward an 
assortment of those books which so many 
writers, male and female, some of the in- 
fidel, some of the semi-fidel, and some of the 
super-fidel schools have composed for the 



38 



THE DOCTOR. 



laudable purpose of enabling children to 
understand every thing. — " What, Sir," 
she repeats, " are we to make our children 
learn things by rote like parrots, and fill 
their heads with words to which they cannot 
attach any signification ? " 

" Yes, Madam, in very many cases." 

" I should like, Sir, to be instructed 
why?" 

She says this in a tone, and with an ex- 
pression both of eyes and lips, which plainly 
show, in direct opposition to the words, that 
the Lady thinks herself much fitter to in- 
struct, than to be instructed. It is not her 
fault. She is a good woman, and naturally a 
sensible one, but she has been trained up in 
the way women should not go. She has 
been carried from lecture to lecture, like a 
student who is being crammed at a Scotch 
University. She has attended lectures on 
chemistry, lectures on poetry, lectures on 
phrenology, lectures on mnemonics ; she has 
read the latest and most applauded essays 
on Taste : she has studied the newest and 
most approved treatises practical and theo- 
retical upon Education : she has paid suf- 
ficient attention to metaphysics to know 
as much as a professed philosopher about 
matter and spirit: she is a proficient in 
political economy, and can discourse upon 
the new science of population. Poor Lady, 
it would require large draughts of Lethe to 
clear out all this undigested and undiges- 
tible trash, and fit her for becoming what 
she might have been ! Upon this point, how- 
ever, it may be practicable to set her right. 

"You are a mother, Madam, and a good 
one. In caressing your infants you may 
perhaps think it unphilosophioal to use what 
I should call the proper and natural language 
of the nursery. But doubtless you talk to 
them ; you give some utterance to your 
feelings ; and whether that utterance be in 
legitimate and wise words, or in good ex- 
temporaneous nonsense, it is alike to the 
child. The conventional words convey no 
more meaning to him than the mere sound ; 
but he understands from cither all that is 
meant, all that you wish him to understand, 
all that is to he understood. He knows 



that it is an expression of your love and 
tenderness, and that he is the object of it. 

" So too it continues after he is advanced 
from infancy into childhood. When children 
are beginning to speak they do not and 
cannot affix any meaning to half the words 
which they hear ; yet they learn their 
mother tongue. What I say is, do not 
attempt to force their intellectual growth. 
Do not feed them with meat till they have 
teeth to masticate it. 

" There is a great deal which they ought 
to learn, can learn, and must learn, before 
they can or ought to understand it. How 
many questions must you have heard from 
them which you have felt to be best answered, 
when they were with most dexterity put 
aside ! Let me tell you a story which the 
Jesuit Manuel de Vergara used to tell of 
himself. When he was a little boy he asked 
a Dominican Friar what was the meaning of 
the seventh commandment, for he said he 
could not tell what committing adultery was. 
The Friar not knowing how to answer, cast 
a perplexed look round the room, and think- 
ing he had found a safe reply pointed to a 
kettle on the fire, and said the Command- 
ment meant that he must never put his hand 
in the pot while it was boiling. The very 
next day, a loud scream alarmed the family, 
and behold there was little Manuel running 
about the room holding up his scalded finger, 
and exclaiming " Oh dear, oh dear, I've 
committed adultery ! I've committed adul 
tery ! I've committed adultery ! " 



CHAPTER XVI. P. I. 

USE AND ABUSE OF STORIES IN REASOrNING, 
WITH A WORD IN BEHALF OF CHIMNEY- 
SWEEPERS AND IN REPROOF OF THE EARL 
OF LAUDERDALE. 

My particular inclination moves me in controversy 
especially to approve his choice that said, Jortia mallem 
quamformosa. Dr. Jackson. 

I ended that last chapter with a story, and 
though " I say it who should not say it," it 
is a good story well applied. Of what use a 
story may be even in the most serious de- 
bates may be seen from the circulation of 



THE DOCTOR. 



39 



old Joes in Parliament, which are as current 
there as their sterling namesakes used to be 
in the city some threescore years ago. A 
jest, though it should be as stale as last 
week's newspaper, and as flat as Lord Floun- 
der's face, is sure to be received with laughter 
by the Collective Wisdom of the Nation : 
nay, it is sometimes thrown out like a tub to 
the whale, or like a trail of carrion to draw 
off hounds from the scent. 

The Bill which should have put an end to 
the inhuman practice of employing children 
to sweep chimneys, was thrown out on the 
third reading in the House of Lords (having 
passed the Commons without a dissentient 
voice) by a speech from Lord Lauderdale, 
the force of which consisted in, literally, a 
Joe Millar jest. He related that an Irish- 
man used to sweep his chimney by letting 
a rope down, which was fastened round the 
legs of a goose, and then pulling the goose 
after it. A neighbour to whom he recom- 
mended this as a convenient mode objected 
to it upon the score of cruelty to the goose : 
upon which he replied, that a couple of 
ducks might do as well. Now if the Bill 
before the house had been to enact that men 
should no longer sweep chimneys but that 
boys should be used instead, the story would 
have been applicable. It was no other- 
wise applicable than as it related to 
chimney- sweeping : but it was a joke, and 
that sufficed. The Lords laughed ; his 
Lordship had the satisfaction of throwing 
out the Bill, and the home Negro trade has 
continued from that time, now seven years, 
till this day, and still continues. His Lord- 
ship had his jest, and it is speaking within 
compass to say that in the course of those 
seven years two thousand children have 
been sacrificed in consequence. 

The worst actions of Lord Lauderdale's 
worst ancestor admit of a better defence 
before God and Man. 

Had his Lordship perused the evidence 
which had been laid before the House of 
Commons when the Bill was brought in, 
upon which evidence the Bill was founded ? 
Was he aware of the shocking barbarities 
connected with the trade, and inseparable 



from it ? Did he know that children in- 
evitablv lacerate themselves in learning: this 



dreadful occupati 



that they are fre- 



quently crippled by it? frequently lose 
their lives in it by suffocation, or by slow 
fire ? that it induces a peculiar and dread- 
ful disease ? that they who survive the 
accumulated hardships of a childhood during 
which they are exposed to every kind of 
misery, and destitute of every kind of com- 
fort, have at the age of seventeen or eighteen 
to seek their living how they can in some 
other employment, — for it is only by chil- 
dren that this can be carried on ? Did his 
Lordship know that girls as well as boys are 
thus abused ? that their sufferings begin at 
the age of six, sometimes a year earlier ? 
finally that they are sold to this worst and 
most inhuman of all slaveries, and sometimes 
stolen for the purpose of being sold to it ? 

I bear no ill-will towards Lord Lauder- 
dale, either personally or politically: far 
from it. His manly and honourable conduct 
on the Queen's trial, when there was such an 
utter destitution of honour in many quarters 
where it was believed to exist, and so fearful 
a want of manliness where it ought to have 
been found, entitles him to the respect and 
gratitude of every true Briton. But I will 
tell his Lordship that rather than have 
spoken as he did against an act which would 
have lessened the sum of wickedness and 
suffering in this country, — rather than have 
treated a question of pure humanity with 
contempt and ridicule, — rather than have 
employed my tongue for such a purpose and 

with such success, I would But no: 

I will not tell him how I had concluded. I 
will not tell him what I had added in the 
sincerity of a free tongue and an honest heart. 
I leave the sentence imperfect rather than 
that any irritation which the strength of my 
language might excite should lessen the 
salutary effects of self-condemnation. 

James Montgomery ! these remarks are too 
late for a place in thy Chimney Sweepers' 
Friend : but insert them, I pray thee, in thy 
newspaper, at the request of one who ad- 
mires and loves thee as a Poet, honours and 
respects thee as a man, and reaches out in 



40 



THE DOCTOR. 



spirit at this moment a long arm to shake 
hands with thee in cordial good will. 

My compliments to you, Mr. Bowring! 
your little poem in Montgomery's benevolent 
album is in a strain of* true poetry and 
right feeling. None but a man of genius 
could have struck off such stanzas upon such 
a theme. But when you wrote upon Hu- 
manity at Home, the useful reflection might 
have occurred that Patriotism has no busi- 
ness abroad. Whatever cause there may be 
to wish for amendment in the government 
and institutions of other countries, keep 
aloof from all revolutionary schemes for 
amending them, lest you should experience 
a far more painful disappointment in their 
success than in their failure. No spirit of 
prophecy is required for telling you that 
this must be the result. Lay not up that 
cause of remorse for yourself, and time will 
ripen in you what is crude, confirm what is 
right, and gently rectify all that is erro- 
neous ; it will abate your political hopes, 
and enlarge your religious faith, and stablish 
both upon a sure foundation. My good 
wishes and sincere respects to you, Mr. 
Bowrine ! 



INTERCHAPTEB, II. 

ABALLIBOOZOBANGANORRIBO. 

Io 7 dico dunque, e dicol che ognun nCode. 

Benedetto Varchi. 

Whether the secret of the Freemasons be 
comprised in the mystic word above is more 
than I think proper to reveal at present. 
But I have broken no vow in uttering it. 

And I am the better for having uttered 
it. 

Mahomet begins some of the chapters of 
the Koran with certain letters of unknown 
signification, and the commentators say that 
the meaning of these initials ought not to be 
inquired. So Gelaleddin says, so sayeth 
Taleb. And they say truly. Some begin 
with A. L. M. Some with K. H. I. A. S. ; 
some with T. II. ; — T. S. M. ; — T. S. or 
I. S. others with K. M.; — H. M. A. S. K.; 
— N. M. ; — a single Kaf, a single Nun or 



a single Sad, and sad work would it be 
either for Kaffer or Mussulman to search 
for meaning where none is. Gelaleddin 
piously remarks that there is only One who 
knoweth the import of these letters ; — I 
reverence the name which he uses too much 
to employ it upon this occasion. Mahomet 
himself tells us that they are the signs of the 
Book which teacheth the true doctrine, — 
the Book of the Wise, — the Book of 
Evidence, the Book of Instruction. When 
he speaketh thus of the Koran he lieth like 
an impostor as he is : but what he has said 
falsely of that false book may be applied 
truly to this. It is the Book of Instruction 
inasmuch as every individual reader among 
the thousands and tens of thousands who 
peruse it will find something in it which he 
did not know before. It is the Book of 
Evidence because of its internal truth. It 
is the Book of the Wise, because the wiser a 
man is the more he will delight therein ; 
yea, the delight which he shall take in it 
will be the measure of his intellectual capa- 
city. And that it teacheth the true doctrine 
is plain from this circumstance, that I defy 
the British Critic, the Antijacobin, the 
Quarterly and the Eclectic Reviews, — ay, 
and the Evangelical, the Methodist, the 
Baptist, and the Orthodox Churchman's Ma- 
gazine, with the Christian Observer to boot, 
to detect any one heresy in it. Therefore I 
say again, 

Aballiboozobanganorribo, 

and, like Mahomet, I say that it is the Sign 
of the Book ; and therefore it is that I have 
said it ; 

Kondimen ne la lingua degli Hebrei 
Ni la Latina, ve la Grrca antica, 
Ne quella forse ancor degli Aramei.* 

Happen it may, — for things not less 
strange have happened, and what has been 
may be again ; — for maybe and has been 
are only tenses of the same verb, and that 
verb is eternally being declined : Hap- 
pen I say it may ; and peradventure if it 
may it must ; and certainly if it must it will : 
— but what with indicatives and subjunc- 

* MOLZA. 



THE DOCTOR 



41 



lives, presents, prceterperfects and paulo- 
post-futura, the parenthesis is becoming too 
long for the sentence, and I must begin it 
again. A prudent author should never 
exact too much from the breath or the 
attention of his reader, — to say nothing of 
the brains. 

Happen then it may that this Book may 
outlive Lord Castlereagh's Peace, Mr. Pitt's 
reputation (we will throw Mr. Fox's into the 
bargain) ; Mr. Locke's Metaphysics, and the 
Regent's Bridge in St. James's Park. It 
may outlive the eloquence of Burke, the 
discoveries of Davy, the poems of Words- 
worth, and the victories of Wellington. It 
may outlive the language in which it is 
written ; and, in heaven knows what year of 
heaven knows what era, be discovered by 
some learned inhabitant of that continent 
which the insects who make coral and ma- 
drepore are now, and from the beginning 
of the world have been, fabricating in the 
Pacific Ocean. It may be dug up among 
the ruins of London, and considered as one 
of the sacred books of the sacred Island of 
the West, — for I cannot but hope that some 
reverence will always be attached to this 
most glorious and most happy island when 
its power and happiness and glory, like those 
of Greece, shall have passed away. It may 
be deciphered and interpreted, and give 
occasion to a new religion called Dovery or 
Danielism, which may have its Chapels, 
Churches, Cathedrals, Abbeys, Priories, Mo- 
nasteries, Nunneries, Seminaries, Colleges, 
and Universities ; — its Synods, Consistories, 
Convocations, and Councils ; — its Acolytes, 
Sacristans, Deacons, Priests, Archdeacons, 
Rural Deans, Chancellors, Prebends, Canons, 
Deans, Bishops, Archbishops, Prince Bishops, 
Primates, Patriarchs, Cardinals, and Popes; 
its most Catholic Kings, and its Kings most 
Dovish or most Danielish. It may have 
Commentators and Expounders — (who can 
doubt that it will have them ?) — who will 
leave unenlightened that which is dark, and 
darken that which is clear. Various inter- 
pretations will be given, and be followed by 
as many sects. Schisms must ensue ; and 
the tragedies, comedies, and farces, with all 



the varieties of tragi-comedy and tragi-farce 
or farcico -tragedy which have been repre- 
sented in this old world, be enacted in that 
younger one. Attack on the one side, de- 
fence on the other ; high Dovers and low 
Dovers; Danielites of a thousand unima- 
gined and unimaginable denominations ; 
schisms, heresies, seditions, persecutions, 
wars, — the dismal game of Puss-catch- 
corner played by a nation instead of a family 
of children, and in dreadful earnest, when 
power, property, and life are to be won and 
lost ! 

But, without looking so far into the future 
history of Dovery, let me exhort the learned 
Australian to whom the honour is reserved 
of imparting this treasure to his countrymen, 
that he abstain from all attempts at disco- 
vering the mysteries of Aballiboozobanga- 
norribo ! The unapocalyptical arcana of 
that stupendous vocable are beyond his 
reach ; — so let him rest assured. Let him 
not plunge into the fathomless depths of 
that great word ; let him not attempt to 
soar to its unapproachable heights. Perhaps, 
— and surely no man of judgement will sup- 
pose that I utter any thing lightly, — per- 
haps, if the object were attainable, he might 
have cause to repent its attainment. If too 
" little learning be a dangerous thing," too 
much is more so ; 

II saper troppo qualcke volta nuoce.* 

" Curiosity," says Fuller, " is a kernel of 
the Forbidden Fruit, which still sticketh in 
the throat of a natural man, sometimes to 
the danger of his choaking." 

There is a knowledge which is forbidden 
because it is dangerous. Remember the 
Apple ! Remember the beautiful tale of 
Cupid and Psyche ! Remember Cornelius 
Agrippa's library ; the youth who opened in 
unhappy hour his magical volume ; and the 
choice moral which Southey, who always 
writes so morally, hath educed from that 
profitable story ! Remember Bluebeard ! 
But I am looking far into futurity. Blue- 
beard may be forgotten ; Southey may be 



MOLZA. 



42 



THE DOCTOR. 



forgotten; Cornelius Agrippa may be no 
more remembered ; Cupid and Psyche may 
be mere names which shall have outlived 
all tales belonging to them; Adam and 
Eve — Enough. 

Eat beans, if thou wilt, in spite of Pytha- 
goras. Eat bacon with them, for the Levi- 
tical law hath been abrogated : and indulge 
in black-puddings, if thou likest such food, 
though there be Methodists who prohibit 
them as sinful. But abstain from Aballi- 
boozobansanorribo. 



CHAPTER XVII. P. I. 

ft 

THE HAPPINESS OF HAVING A CATHOLIC 

TASTE. 

There's no want of meat, Sir ; 
Portly and curious viands are prepared 
To please all kinds of appetites. Massinger. 

A fastidious taste is like a squeamish ap- 
petite ; the one has its origin in some disease 
of mind, as the other has in some ailment 
of the stomach. Your true lover of litera- 
ture is never fastidious. I do not mean the 
helluo librorum, the swinish feeder, who 
thinks that every name which is to be found 
in a title-page, or on a tombstone, ought to 
be rescued from oblivion ; nor those first 
cousins of the moth, who labour under a 
bulimy for black-letter, and believe every 
thing to be excellent which was written in 
the' reign of Elizabeth. I mean the man of 
robust and healthy intellect, who gathers the 
harvest of literature into his barns, threshes 
the straw, winnows the grain, grinds it at 
his own mill, bakes it in his own oven, and 
then eats the true bread of knowledge. If 
In- bake his loaf upon a cabbage leaf, and 
eat onions with his bread and cheese, let 
who will find fault with him for his taste, — 
not I! 

The Doves, father as well as son, were 
blest with a hearty intellectual appetite, and 
:i Btrong digestion: but the son had the 
more catholic taste. lie would have relished 
caviare ; would have ventured upon layer 
undeterred by its appearance — and would 
have liked it. 



What an excellent thing did God bestow on man, 
"When he did give him a good stomach ! * 

He would have eaten sausages for break- 
fast at Norwich, sally-luns at Bath, sweet 
butter in Cumberland, orange marmalade 
at Edinburgh, Findon haddocks at Aber- 
deen, and drunk punch with beef-steaks to 
oblige the French if they insisted upon 
obliging him with a dejeuner a VAngloise. 

A good digestion turneth all to health. f 

He would have eaten squab -pie in De- 
vonshire, and the pie which is squabber 
than squab in Cornwall ; sheep's head with 
the hair on in Scotland, and potatoes roasted 
on the hearth in Ireland ; frogs with the 
French, pickled herrings with the Dutch, 
sour-krout with the Germans, maccaroni 
with the Italians, aniseed with the Spaniards, 
garlic with any body; horse-flesh with the 
Tartars; ass-flesh with the Persians; dogs 
with the North Western American Indians, 
curry with the Asiatic East Indians, birds' 
nests with the Chinese, mutton roasted with 
honey with the Turks, pismire cakes on the 
Orinoco, and turtle and venison with the 
Lord Mayor ; and the turtle and venison he 
would have preferred to all the other dishes, 
because his taste, though catholic, was not 
indiscriminating. ^ He would have tried all, 
tasted all, thriven upon all, and lived content- 
edly and cheerfully upon either, but he would 
have liked best that which was best. And his 
intellectual appetite had the same happy 
Catholicism. 

He would not have said with Euphues, 
" If I be in Crete, I can lie ; if in Greece, I 
can shift ; if in Italy, I can court it : " but 
he might have said with him, " I can carouse 
with Alexander; abstain with Romulus; 
eat with the Epicure ; fast with the Stoic ; 
sleep with Endymion ; watch with Chry- 
sippus." 

The reader will not have forgotten, I 
trust, (but if he should I now remind him 
of it,) that in the brief inventory of Daniel's 
library there appeared some odd volumes of 
that " book full of Pantagruelism," the in- 



Beaumont and Fletcher. 



f Herbert. 



THE DOCTOR. 



43 



estimable life of the Great Gargantua. The 
elder Daniel could make nothing of this 
book ; and the younger, who was about ten 
years old when he began to read it, less than 
he could of the Pilgrim's Progress. But he 
made out something. 

Young Daniel was free from all the isms 
in Lily, and from rhotacism to boot ; he was 
clear too of schism, and all the worse isms 
which have arisen from it : having by the 
blessing of Providence been bred up not in 
any denomination ending in ist or inian, or 
erian or arian, but as a dutiful and con- 
tented son of the Church of England. In 
humour, however, he was by nature a Pan- 
tagruelist. And, indeed, in his mature years 
he always declared that one of the reasons 
which had led him to reject the old hu- 
moral pathology was, that it did not include 
Pantagruelism, which, he insisted, depended 
neither upon heat or cold, moisture or dry- 
ness, nor upon any combination of those 
qualities ; but was itself a peculiar and ele- 
mentary humour ; a truth, he said, of which 
he was feelingly and experimentally con- 
vinced, and lauded the gods therefore. 

Mr. Wordsworth, in that poem which Mr. 
Jeffrey has said won't do — (Mr. Jeffrey is 
always lucky in his predictions whether as 
a politician or a critic, — bear witness, Wel- 
lington ! bear witness, Wordsworth and 
Southey ! bear witness, Elia and Lord 
Byron !) — Mr. Wordsworth, in that poem 
which 

The high and tender Muses shall accept 
With gracious smile deliberately pleased, 
And listening Time reward with sacred praise : 

Mr. Wordsworth, in that noble poem, ob- 
serves, * 

Oh many are the Poets that are sown 
By nature ! 

Among the emblems of Daniel Heinsius 
— (look at his head, reader, if thou hast a 
collection of portraits to refer to, and thou 
wilt marvel how so queer a conceit should 
have entered it, for seldom has there been a 
face more gnarled and knotted with crabbed 
cogitation than that of this man, who was 
one of the last of the Giants;) — among his 
emblems, I say, is one which represents 



Cupid sowing a field, and little heads spring- 
ing out of the ground on all sides, some up 
to the neck, others to the shoulders, and 
some with the arms out. If the crop were 
examined, I agree with Mr. Wordsworth, 
that poets should be found there as thick as 
darnel in the corn ; — and grave counsellors 
would not be wanting whose advice would 
be that they should be weeded out. 

The Pantagruelists are scarcer. Greece 
produced three great tragic poets, and only 
one Aristophanes. The French had but one 
Rabelais when the seven Pleiades shone in 
their poetical hemisphere. We have seen a 
succession of great Tragedians from Better- 
ton to the present time ; and in all that time 
there has been but one Grimaldi in whom 
the Pantagruelism of Pantomine has found 
its perfect representative. 

And yet the reader must not hastily con- 
clude that I think Pantagruelism a better 
thing than Poetry, because it is rarer ; that 
were imputing to me the common error of 
estimating things by their rarity rather than 
their worth, an error more vulgar than any 
which Sir Thomas Brown has refuted. But 
I do hold this, that all the greatest poets 
have had a spice of Pantagruelism in their 
composition, which I verily believe was es- 
sential to their greatness. What the world 
lost in losing the Margites of Homer we 
know not, we only know that Homer had 
there proved himself a Pantagruelist. Shake- 
spear was a Pantagruelist ; so was Cer- 
vantes ; and till the world shall have produced 
two other men in whom that humour has 
been wanting equal to 'these, I hold my 
point established. 

Some one objects Milton. I thank him 
for the exception ; it is just such an excep- 
tion as proves the rule ; for look only at 
Milton's Limbo and you will see what a glo- 
rious Pantagruelist he might have been, — if 
the Puritans had not spoilt him for Panta- 
gruelism. 



44 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER XVIII. P. I. 
all's well that ends well. 

Tot, y civ inipLvYitrdcd — iino rov "kbyov i%ot,voc.y%,otZ,b[x.ivo$ 
'frifx.vyi<rOvi(roix.ot,i. Herodotus. 

If William Dove had been installed in 
office, with cap and bells and bauble, he 
would have been a Professor of Pantagruel- 
ism, and might have figured in Flogel's 
History of such Professors with Tyll Eulen- 
spiegel, Piovano Arlotto, and Peter the 
Lion ; and in Douce's Illustrations of Shake- 
spear with Muckle John, Rees Pengelding, 
and Robin Rush. The humour lay latent 
till the boy his nephew hit the spring by 
reading to him some of those chapters in 
Rabelais which in their literal grotesqueness 
were level to the capacity of both. These 
readings led to a piece of practical Panta- 
gruelism, for which William would have 
been whipt if he had worn a Fool's coat. 

One unlucky day, Dan was reading to 
him that chapter wherein young Gargantua 
relates the course of experiments which he 
had made with a velvet mask, a leaf of ver- 
vain, his mother's glove, a lappet worked 
with gold thread, a bunch of nettles, and 
other things more or less unfit for the pur- 
pose to which they were applied. To those 
who are acquainted with the history of 
Grandgousier's royal family, I need not 
explain what that purpose was ; nor must I 
to those who are not, (for reasons that re- 
quire no explanation,) farther than to say, it 
was the same purpose for which that wild 
enigma (the semi-coinposition of the Sphinx's 
Ghost) was designed, — that enigma of all 
enigmas the wildest, 

On which was written P^yyuapwA. 

William had frequently interrupted him 
with bursts of laughter ; but when they 
came to that crowning experiment in which 
Gargantua thought he had found the beau 
ideal of what he was seeking, William clapt 
his hands, and with an expression of glee in 
his countenance worthy of Eulenspiegel him- 
self, exclaimed, "Thou shalt try the Goose, 
Dan ! thou shalt try the Goose !" 



So with William's assistance the Goose 
was tried. They began with due prudence, 
according to rule, by catching a Goose. 
In this matter a couple of Ducks, Lord 
Lauderdale knows, would not have answered 
as well. The boy then having gone through 
the ceremony which the devotees of Baal 
are said to have performed at the foot of his 
Image, as the highest act of devotion, (an 
act of super-reverence it was,) and for which 
the Jews are said to have called him in 
mockery Baalzebul instead of Baalzebub ; 
— cried out that he was ready. He was 
at that moment in the third of those eight 
attitudes which form a RiJiath. My readers 
who are versed in the fashionable poets of 
the day — (this day I mean — their fashion 
not being insured for to-morrow) — such 
readers, I say, know that a rose is called a 
ghul, and a nightingale a bulbul, and that 
this is one way of dressing up English 
Poetry in Turkish Costume. But if they 
desire to learn a little more of what Maho- 
metan customs are, they may consult D'Ohs- 
son's Tableau of the Ottoman Empire, and 
there they may not only find the eight atti- 
tudes described, but see them represented. 
Of the third attitude or Rukeou, as it is de- 
nominated, I shall only say that the Ancients 
represented one of their Deities in it, and 
that it is the very attitude in which As in 
prcesenti committed that notorious act for 
which he is celebrated in scholastic and im- 
mortal rhyme, and for which poor Syntax 
bore the blame. Verbum sit sat sapienti. 
During the reign of Liberty and Equality 
a Frenchman was guillotined for exemplify- 
ing it under Marat's Monument in the Place 
du Carousal. 

The bird was brought, but young Daniel 
had not the strength of young Gargantua ; 
the goose, being prevented by William from 
drawing back, pressed forward ; they were 
by the side of the brook, and the boy by this 
violent and unexpected movement was, as 
the French would say in the politest and 
most delicate of all languages, culbute, or in 
sailors' English, capsized into the water. 
The misfortune did not end there ; for, fall- 
ing with his forehead against a stone, he 



THE DOCTOR. 



45 



received a cut upon the brow, which left a 
scar as long as he lived. 

It was not necessary to prohibit a repeti- 
tion of what William called the speriment. 
Both had been sufficiently frightened ; and 
William never felt more pain of mind than 
on this occasion, when the Father, with a 
shake of the head, a look of displeasure, and 
a low voice, told him he ought to have known 
better than to have put the lad upon such 
pranks ! 

The mishap, however, was not without its 
use. For, in after life, when Daniel felt an 
inclination to do any thing which might 
better be left undone, the recollection that he 
had tried the goose served as a salutary me- 
mento, and saved him, perhaps, sometimes 
from worse consequences. 



CHAPTER XIX. P. I. 

A CONVERSATION WITH MISS GRAVEAIRS. 

Open suscepto inserviendum fuit ; so Jacobus Mycillus 
pleadeth for himself in his translation of Lucian's Dia- 
logues, and so do I ; I must and will perform my task. 

Burton. 

" It does not signify, Miss Graveairs ! you 
may flirt your fan, and overcloud that white 
forehead with a frown; but I assure you 
the last chapter could not be dispensed with. 
The Doctor used to relate the story himself 
to his friends ; and often alluded to it as the 
most wholesome lesson he had ever received. 
My dear Miss Graveairs, let not those intel- 
ligent eyes shoot forth in anger arrows 
which ought to be reserved for other execu- 
tion. You ought not to be displeased ; 
ought not, must not, can not, shall not ! " 

" But you ought not to write such things, 
Mr. Author ; really you ought not. What 
can be more unpleasant than to be reading 
aloud, and come unexpectedly upon some- 
thing so strange that you know not whether 
to proceed or make a full stop, nor where 
to look, nor what to do ? It is too bad of 
you, Sir, let me tell you ! and if I come to 
any thing more of the kind, I must discard 
the book. It is provoking enough to meet 



with so much that one does not understand ; 
but to meet with any thing that one ought 
not to understand, is worse. Sir, it is not to 
be forgiven ; and I tell you again, that if I 
meet with any thing more of the same kind, 
I must discard the book." 

" Nay, dear Miss Graveairs ! " 

" I must, Mr. Author ; positively I must." 

" Nay, dear Miss Graveairs ! Banish Tris- 
tram Shandy ! banish Smollett, banish 
Fielding, banish Richardson ! But for the 
Doctor, — sweet Doctor Dove, kind Doctor 
Dove, true Doctor Dove, banish not him ! 
Banish Doctor Dove, and banish all the 
world ! — Come, come, good sense is getting 
the better of preciseness. That stitch in 
the forehead will not long keep the brows 
in their constrained position; and the in- 
cipient smile which already brings out that 
dimple, is the natural and proper feeling." 

" Well, you are a strange man ! " 

" Call me a rare one, and I shall be satis- 
fied. ' O rare Ben Jonson,' you know, was 
epitaph enough for one of our greatest 
men." 

" But seriously, why should you put any 
thing in your book, which, if not actually 
exceptionable, exposes it at least to that 
sort of censure which is most injurious?" 

" That question, dear Madam, is so sen- 
sibly proposed, that I will answer it with all 
serious sincerity. There is nothing excep- 
tionable in these volumes ; ' Certes,' as Eu- 
phues Lily has said, ' I think there be more 
speeches here which for gravity will mislike 
the foolish, than unseemly terms which for 
vanity may offend the wise.' There is 
nothing in them that I might not have read 
to Queen Elizabeth, if it had been my for- 
tune to have lived in her golden days ; 
nothing that can by possibility taint the 
imagination, or strengthen one evil propen- 
sity, or weaken one virtuous principle. But 
they are not composed like a forgotten 
novel of Dr. Towers's, to be read aloud in 
dissenting families instead of a moral essay, 
or a sermon ; nor like Mr. Kett's Emily, to 
complete the education of young ladies by 
supplying them with an abstract of universal 
knowledge. Neither have they any preten- 



4(3 



THE DOCTOR. 



sions to be placed on the same shelf with 
Coelebs. But the book is a moral book ; its 
tendency is good, and the morality is both 
the wholesomer and pleasanter because it is 
not administered as physic, but given as 
food. I don't like morality in doses." 

" But why, my good Mr. Author, why lay 
yourself open to censure ? " 

" Miss Graveairs, nothing excellent was 
ever produced by any author who had the 
fear of censure before his eyes. He who 
would please posterity must please himself 
by choosing his own course. There are 
only two classes of writers who dare do this, 
the best and the worst, — for this is one of 
the many cases in which extremes meet. 
The mediocres in every grade aim at pleas- 
ing the public, and conform themselves to the 
fashion of their age whatever it may be." 

My Doctor, like the Matthew Henderson 
of Burns, was a queer man, and in that re- 
spect, I, his friend and biographer, humbly 
resemble him. The resemblance may be 
natural, or I may have caught it, — this I 
pretend not to decide, but so it is. Perhaps 
it might have been well if I had resolved 
upon a farther designation of Chapters, and 
distributed them into Masculine and Femi- 
nine ; or into the threefold arrangement 
of virile, feminile, and puerile ; considering 
the book as a family breakfast, where there 
should be meat for men, muffins for women, 
and milk for children. Or I might have 
adopted the device of the Porteusian So- 
ciety, and marked my chapters as they (very 
usefully) have done the Bible, pointing out 
what should be read by all persons for edifi- 
cation, and what may be passed over by the 
many, as instructive or intelligible only to 
the learned. 

Here, however, the book is, — 

An orchard bearing several trees, 
And fruits of several taste.* 

Ladies and Gentlemen, my gentle Readers, 
one of our liveliest and most popular old 
Dramatists knew so well the capricious hu- 
mour of an audience that he made his Pro- 
logue say — 

* Middleton and Rowley's Spanish Gipsey. 



He'd rather dress upon a Triumph-Day 

My Lord Mayor's Feast, and make them sauces too, 

Sauce for each several mouth ; nay further go, 

He'd rather build up those invincible Pies 

And Castle-Custards that affright all eyes, — 

Nay, eat them all and their artillery,— 

Than dress for such a curious company, 

One single dish. 

But I, gentle Readers, have set before you 
a table liberally spread. It is not expected 
or desired that every dish should suit the 
palate of all the guests, but every guest will 
find something that he likes. You, Madam, 
may prefer those boiled chicken, with 
stewed celery, — or a little of that frican- 
deau ; — the Lady opposite will send her 
plate for some pigeon pie. The Doctor has 
an eye upon the venison — and so I see has 
the Captain. — Sir, I have not forgotten 
that this is one of your fast days — I am 
glad, therefore, that the turbot proves so 
good, — and that dish has been prepared for 
you. Sir John, there is garlic in the fri- 
cassee. The Hungarian wine has a bitterness 
which everybody may not like ; the Ladies 
will probably prefer Malmsey. The Cap- 
tain sticks to his Port, and the Doctor to 
his Madeira. — Sir John, I shall be happy 
to take Sauterne with you. — There is a 
splendid trifle for the young folks, which 
some of the elders also will not despise : — 
and I only wish my garden could have fur- 
nished a better dessert ; but, considering our 
climate, it is not amiss. — Is not this enter- 
tainment better than if I had set you all 
down to a round of beef and turnips ? 

If any thing be set to a wrong taste, 

'Tis not the meat there, but the mouth's displaced; 

Remove but that sick palate, all is well.* 

Like such a dinner I would have my 
book, — something for everybody's taste, and 
all good of its kind. 

It ought also to resemble the personage 
of whom it treats ; and 

If ony whiggish whingin sot 
To blame the Doctor dare, man ; 

May dool and sorrow be his lot, 
For the Doctor was a rare man ! f 

Some whiggish sots, I dare say, will blame 
him, and whiggish sots they will be who do ! 



Ben Jonson. 



+ Burns. 



THE DOCTOR. 



47 



u En un mot; mes amis,je rtai enirepris de 
vous contenter tous en general; ainsi uns et 
autre s en particulier, et par special, moy- 
meme" * 



CHAPTER XX. P. I. 

HOW TO MAKE GOLD. 

i' Alchimisla non travaglia a voto ; 

Ei cerca C oro, ei cerca V oro, io dico 

Ch' ei cerca V oro ; e s' eigiungesse in porto 

Fora ben per se stesso e per altrui. 

U oro e somma posanza infra mortali ; 

Chiedine a Cavalier, chiedine a Dame, 

Chiedine a tutto il Mondo. Chiabkera. 

William had heard so much about experi- 
ments that it is not surprising he should 
have been for making some himself. It was 
well indeed for his family that the speculative 
mind, which lay covered rather than con- 
cealed under the elder Daniel's ruminating 
manners, and quiet contented course of life, 
was not quickened by his acquaintance with 
the schoolmaster into an experimental and 
dangerous activity, instead of being satisfied 
with theoretical dreams. For Guy had 
found a book in that little collection which 
might have produced more serious con- 
sequences to the father than the imitation 
of Gargantua had done to the son. 

This book was the Exposition of 
Eirenseus Philalethes upon Sir George 
Ripley's Hermetico-Poetical works. Daniel 
had formerly set as little value upon it as 
upon Rabelais. He knew indeed what its 
purport was; thus much he had gathered 
from it : but although it professed to con- 
tain " the plainest and most excellent dis- 
coveries of the most hidden secrets of the 
Ancient Philosophers that were ever yet 
published," it was to him as unintelligible 
as the mysteries of Pantagruelism. He could 
make nothing of the work that was to ascend 
in Bus and Nubi from the Moon up to the 
Sun, though the Expositor had expounded 
that this was in Nubibus ; nor of the Lake 
which was to be boiled with the ashes of 
Hermes's Tree, night and day without ceas- 



Pasquier. 



ing, till the Heavenly Nature should ascend 
and the Earthly descend : nor of the Crow's 
bill, the White Dove, the Sparkling Che- 
rubim, and the Soul of the Green Lion. But 
he took those cautions simply and honestly 
as cautions, which were in fact the lures 
whereby so many infatuated persons had 
been drawn on to their own undoing. The 
author had said that his work was not writ- 
ten for the information of the illiterate, and 
illiterate Daniel knew himself to be. " Our 
writings," says the dark Expositor, " shall 
prove as a curious edged knife ; to some 
they shall carve out dainties, and to others 
it shall serve only to cut their fingers. Yet 
we are not to be blamed ; for we do seriously 
profess to any that shall attempt the work, 
that he attempts the highest piece of phi- 
losophy that is in Nature ; and though we 
write in English, yet our matter will be as 
hard as Greek to some, who will think they 
understand us well, when they misconstrue 
our meaning most perversely ; for is it ima- 
ginable that they who are fools in Nature 
should be wise in our Books, which are 
testimonies unto Nature ? " And again, 
" Make sure of thy true matter, which is no 
small thing to know ; and though we have 
named it, yet we have done it so cunningly, 
that thou mayest sooner stumble at our 
Books than at any thou ever didst read in 
thy life. — Be not deceived either with re- 
ceipt or discourse ; for we verily do not 
intend to deceive you ; but if you will be 
deceived, be deceived ! — Our way, which is 
an easy way, and in which no man may err, 
— our broad way, our linear way, we have 
vowed never to reveal it but in metaphor. 
I, being moved with pity, will hint it to you. 
Take that which is not yet perfect, nor yet 
wholly imperfect, but in a way to perfection, 
and out of it make what is most noble and 
most perfect. This you may conceive to be 
an easier receipt than to take that Avhich is 
already perfect, and extract out of it what is 
imperfect and make it perfect, and after out 
of that perfection to draw a plusquam per- 
fection ; and yet this is true, and we have 
wrought it. But this last discovery, .which 
I hinted in few words, is it which no man 



48 



THE DOCTOR. 



ever did so plainly lay open ; nor may 
any make it more plain upon pain of an 
anathema." 

All this was heatlien Greek to Daniel, 
except the admonition which it con- 
tained. But Guy had meddled with this 
perilous pseudo-science, and used to talk 
with him concerning its theory, which 
Daniel soon comprehended, and which like 
many other theories wanted nothing but a 
foundation to rest upon. That every thing 
had its own seed as well as its own form 
seemed a reasonable position ; and that the 
ferrnental virtue, " which is the wonder of 
the world, and by which water becomes 
herbs, trees and plants, fruits, flesh, blood, 
stones, minerals and every thing, works 
only in kind. Was it not then absurd to 
allow that the fermentive and multiplicative 
power existed in almost all other things, and 
yet deny it to Gold, the most perfect of all 
sublunary things?" — The secret lay in ex- 
tracting from Gold its hidden seed. 

Ben Jonson has with his wonted ability 
presented the theory of this delusive art. 
His knavish Alchemist asks of an unbeliever, 

Why, what have you observed, Sir, in our art, 

Seems so impossible ? 
Surly. But your whole work, no more ! 

That you should hatch gold in a furnace, Sir, 

As they do eggs in Egypt. 
Subtle. Sir, do you 

Believe that eggs are hatch'd so ? 
Surly. If I should ? 

Subtle. Why, I think that the greater miracle. 

No egg but differs from a chicken more 

Than metals in themselves. 
Surly. That cannot be. 

The egg's ordained by nature to that end, 

And is a chicken in potential. 
Subtle. The same we say of lead and other metals, 

Which would be gold if they had time. 
Mam, tm a. And that 

Our art doth further. 
Subtle. Ay. for 'twere absurd 

To think that nature in the earth bred gold 

Perfect in the instant: something went before. 

There must be remote matter. 
Surly. Ay, what is that ? 

Subtle. Marry we say — 
Mannnon. Ay, now it heats ; stand, father ; 

Pound him to dust. 
Subtle. It is, of the one part, 

A humid exhalation, which we call 
Materia liquida, or the unctuous water ; 
On I lie other part a certain crass and viscous 
1'ortion of earth ; both which concorporate 
I )d make the elementary matter of gold ; 
Which is not yet propria materia, 



But common to all metals and all stones ; 
For where it is forsaken of that moisture, 
And hath more dryness, it becomes a stone ; 
Where it retains more of the humid fatness, 
It turns to sulphur, or to quicksilver, 
Who are the parents of all other metals. 
Nor can this remote matter suddenly 
Progress so from extreme unto extreme, 
As to grow gold, and leap o'er all the means. 
Nature doth first beget the imperfect, then 
Proceeds she to the perfect. Of that airy 
And oily water, mercury is engendered ; 
Sulphur of the fat and earthy part ; the one, 
Which is the last, supplying the place of male, 
The other of the female in all metals. 
Some so believe hermaphrodeity, 
That both do act and suffer. But these too 
Make the rest ductile, malleable, extensive, 
And even in gold they are ; for we do find 
Seeds of them, by our fire, and gold in them ; 
And can produce the species of each metal 
More perfect thence than nature doth in earth. 

I have no cause to say here, with Sheik 
Mohammed Ali Hazin, that " taste for poeti- 
cal and elegant composition has turned the 
reins of my ink-dropping pen away from the 
road which lay before it : " for this passage 
of learned Ben lay directly in the way ; and 
no where, Reader, couldst thou find the 
theory of the Alchemists more ably epi- 
tomised. 

" Father," said the boy Daniel one day, 
after listening to a conversation upon this 
subject, " I should like to learn to make 
gold." 

" And what wouldst thou do, Daniel, if 
thou couldst make it ? " was the reply. 

" Why I would build a great house, and 
fill it with books ; and have as much money 
as the King, and be as great a man as the 
Squire." 

" Mayhap, Daniel, in that case thou 
wouldst care for books as little as the 
Squire, and have as little time for them as 
the King. Learning is better than house 
or land. As for money, enough is enough ; 
no man can enjoy more ; and the less he can 
be contented with the wiser and better he is 
likely to be. What, Daniel, does our good 
poet tell us in the great verse-book ? 

Nature's with little pleased ; enough's a feast : 
A sober life but a small charge requires : 
But man, the author of his own unrest, 
The more he hath, the more he still desires. 

No, boy, thou canst never be as rich as the 



THE DOCTOR. 



49 



King, nor as great as the Squire ; but thou 
niayest be a Philosopher, and that is being 
as happy as either." 

" A great deal happier," said Guy. " The 
Squire is as far from being the happiest man 
in the neighbourhood, as he is from being the 
wisest or the best. And the King, God bless 
him ! has care enough upon his head to bring 
on early grey hairs. 

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." 

" But what does a Philosopher do ? " re- 
joined the boy. "The Squire hunts and 
shoots and smokes, and drinks punch and 
goes to Justice-Meetings. And the King 
goes to fight for us against the French, and 
governs the Parliament, and makes laws. 
But I cannot tell what a Philosopher's busi- 
ness is. Do they do any thing else besides 
making Almanacks and gold?" 

" Yes," said William, " they read the 
stars." 

" And what do they read there ?" 

" What neither thou nor I can under- 
stand, Daniel," replied the father, " however 
nearly it may concern us ! " 



CHAPTEP. XXI. P. I. 

A DOUBT CONCERNING THE USES OF 
PHILOSOPHY. 

El comienxo de salud 
es el saber, 
distinguir y corwcer 
qual es vii tud. 
Proverbios del Marques de Santillana. 

That grave reply produced a short pause. 
It was broken by the boy, who said, return- 
ing to the subject, " I have been thinking, 
Father, that it is not a good thing to be a 
Philosopher." 

" And what, my Son, has led thee to that 
thought?" 

" What I have read at the end of the Dic- 
tionary, Father. There was one Philosopher 
that was pounded in a mortar." 

" That, Daniel," said the Father, " could 



neither have been the Philosopher's fault 
nor his choice." 

" But it was because he was a Philosopher, 
my lad," said Guy, " that he bore it so 
bravely, and said, beat on, you can only 
bruise the shell of Anaxarchus ! If he had 
not been a Philosopher they might have 
pounded him just the same, but they would 
never have put him in the Dictionary. 
Epictetus in like manner bore the torments 
which his wicked master inflicted upon him, 
without a groan, only saying, ' Take care, or 
you will break my leg;' and when the leg 
was broken, he looked the wretch in the face 
and said, ' I told you you would break it.' " 

" But," said the youngster, " there was 
one Philosopher who chose to live in a tub ; 
and another who, that he might never again 
see any thing to withdraw his mind from 
meditation, put out his eyes by looking upon 
a bright brass basin, such as I cured my 
warts in." 

" He might have been a wise man," said 
William Dove, " but not wondrous wise : 
for if he had, he would not have used the 
basin to put his eyes out. He would have 
jumped into a quickset hedge, and scratched 
them out, like the Man of our Town ; be- 
cause when he saw his eyes were out, he 
might then have jumped into another hedge 
and scratched them in again. The Man of 
our Town was the greatest philosopher of 
the two." 

" And there was one," continued the boy, 
"who had better have blinded himself at 
once, for he did nothing else but cry at 
every thing he saw. Was not this being 
very foolish ? " 

" I am sure," says William, " it was not 
being merry and wise." 

" There was another who said that hunger 
was his daily food." 

" He must have kept such a table as Duke 
Humphrey," quoth William ; " I should not 
have liked to dine with him." 

" Then there was Crates," said the perse- 
vering boy ; "he had a good estate and sold 
it and threw the money into the sea, saving, 
' Away ye paltry cares ! I will drown you 
that you may not drown me.'" 



THE DOCTOE. 



" I should like to know," quoth AVilliarn, 
" what the overseers said to that chap, when 
he applied to the parish for support." 

" They sent him off to Bedlam, I suppose," 
said the Mother, " it was the fit place for 
him, poor creature." 

" And when Aristippus set out upon a 
journey he bade his servants throw away all 
their money, that they might travel the 
better. Why they must have begged their 
way, and it cannot be right to beg if people 
are not brought to it by misfortune. And 
there were some who thought there was no 
God. I am sure they were fools, for the 
Bible says so." 

"Well, Daniel," said Guy, "thou hast 
studied the end of the Dictionary to some 
purpose ! " 

" And the Bible too, Master Guy ! " said 
Dinah, — her countenance brightening with 
joy at her son's concluding remark. 

" It's the best part of the book," said the 
boy, replying to his schoolmaster; " there are 
more entertaining and surprising things 
there than I ever read in any other place, 
except in my Father's book about Panta- 
gruel." 



CHAPTER XXII. P. I. 

Tbv ft aTranutofxtvoQ. 

felice colui, che Mender puote 
Le cagion de le cose di natura, 
Che al piu di que' che vivon sono ignote ; 

E sotto il pie si mette ogni paura 
Defali, e de la mur/e, ch'e si trisia, 
Ncdivulgogli cal, ne d'altro ha cura. 

Tansillo. 

The elder Daniel had listened to this dia- 
logue in his usual quiet way, smiling some- 
times at his brother William's observations. 
He now stroked his forehead, and looking 
mildly but seriously at the boy addressed 
him thus. 

"My son, many things appear strange or 

silly in themselves if they are presented to 

n ply, without any notice when and 

where they were done, and upon what occa- 



sion. If any strangers, for example, had seen 
thee washing thy hands in an empty basin, 
without knowing the philosophy of the 
matter, they would have taken thee for an 
innocent, and thy master and me for little 
better ; or they might have supposed some 
conjuring was going on. The things which 
the old Philosophers said and did, would 
appear, I dare say, as wise to us as they did 
to the people of their own times, if we knew 
why and in what circumstances they were 
done and said. 

" Daniel, there are two sorts of men in all 
ranks and ways of life, the wise and the 
foolish ; and there are a great many degrees 
between them. That some foolish people 
have called themselves Philosophers, and 
some wicked ones, and some who were out 
of their wits, is just as certain as that per- 
sons of all these descriptions are to be found 
among all conditions of men. 

"Philosophy, Daniel, is of two kinds : that 
which relates to conduct, and that which re- 
lates to knowledge. The first teaches us to 
value all things at their real worth, to be 
contented with little, modest in prosperity, 
patient in trouble, equal- minded at all 
times. It teaches us our duty to our neigh- 
bour and ourselves. It is that wisdom of 
which King Solomon speaks in our rhyme- 
book. Reach me the volume! " Then turn- 
ing to the passage in his favourite Du Bartas 
he read these lines : 

" She's God's own mirror ; she's a light whose glance 
Springs from the lightening of his countenance. 
She's mildest heaven's most sacred influence ; 
Never decays her beauties' excellence, 
Aye like herself; and she doth always trace 
Not only the same path but the same pace. 
Without her honour, health and wealth would prove 
Three poisons to me. Wisdom from above 
Is the only moderatrix, spring and guide, 
Organ and honour of all gifts beside." 

" But let us look in the Bible : — aye, this 
is the place. 

"For in her is an understanding spirit, 
holy, one only, manifold, subtil, lively, clear, 
undefiled, plain, not subject to hurt, loving 
the thing that is good, quick, which cannot 
be letted, ready to do good ; 

" Kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from 



THE DOCTOR. 



51 



care, having all power, overseeing all things, 
and going through all understanding, pure, 
and most subtil, spirits. 

" For wisdom is more moving than any 
motion : she passeth and goeth through all 
things by reason of her pureness. 

" For she is the breath of the power of 
God, and a pure influence, flowing from the 
glory of the Almighty; therefore can no de- 
filed thing fall into her. 

" For she is the brightness of the ever- 
lasting light, the unspotted mirror of the 
power of God, and the image of his goodness. 

" And being but one she can do all things ; 
and remaining in herself she maketh all 
things new : and in all ages entering into 
holy souls she maketh them friends of God, 
and prophets. 

"For God loveth none but him that 
dwelleth with wisdom. 

" For she is more beautiful than the Sun, 
and above all the order of Stars : being com- 
pared with the light she is found before it. 

" For after this cometh night : but vice 
shall not prevail against wisdom." 

He read this with a solemnity that gave 
weight to every word. Then closing the 
book, after a short pause, he proceeded in a 
lower tone. 

" The Philosophers of whom you have read 
in the Dictionary possessed this wisdom only 
in part, because they we're heathens, and 
therefore could see no farther than the light 
of mere reason sufficed to show the way. 
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
wisdom, and they had not that to begin with. 
So the thoughts which ought to have made 
them humble produce pride, and so far their 
wisdom proved but folly. The humblest 
Christian who learns his duty, and performs 
it as well as he can, is wiser than they. He 
does nothing to be seen of men ; and that 
was their motive for most of their actions. 

" Now for the philosophy which relates to 
knowledge. Knowledge is a brave thing. 
I am a plain, ignorant, untaught man, and 
know my ignorance. But it is a brave thing 
when we look around us in this wonderful 
world to understand something of what we 
see : to know something of the earth on 



which we move, the air which we breathe., 
and the elements whereof we are made : to 
comprehend the motions of the moon and 
stars, and measure the distances between 
them, and compute times and seasons : to 
observe the laws which sustain the universe 
by keeping all things in their courses : to 
search into the mysteries of nature, and dis- 
cover the hidden virtue of plants and stones, 
and read the signs and tokens which are 
shown us, and make out the meaning of 
hidden things, and apply all this to the 
benefit of our fellow-creatures. 

" Wisdom and knowledge, Daniel, make 
the difference between man and man, and 
that between man and beast is hardly 
greater. 

" These things do not always go together. 
There may be wisdom without knowledge, 
and there maybe knowledge without wisdom. 
A man without knowledge, if he walk humbly 
with his God, and live in charity with his 
neighbours, may be wise unto salvation. A 
man without wisdom may not find his know- 
ledge avail him quite so well. But it is he 
who possesses both that is the true Philoso- 
pher. The more he knows, the more he is 
desirous of knowing ; and yet the farther he 
advances in knowledge the better he under- 
stands how little he can attain, and the more 
deeply he feels that God alone can satisfy 
the infinite desires of an immortal soul. To 
understand this is the height and perfection 
of philosophy." 

Then opening the Bible which lay before 
him, he read these verses from the Proverbs. 

" My son, if thou wilt receive my words, — 

" So that thou incline thine ear unto wis- 
dom and apply thine heart to understanding; 

" Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and 
liftest up thy voice for understanding ; 

" If thou seekest after her as silver, and 
searchest for her as for hid treasures ; 

" Then shalt thou understand the fear of 
the Lord and find the knowledge of God. 

"For the Lord giveth wisdom ; out of His 
moulh cometh knowledge and understanding. 

" He layeth up sound wisdom for the 
righteous ; He is a buckler to them that 
walk uprightly. 



52 



THE DOCTOR. 



" He keepeth the paths of judgement and 
preserveth the way of his Saints. 

" Then shalt thou understand righteous- 
ness and judgement and equity ; yea, every 
good path. 

" When wisdom entereth into thine heart, 
and knowledge is pleasant unto thy soul ; 

" Discretion shall preserve thee, under- 
standing shall keep thee, 

" To deliver thee from the way of the evil."* 

" Daniel, my son," after a pause he pur- 
sued, "thou art a diligent good. lad. God 
hath given thee a tender and a dutiful 
heart ; keep it so, and. it will be a wise one, 
for thou hast the beginning of wisdom. I 
wish thee to pursue knowledge, because in 
pursuing it happiness will be found by the 
way. If I have said any thing now which 
is above thy years, it will come to mind in 
after time, when I am gone perhaps, but 
when thou mayest profit by it. God bless 
thee, my child ! " 

He stretched out his right hand at these 
words, and laid it gently upon the boy's 
head. What he said was not forgotten, and 
throughout life the son never thought of 
that blessing without feeling that it had 
taken effect. 



CHAPTER xxnr. P. I. 

ROWLAND DIXON AND HIS COMPANY OP 
PUPPETS. 

Alii sr ve Inn eftcax el llanlo, 
lasjabulm y historias retratadas, 
que parccc verdad, y cs clulce cncanto. 



Y para el vulgo rudo, que ignorante 
ahorrece el manjar custoso, gvisa 
elplalo del gracioso extravagante ; 

Con que les hartas de contcnto y ■> isa, 
gtulando de mirar sayal grossero, 
mas que sulil y Candida camisa. 

Joseph Outiz de Vii.lena. 

Webb it not for that happy facility with 
which the mind in such cases commonly 
satisfies itself, my readers would find it not 



* I am not sure whether wan is left out advisedly, but 
I mspect it is. 



more easy to place themselves in imagination 
at Ingleton a hundred years ago, than at 
Thebes or Athens, so strange must it appear 
to them, that a family should have existed, 
in humble but easy circumstances, among 
whose articles of consumption neither tea 
nor sugar had a place, who never raised 
potatoes in their garden, nor saw them at 
their table, and who never wore a cotton 
garment of any kind. 

Equally unlike any thing to which my 
contemporaries have been accustomed, must 
it be for them to hear of an Englishman 
whose talk was of philosophy, moral or spe- 
culative, not of politics ; who read books in 
folio and had never seen a newspaper ; nor 
ever heard of a magazine, review, or literary 
journal of any kind. Not less strange must 
it seem to them who, if they please, may 
travel by steam at the rate of thirty miles 
an hour upon the Liverpool and Manchester 
railway, or at ten miles an hour by stage 
upon any of the more frequented roads, to 
consider the little intercourse which, in those 
days, was carried on between one part of 
the kingdom and another. During young 
Daniel's boyhood, and for many years after 
he had reached the age of manhood, the 
whole carriage of the northern counties, and 
indeed of all the remoter parts, was per- 
formed by pack-horses, the very name of 
which would long since have been as obso- 
lete as their use, if it had not been preserved 
by the sign or appellation of some of those 
inns at which they were accustomed to put 
up; Rarely, indeed, were the roads about 
Ingleton marked by any other wheels than 
those of its indigenous carts. 

That little town, however, obtained con- 
siderable celebrity in those days, as beino- 
the home and head quarters of Rowland 
Dixon, the Gesticulator Maximus, or Pup- 
pet-show -master-general, of the North; a 
person not less eminent in his line than 
Powel, whom the Spectator has immorta- 
lised. 

My readers must not form their notion of 
Rowland Dixon's company from the am- 
bulatory puppet-shows which of late years 
have added new sights and sounds to the 



THE DOCTOR. 



53 



spectacles and cries of London. Far be it 
from me to depreciate those peripatetic 
street exhibitions, which you may have be- 
f re your window at a call, and by which 
the hearts of so many children are con- 
tinually delighted : Nay, I confess that few 
things in that great city carry so much 
comfort to the cockles of my own, as the 
well-known voice of Punch ; 

the same which in my school-boy days 

I listened to, 

as Wordsworth says of the Cuckoo, 

And I can listen to it yet — 
And listen till I do beget 
That golden time again. 

It is a voice that seems to be as much in 
accord with the noise of towns, and the 
riotry of fairs, as the note of the Cuckoo, 
with the joyousness of spring fields and the 
fresh verdure of the vernal woods. 

But Eowland Dixon's company of puppets 
would be pitifully disparaged, if their size, 
uses, or importance, were to be estimated 
by the street performances of the present 
day. 

The Dramatis Persona? of these modern 
exhibitions never, I believe, comprehends 
more than four characters, and these four 
are generally the same, to wit, Punch, Judy, 
as she who used to be called Joan is now 
denominated, the Devil and the Doctor, or 
sometimes the Constable in the Doctor's 
stead. There is, therefore, as little variety 
in the action as in the personages ; and 
their dimensions are such, that the whole 
company and the theatre in which they are 
exhibited are carried along the streets at 
quick time and with a light step by the two 
persons who manage the concern. 

But the Rowlandian, Dixonian, or Ingle- 
tonian puppets were large as life ; and re- 
quired for their removal a caravan — (in 
the use to which that word is now ap- 
propriated), — a vehicle of such magnitude 
and questionable shape, that if Don Quixote 
had encountered its like upon the highway, 
he would have regarded it as the most for- 
midable adventure which had ever been 
presented to his valour. And they went as 



far beyond our street-puppets in the sphere of 
their subjects as they exceeded them in size ; 
for in that sphere quicquid agunt homines was 
included, — and a greal deal more. 

In no country, and in no stage of society, 
has the drama ever existed in a ruder state 
than that in which this company presented 
it. The Drolls of Bartholomew Fair were 
hardly so far below the legitimate drama, 
as they were above that of Rowland Dixon ; 
for the Drolls were written compositions : 
much ribaldry might be, and no doubt was, 
interpolated as opportunity allowed or in- 
vited ; but the main dialogue was prepared. 
Here, on the contrary, there was no other 
preparation than that of frequent practice. 
The stock pieces were founded upon popular 
stories or ballads, such as Fair Rosamond, 
Jane Shore, and Bateman, who hanged him- 
self for love ; with scriptural subjects for 
Easter and Whitsun-week, such as the Cre- 
ation, the Deluge, Susannah and the Elders, 
and Nebuchadnezzar or the Fall of Pride. 
These had been handed down from the time 
of the old mysteries and miracle-plays, hav- 
ing, in the progress of time and change, 
descended from the monks and clergy to 
become the property of such managers as 
Powel and Rowland Dixon. In what man- 
ner they were represented when thus 

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, 
Fallen from their high estate, 

may be imagined from a play- bill of Queen 
Anne's reign, in which one of them is thus 
advertised : 

" At Crawley's Booth, over against the 
Crown Tavern in Smithfield, during the 
time of Bartholomew Fair, will be presented 
a little Opera, called the Old Creation of the 
World, yet newly revived ; with the addi- 
tion of Noah's flood. Also several fountains 
playing water during the time of the play. 
The last scene does present Noah and his 
family coming out of the Ark, with all the 
beasts two and two, and all the fowls of the 
air seen in a prospect sitting upon trees. 
LikeAvise over the Ark is seen the Sun 
rising in a most glorious manner. More- 
over, a multitude of Angels will be seen in 



54 



THE DOCTOR. 



a double rank, which presents a double 
prospect, one for the Sun, the other for a 
palace, where will be seen six Angels, ring- 
ing of bells. Likewise machines descend 
from above double and treble, with Dives 
rising out of Hell, and Lazarus seen in 
Abraham's bosom ; besides several figures 
dancing jigs, sarabands and country dances, 
to the admiration of the spectators ; with 
the merry conceits of Squire Punch, and 
Sir John Spendall." 

I have not found it any where stated at 
what time these irreverent representations 
were discontinued in England, nor whether 
(which is not unlikely) they were put an 
end to by the interference of the magis- 
trates. The Autos Sacramentales, which form 
the most characteristic department of the 
Spanish drama, were prohibited at Madrid 
in 1763, at the instance of the Conde de 
Teba, then Archbishop of Toledo, chiefly 
because of the profaneness of the actors, and 
the indecency of the places in which they 
were represented : it seems, therefore, that 
if they had been performed by clerks, and 
within consecrated precincts, he would not 
have objected to them. The religious dra- 
mas, though they are not less extraordinary 
and far more reprehensible, because in many 
instances nothing can be more pernicious 
than their direct tendency, were not in- 
cluded in the same prohibition ; the same 
marks of external reverence not being re- 
quired for Saints and Images as for the 
great object of Romish Idolatry. These, 
probably, will long continue to delight the 
Spanish people. But facts of the same kind 
may be met with nearer home. So recently 
as the year 1816, the Sacrifice of Isaac was 
represented on the stage at Paris : Samson 
was the subject of the ballet ; the unshorn 
son of Manoah delighted the spectators by 
dancing a solo with the gates of Gaza on his 
back; Dalilah dipt him during the intervals 
of a jig; and the Philistines surrounded and 
captured him in a country dance! 

That Punch made his appearance in the 
puppet-show of the Deluge, most persons 
know; his exclamation of "hazy weather, 
master Noah," having been preserved by 



tradition. In all of these wooden dramas, 
whether sacred or profane, Punch indeed 
bore a part, and that part is well described 
in the verses entitled Pupce gesticulantes, 
which may be found among the Selecta 
Poemata Anglorum Latina, edited by Mr. 
Popham. 

Ecce tarnen subitb, et medio discrimine rerum, 
Ridiculus vultu procedit Homuncio, tergum 
Cui rigel in gibbum, immensusque protruditur alvi/s : 
Ponchius huicnomen, nee erat petulantior unquam 
Ullus ; quinctiam media inter seria semper 
Importunus adest, lepidusque et garrulus usque 
Perstat, permiscetque jocos, atque omnia turbat. 
Scepe puellarum densa ad subsellia sese 
Convertens, — sedet en ! pulchras mea, dixit, arnica 
Illic inter eas ! Oculo simul improbus uno 
Connivens, aliquam dlarum quasi noverat, ipsam 
Quceque pudens se signari pudejacla rubescit ; 
Totaque subridet juvenumque virumque corona. 
Cum vero ambiguis obsccenas turpia diclis 
Innuit, effuso testantur gaudia risu. 

In one particular only this description is 
unlike the Punch of the Ingleton Company. 
He was not an homuncio, but a full-grown 
personage, who had succeeded with little 
alteration either of attributes or appearance 
to the Vice of the old Mysteries, and served 
like the Clown of our own early stage, and 
the Gracioso of the Spaniards, to scatter 
mirth over the serious part of the perform- 
ance, or turn it into ridicule. The wife was 
an appendage of later times, when it was 
not thought good for Punch to be alone ; 
and when, as these performances had fallen 
into lower hands, the quarrels between such 
a pair afforded a standing subject equally 
adapted to the capacity of the interlocutor 
and of his audience. 

A tragic part was assigned to Punch in 
one of Rowland Dixon's pieces, and that one 
of the most popular, being the celebrated 
tragedy of Jane Shore. The Beadle in this 
piece, after proclaiming in obvious and 
opprobrious rhyme the offence which had 
drawn upon Mistress Shore this public 
punishment, prohibited all persons from 
relieving her on pain of death, and turned 
her out, according to the common story, 
to die of hunger in the streets. The only 
person who ventured to disobey this pro- 
hibition was Punch the Baker ; and the 
reader may judge of the dialogue of these 



THE DOCTOR. 



55 



pieces by this Baker's words, when he stole 
behind her, and nudging her furtively, while 
he spake, offered her a loaf, saying, " Tali it 
Jenny, tak it ! " for which act so little con- 
sonant with his general character, Punch 
died a martyr to humanity by the hang- 
man's hands. 

Dr. Dove used to say he doubted whether 
Garrick and Mrs. Gibber could have affected 
him more in middle life, than he had been 
moved by Punch the Baker and this wooden 
Jane Shore in his boyhood. For rude 
as were these performances (and nothing 
could possibly be ruder), the effect on 
infant minds was prodigious, from the ac- 
companying sense of wonder, an emotion 
which of all others is, at that time of life, 
the most delightful. Here was miracle in 
any quantity to be seen for two-pence, and 
be believed in for nothing. No matter how 
confined the theatre, how coarse and in- 
artificial the scenery, or how miserable the 
properties ; the mind supplied all that was 
wanting. 

"Mr. Guy," said young Daniel to the 
schoolmaster, after one of these perform- 
ances, " I wish Rowland Dixon could per- 
form one of our Latin dialogues ! " 

"Ay, Daniel," replied the schoolmaster, 
entering into the boy's feelings ; " it would 
be a grand thing to have the Three Fatal 
Sisters introduced, and to have them send 
for Death ; and then for Death to summon 
the Pope and jugulate him; and invite the 
Emperor and the King to dance ; and dis- 
arm the soldier, and pass sentence upon the 
Judge ; and stop the Lawyer's tongue ; and 
feel the Physician's pulse ; and make the 
Cook come to be killed ; and send the Poet 
to the shades ; and give the Drunkard his 
last draught. And then to have Rhada- 
manthus come in and try them all ! Me- 
thinks, Daniel, that would beat Jane Shore 
and Fair Rosamond all to nothing, and 
would be as good as a sermon to boot." 

" I believe it would, indeed ! " said the 
Boy ; " and then to see Mors and Natura ; 
and have Damnatus called up ; and the 
Three Cacodaemons at supper upon the 
sirloin of a King, and the roasted Doctor of 



Divinity, and the cruel Schoolmaster's 
rump ! Would not it be nice, Mr. Guy ? " 

" The pity is, Daniel," replied Guy, " that 
Rowland Dixon is no Latiner, any more 
than those who go to see his performances." 

" But could not you put it into English 
for him, Mr. Guy ?" 

" I am afraid, Daniel, Rowland Dixon 
would not thank me for my pains. Besides, 
I could never make it sound half so noble 
in English as in those grand Latin verses, 
which fill the mouth, and the ears, and the 
mind, — ay and the heart and soul too. 
No, boy ! schools are the proper places for 
representing such pieces, and if I had but 
Latiners enough we would have them our- 
selves. But there are not many houses, 
my good Daniel, in which learning is held 
in such esteem as it is at thy father's ; if 
there were, I should have more Latin scho- 
lars ; — and what is of far more consequence, 
the world would be wiser and better than it 
is!" 



CHAPTER XXIV. P. I. 

QUACK AND NO QUACK, BEING AN ACCOUNT 
OF DOCTOR GREEN AND HIS MAN KEMP. 
POPULAR MEDICINE, HERBARY, THEORY OF 
SIGNATURES, WILLIAM DOVE, JOHN WESLEY, 
AND BAXTER. 

Hold thy hand ! health's dear maintainer ; 

Life perchance may burn the stronger : 
Having substance to maintain her 
She untouch'd may last the longer. 
When the Artist goes about 
To redress her flame, I doubt 
Oftentimes he snuffs it out. Qcarles. 

It was not often that Rowland Dixon ex- 
hibited at Ingleton. He took his regular 
circuits to the fairs in all the surrounding 
country far and wide ; but in the intervals 
of his vocation, he, who when abroad was the 
servant of the public, became his own master 
at home. His puppets were laid up in ordi- 
nary, the voice of Punch ceased, and the 
master of the motions enjoyed otium cum 
dignitate. When he favoured his friends 
and neighbours with an exhibition, it was 



56 



THE DOCTOR. 



speciali gratia, and in & way that rather en- 
hanced that dignity than derogated from it. 

A performer of a very different kind used 
in those days to visit Ingleton in his rounds, 
where his arrival was always expected by 
some of the community with great anxiety. 
This was a certain Dr. Green, who having 
been regularly educated for the profession 
of medicine, and regularly graduated in it, 
chose to practise as an itinerant, and take 
the field with a Merry Andrew for his aide- 
de-camp. He was of a respectable and 
wealthy family in the neighbourhood of 
Doncaster, which neighbourhood on their 
account he never approached in his pro- 
fessional circuits, though for himself he was 
far from being ashamed of the character 
that he had assumed. The course which he 
had taken had been deliberately chosen, with 
the twofold object of gratifying his own hu- 
mour, and making a fortune ; and in the 
remoter as well as in the immediate purpose, 
he succeeded to his heart's content. 

It is not often that so much worldly pru- 
dence is found connected with so much ec- 
centricity of character. A French poetess, 
Madame de Villedieu, taking as a text for 
some verses the liberal maxim que la vertu 
depend autant du temperament que des loix, 
says, 

Prcsque toujours chacun suit son caprice ; 
Heurcux est le mortel que les drstins ami's 
Ont partage <Vun caprice per mis. 

He is indeed a fortunate man who, if he must 
have a hobby-horse, which is the same as 
saying if he will have one, keeps it not merely 
for pleasure, but for use, breaks it in well, 
has it entirely under command, and gets as 
much work out of it as he could have done 
out of a common roadster. Dr. Green did 
this ; he had not taken to this strange course 
because he was impatient of the restraints 
of society, but because he fancied that his 
constitution both of body and of mind re- 
quired an erratic life ; and that, within cer- 
tain bounds which he prescribed for himself, 
he might indulge in it, both to his own 
advantage, and that of the community, — 
that part of the community at least among 
whom it would be his lot to labour. Our 



laws had provided itinerant Courts of Justice 
for the people. Our church had formerly 
provided itinerant preachers ; and after the 
Reformation, when the Mendicant Orders 
were abolished by whom this service used 
to be performed, such preachers have never 
failed to appear during the prevalence of 
any religious influenza. Dr. Green thought 
that itinerant physicians were wanted ; and 
that if practitioners regularly educated and 
well qualified would condescend to such a 
course, the poor ignorant people would no 
longer be cheated by travelling quacks, and 
sometimes poisoned by them ! 

One of the most reprehensible arts to 
which the Reformers resorted in their hatred 
of popery, was that of adapting vulgar 
verses to church tunes, and thus associating 
with ludicrous images, or with something 
worse, melodies which had formerly been 
held sacred. It is related of Whitefield that 
he, making a better use of the same device, 
fitted hymns to certain popular airs, because, 
he said, " there was no reason why the Devil 
should keep all the good tunes to himself." 
Green acted upon a similar principle when 
he took the field as a Physician Errant, with 
his man Kemp, like another Sancho for his 
Squire. But the Doctor was no Quixote ; 
and his Merry Andrew had all Sancho's 
shrewdness, without any alloy of his simple- 
ness. 

In those times medical knowledge among 
the lower practitioners was at the lowest 
point. Except in large towns the people 
usually trusted to domestic medicine, which 
some Lady Bountiful administered from her 
family receipt book ; or to a Village Doc- 
tress whese prescriptions were as likely 
sometimes to be dangerously active, as at 
others to be ridiculous and inert. But 
while they held to their garden physic it 
was seldom that any injury was done either 
by exhibiting wrong medicines or violent 
ones. 

Herb?, Woods and Springs, the power that in you lies 
If mortal man could know your properties ! * 



* Fletcher. 



THE DOCTOR. 



57 



There was at one time abundant faith in 
those properties. The holy Shepherdess in 
Fletcher's fine pastoral drama, which so in- 
finitely surpasses all foreign compositions of 
that class, thus apostrophises the herbs which 
she goes out to cull : 

you best sons of earth, 

You only brood unto whose happy birth 

Virtue was given, holding more of Nature 

Than man, her first-born and most perfect creature, — 

Let me adore you, you that only can 

Help or kill Nature, drawing out that span 

Of life and breath even to the end of time ! 

So abundantly was the English garden 
stocked in the age of the Tudors, that Tusser, 
after enumerating in an Appendix to one 
of his Chapters two and forty herbs for the 
kitchen, fourteen others for sallads or sauces, 
eleven to boil or butter, seventeen as strew- 
ing herbs, and forty " herbs, branches, and 
flowers for windows and pots," adds a list of 
seventeen herbs " to still in summer," and 
of five and twenty " necessary herbs to grow 
in the garden for physic, not rehearsed 
before ; " and after all advises his readers to 
seek more in the fields. He says, 

The nature of Flowers dame Physic doth shew ; 
She teacheth them all to be known to a few. 

Elsewhere he observes that 

The knowledge of stilling is one pretty feat, 
The waters be wholesome, the charges not great. 

In a comedy of Lord Digby's, written 
more than a hundred years after Tusser's 
didactics, one of the scenes is laid in a lady's 
laboratory, " with a fountain in it, some stills, 
and many shelves, with pots of porcelain and 
glasses ; " and when the lady wishes to keep 
her attendant out of the way, she sends her 
there, saying 

1 have a task to give you, carefully 

To shift the oils in the perfuming room, 
As in the several ranges you shall see 
The old begin to wither. To do it well 
Will take you up some hours, but 'tis a work 
I oft perform myself. 

And Tusser among " the Points of House- 
wifery united to the Comfort of Husbandry," 
includes good housewifely physic, as incul- 
cated in these rhymes ; 



Good houswife provides ere an sickness do come, 

Of sundry good things in her house to have some; 

Good aqua composita, and vinegar tart, 

Rose water, and treacle to comfort the heart ; 

Cold herbs in her garden for agues that burn, 

That over-strong heat to good temper may turn ; 

White endive, and succory, with spinage enow, 

All such with good pot-herbs should follow the plough. 

Get water of fumitory liver to cool, 

And others the like, or else go like a fool ; 

Conserves of barberry, quinces and such, 

With syrups that easeth the sickly so much. 

Old Gervase Markham in his " Approved 
Book called the English Housewife, con- 
taining the inward and outward virtues 
which ought to be in a complete woman," 
places her skill in physic as one of the most 
principal ; " you shall understand," he says, 
" that sith the preservation and care of the 
family touching their health and soundness 
of body consisteth most in her diligence, it 
is meet that she have a physical kind of 
knowledge, how to administer any whole- 
some receipts or medicines for the good of 
their healths, as well to prevent the first 
occasion of sickness, as to take away the 
effects and evil of the same, when it hath 
made seizure upon the body." And " as it 
must be confessed that the depths and secrets 
of this most excellent art of physic, are far 
beyond the capacity of the most skilful 
woman," he relates for the Housewife's use 
some " approved medecines and old doctrines, 
gathered together by two excellent and 
famous physicians, and in a manuscript 
given to a great worthy Countess of this 
land." 

The receipts collected in this and other 
books for domestic practice are some of them 
so hyper-composite that even Tusser's gar- 
den could hardly supply all the indigenous 
ingredients ; others are of the most fantastic 
kind, and for the most part they were as 
troublesome in preparation, and many of 
them as disgusting, as they were futile. 
That " Sovereign "Water " which was in- 
vented by Dr. Stephens, was composed of 
almost all known spices, and all savoury and 
odorous herbs, distilled in claret. With 
this Dr. Stephens " preserved his own life 
until such extreme old age that he could 
neither go nor ride ; and he did continue 
his life, being bed-rid five years, when other 



58 



THE DOCTOK. 



physicians did judge he could not live one 
year ; and he confessed a little before his 
death, that if he were sick at any time, he 
never used any thing but this water only. 
And also the Archbishop of Canterbury used 
it, and found such goodness in it that he 
lived till he was not able to drink out of a 
cup, but sucked his drink through a hollow 
pipe of silver." 

Twenty-nine plants were used in the com- 
position of Dr. Adrian Gilbert's most sove- 
reign Cordial Water, besides hartshorn, figs, 
raisins, gillyflowers, cowslips, marygolds, 
blue violets, red rose-buds, ambergris, be- 
zoar stone, sugar, aniseed, liquorice, and to 
crown all, " what else you please." But 
then it was sovereign against all fevers ; and 
one who in time of plague should take two 
spoonsful of it in good beer, or white wine, 
" he might walk safely from danger, by the 
leave of God." — The Water of Life was 
distilled from nearly as many ingredients, 
to which were added a fleshy running capon, 
the loins and legs of an old coney, the red 
flesh of the sinews of a leg of mutton, four 
young chickens, twelve larks, the yolks of 
twelve eggs, and a loaf of white bread, all to 
be distilled in white wine. 

For consumption, there were pills in 
which powder of pearls, of white amber and 
of coral, were the potential ingredients ; 
there was cockwater, the cock being to be 
chased and beaten before he was killed, or 
else plucked alive ! and there was a special 
water procured by distillation, from a peck 
of garden shell-snails and a quart of earth 
worms, besides other things ; this was pre- 
scribed not for consumption alone, but for 
dropsy and all obstructions. For all faint- 
ness, hot agues, heavy fantasies and imagi- 
nations, a cordial was prepared in tabulates, 
which were called Manus Christi : the true 
receipt required one ounce of prepared pearls 
to twelve of fine sugar, boiled with rose 
water, violet water, cinnamon water, " or 
howsoever one would have them." But 
apothecaries seldom used more than a drachm 
of pearls to a pound of sugar, because men 
would not go to the cost thereof; and the 
Manus Christi simplex was made without 



any pearl at all. For broken bones, bones 
out of joint, or any grief in the bones or 
sinews, oil of swallows * was pronounced 
exceeding sovereign, and this was to be 
procured by pounding twenty live swallows 
in a mortar with about as many different 
herbs ! A mole, male or female according to 
the sex of the patient, was to be dried in an 
oven whole as taken out of the earth, and 
administered in powder for the falling evil. 
A grey eel with a white belly was to be 
closed in an earthen pot, and buried alive in 
a dunghill, and at the end of a fortnight 
its oil might be collected to " help hearing." 
A mixture of rose leaves and pigeon's dung 
quilted in a bag, and laid hot upon the parts 
affected, was thought to help a stitch in the 
side ; and for a quinsey, " give the party to 
drink," says Markham, "the herb mouse- ear, 
steept in ale or beer ; and look when you see 
a swine rub himself, and there upon the same 
place rub a slick-stone, and then with it 
slick all the swelling, and it will cure it." 

To make hair grow on a bald part of the 
head, garden snails were to be plucked out 
of their houses, and pounded with horse - 
leaches, bees, wasps and salt, an equal quan- 
tity of each ; and the baldness was to be 
anointed with the moisture from this mix- 
ture after it had been buried eight days in a 
hotbed. For the removal and extirpation 
of superfluous hairs, a depilatory was to be 
made by drowning in a pint of wine as many 
green frogs as it would cover (about twenty 
was the number), setting the pot forty days 
in the sun, and then straining it for use. 

A water specially good against gravel or 
dropsy might be distilled from the dried and 
pulverised blood of a black buck or he-goat, 
three or four years old. The animal was to 
be kept by himself, in the summer time when 
the sun was in Leo, and dieted for three 
weeks upon certain herbs given in pre- 
scribed order, and to drink nothing but red 
wine, if you would have the best prepara- 
tion, though some persons allowed him his 



* I have known it used in the present century. The 
Old Doctor who used it, — Blacksmith, Farrier, Phle- 
botomist, and Tooth-drawer combined, — is now con- 
signed to his resting place, — aetat. 81. 



THE DOCTOR. 



59 



fill of water every third day. But there was 
a water of man's blood which in Queen 
Elizabeth's days was a new invention, 
" whereof some princes had very great 
estimation, and used it for to remain thereby 
in their force, and, as they thought, to live 
long." A strong man was to be chosen, in 
his flourishing youth, and of twenty-five 
years, and somewhat choleric by nature. He 
was to be well dieted for one month with 
light and healthy meats, and with all kinds 
of spices, and with good strong wine, and 
moreover to be kept with mirth ; at the 
month's end veins in both arms were to be 
opened, and as much blood to be let out as 
he could " tolerate and abide." One hand- 
ful of salt was to be added to six pounds of 
this blood, and this was to be seven times 
distilled, pouring the water upon the resi- 
duum after every distillation, till the last. 
This was to be taken three or four times a 
year, an ounce at a time. One has sight of 
a theory here ; the life was thought to be in 
the blood, and to be made transferable when 
thus extracted. 

Richard Brathwait, more famous since 
Mr. Haslewood has identified him with 
Drunken Barnaby, than as author of " the 
English Gentleman and the English Gentle- 
woman, presented to present times for orna- 
ments, and commended to posterity for 
precedents," says of this Gentlewoman, 
" herbals she peruseth, which she seconds 
with conference ; and by degrees so improves 
her knowledge, as her cautelous care perfits 
many a dangerous cure." But herbals were 
not better guides than the medical books of 
which specimens have just been set before 
the reader, except that they did not lead the 
practitioner so widely and perilously astray. 
" Had Solomon," says the author of Adam 
in Eden, or the Paradise of Plants, " that 
great proficient in all sublunary experi- 
ments, preserved those many volumes that 
he wrote in this kind, for the instruction of 
future ages, so great was that spaciousness 
of mind that God had bestowed on him, that 
he had immediately under the Deity been 
the greatest of Doctors for the preservation 
of mankind : but with the loss of his books 



so much lamented by the Rabbins and 
others, the best part of this herbarary art 
hath since groaned under the defects of 
many unworthy authors, and still remains 
under divers clouds and imperfections." 
This writer, " the ingeniously learned and 
excellent Herbarist Mr. William Coles," 
professing as near as possible to acquaint all 
sorts of people with the very pith and marrow 
of herbarism, arranges his work according 
to the anatomical application of plants, 
" appropriating," says he, " to every part of 
the body, (from the crown of the head, with 
which I begin, and proceed till I come to 
the sole of the foot,) such herbs and plants 
whose grand uses and virtues do most speci- 
fically, and by signature thereunto belong, 
not only for strengthening the same, but 
also for curing the evil effects whereunto 
they are subjected :" — the signatures being, 
as it were, the books out of which the an- 
cients first learned the virtues of herbs ; 
Nature, or rather the God of Nature, having 
stamped on divers of them legible characters 
to discover their uses, though he hath left 
others without any, " that after he had showed 
them the way, they, by their labour and 
industry, which renders every thing more 
acceptable, might find out the rest." It was 
an opinion often expressed by a physician of 
great and deserved celebrity, that in course 
of time specifics would be discovered for 
every malady to which the human frame is 
liable. He never supposed, (though few 
men have ever been more sanguine in their 
hopes and expectations,) that life was thus 
to be indefinitely prolonged, and that it 
would be man's own fault, or his own choice, 
if he did not live for ever ; but he thought 
that when we should thus have been taught 
to subdue those diseases which cut our life 
short, we should, like the Patriarchs, live 
out the number of our days, and then fall 
asleep, — Man being by this physical re- 
demption restored to his original corporeal 
state. 



Then shall like four straight pillars, the four Elements 
Support the goodly structure of Mortality: 
Then shall the four Complexions, like four heads 
Of a clear river, streaming in his body, 



60 



THE DOCTOR. 



Nourish and comfort every vein and sinew : 
No sickness of contagion, no grim death, 
Or deprivation of health's real blessings, 
Shall then affright the creature, built by Heaven, 
Reserved for immortality.* 

He had not taken up this notion from any 
religious feeling ; it was connected in him 
with the pride of philosophy, and he ex- 
pected that this was one of the blessings 
which we were to obtain in the progress of 
knowledge. 

Some specific remedies being known to 
exist, it is indeed reasonable to suppose that 
others will be found. Old theorists went 
farther ; and in a world which everywhere 
bears such undeniable evidences of design 
in every thing, few theories should seem 
more likely to be favourably received than 
the one which supposed that every healing 
plant bears, in some part of its structure, 
the type or signature of its peculiar virtues : 
now this could in no other way be so obvi- 
ously marked, as by a resemblance to that 
part of the human frame for which its reme- 
dial uses were intended. There is a fable, in- 
deed, which says that he who may be so 
fortunate as to taste the blood of a certain 
unknown animal, would be enabled thereby 
to hear the voice of plants and understand 
their speech ; and if he were on a mountain 
at sunrise, he might hear the herbs which 
grow there, when freshened with the dews 
of night they open themselves to the beams 
of the morning, return thanks to the Creator 
for the virtues with which he has indued 
them, each specifying what those virtues 
were, le quail veramente son tante e tali che 
beati i pastori che quelle capessero. A bota- 
nical writer who flourished a little before the 
theory of signatures was started complains 
that herbal medicine had fallen into disuse ; 
he says, antequam chemia patrum nostrorum 
memorid orbi restitueretur, contenti vivebant 
oi tuiv iarpuiv Ko^irpoi Kai xapiivraToi phar- 
macis ex vegetabilium regno accersitis parum 
solliciti de Soils sulphur e et oleo, de Luna 
sale et essentia, de Saturnl saccaro, de Martls 
tlneturd et croco, de vitriolo Veneris, de Mer- 
curio pratcipitato, et Antlmonii jloribus, de 



Sidpfiurls spiritu et Tartari crystallis : nihilo- 
minus mascule debellabant morbos, et tute et 
jucunde. Nunc saeculi nostri infelicitas est, 
quod vegetabilibus contemptim habitis, plerique 
nihil aliud spirant prater metallica ista, et 
extis parata liorribilia secreta.* The new 
theory came in timely aid of the Galenists ; 
it connected their practice with a doctrine 
hardly less mysterious than those of the 
Paracelsists, but more plausible because it 
seemed immediately intelligible, and had a 
natural religious feeling to strengthen and 
support it. 

The Author of Adam in Eden refers to 
Oswald Crollius, as "the great discoverer 
of signatures," and no doubt has drawn 
from him most of his remarks upon this 
theory of physical correspondence. The 
resemblance is in some cases very obvious ; 
but in many more the Swedenborgian corre- 
spondences are not more fantastic ; and 
where the resemblances exist the inference 
is purely theoretical. 

Walnuts are said to have the perfect sig- 
nature of the head ; the outer husks or 
green covering represents the pericranium, 
or outward skin of the skull, whereon the 
hair groweth, — and therefore salt made of 
those husks is exceeding good for wounds in 
the head. The inner woody shell hath the 
signature of the skull, and the little yellow 
skin or peel, that of the dura and pia mater 
which are the thin scarfs that envelope the 
brain. The kernel hath "the very figure 
of the brain, and therefore it is very profit- 
able for the brain and resists poisons." So 
too the Piony, being not yet blown, was 
thought to have " some signature and pro- 
portion with the head of man, having su- 
tures and little veins dispersed up and 
down, like unto those which environ the 
brain : when the flowers blow they open an 
outward little skin representing the skull :" 
the piony, therefore, besides its other vir- 
tues was very available against the falling 
sickness. Poppy heads with their crowns 
somewhat represent the head and brain, and 



* Petri Laurembergii Rostochiensis Ilorticultura. 
Pra;loquiu-n, p. 10. 



THE DOCTOR. 



61 



therefore decoctions of them were used with 
good success in several diseases of the head. 
And Lilies of the Valley, which in Coles's 
days grew plentifully upon Hampstead- 
heath, were known by signature to cure the 
apoplexy ; " for as that disease is caused by 
the dropping of humours into the principal 
ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this 
lilly hanging on the plants as if they were 
drops, are of wonderful use herein." 

All capillary herbs were of course sove- 
reign in diseases of the hair ; and because 
the purple and yellow spots and stripes 
upon the flowers of Eyebright very much 
resemble the appearance of diseased eyes, it 
was found out by that signature that this 
herb was very effectual " for curing of the 
same." The small Stone- crop hath the sig- 
nature of the gums, and is therefore good 
for scurvy. The exquisite Crollius observed 
that the woody scales of which the cones of 
the pine tree are composed resemble the 
fore teeth ; and therefore pine leaves boiled 
in vinegar make a gargle which relieves the 
tooth-ache. The Pomegranate has a like 
virtue for a like reason. Thistles and Holly 
leaves signify by their prickles that they 
are excellent for pleurisy and stiches in the 
side. Saxifrage manifesteth in its growth 
its power of breaking the stone. It had 
been found experimentally that all roots, 
barks and flowers which were yellow, cured 
the yellow jaundice ; and though Kidney 
beans as yet were only used for food, yet 
having so perfect a signature, practitioners 
in physic were exhorted to take it into con- 
sideration, and try whether there were not in 
this plant some excellent faculty to cure 
nephritic diseases. In pursuing this fan- 
tastic system, examples might be shown of 
that mischief, which, though it may long 
remain latent, never fails at some time or 
other to manifest itself as inherent in all 
error and falsehood. 

When the mistresses of families grounded 
their practice of physic upon such systems 
of herbary, or took it from books which 
contained prescriptions like those before 
adduced, (few being either more simple or 
more rational,) Dr. Green might well argue 



that when he mounted his hobby and rode 
out seeking adventures as a Physician 
Errant, he went forth for the benefit of his 
fellow -creatures. The guidance of such 
works, or of their own traditional receipts, 
the people in fact then generally followed. 
Burton tells us that Paulus Jovius in his 
description of Britain, and Levinus Lem- 
nius have observed, of this our island, how 
there was of old no use of physic amongst 
us, and but little at this day, except, he 
says, " it be for a few nice idle citizens, sur- 
feiting courtiers, and stall-fed gentlemen 
lubbers. The country people use kitchen 
physic." There a*re two instances among 
the papers of the Berkeley family, of the 
little confidence which persons of rank 
placed upon such medical advice and medi- 
cinal preparations as could be obtained in 
the country, and even in the largest of our 
provincial cities. In the second year of 
Elizabeth's reign, Henry Lord Berkeley 
" having extremely heated himself by chas- 
ing on foot a tame deer in Yate Park, with 
the violence thereof fell into an immoderate 
bleeding of the nose, to stay which, by the 
ill counsel of some about him, he dipt his 
whole face into a basin of cold water, 
whereby," says the family chronicler, " that 
flush and fulness of his nose which forthwith 
arose could never be remedied, though for 
present help he had physicians in a few days 
from London, and for better help came 
thither himself not long after to have the 
advice of the whole College, and lodged 
with his mother at her house in Shoe-lane." 
He never afterwards could sing with truth 
or satisfaction the old song, 

Nose, Nose, jol!y red Nose, 
And what gave thee that jolly red Nose ? 
Cinnamon and Ginger, Nutmegs and Cloves, 
And they gave me this jolly red Nose. 

A few years later, " Langham, an Irish 
footman of this Lord, upon the sickness 
of the Lady Catherine, this Lord's wife, 
carried a letter from Callowdon to old Dr. 
Fryer, a physician dwelling in Little Britain 
in London ; and returned with a glass bottle 
in his hand, compounded by the doctor for 
the recovery of her health, a journey of an 



02 



THE DOCTOR. 



hundred and forty-eight miles performed by 
him in less than forty-two hours, notwith- 
standing his stay of one night at the physi- 
cian's and apothecary's houses, which no one 
horse could have so well and safely per- 
formed." No doubt it was for the safer 
conveyance of the bottle, that a footman 
was sent on this special errand, for which 
the historian of that noble family adds, 
" the lady shall after give him a new suit of 
cloaths." 

In those days, and long after, they who 
required remedies were likely to fare ill, 
under their own treatment, or that of their 
neighbours ; and worse under the travelling 
quack, who was always an ignorant and im- 
pudent impostor, but found that human 
sufferings and human credulity afforded him 
a never-failing harvest. Dr. Green knew 
this : he did not say, with the Romish priest, 
populus vnlt decipi, et decipietur! for he had 
no intention of deceiving them ; but he saw 
that many were to be won by buffoonery, 
more by what is called palaver, and almost 
all by pretensions. Condescending, there- 
fore, to the common arts of quackery, he 
employed his man Kemp to tickle the mul- 
titude with coarse wit ; but he stored him- 
self with the best drugs that were to be 
procured, distributed as general remedies 
such only as could hardly be misapplied and 
must generally prove serviceable ; and 
brought to particular cases the sound know- 
ledge which he had acquired in the school 
of Boerhaave, and the skill which he had 
derived from experience aided by natural 
sagacity. When it became convenient for 
him to have a home, he established himself 
at Penrith, in the County of Cumberland, 
having married a lady of that place ; but he 
long continued h/s favourite course of life 
and accumulated in it a large fortune. He 
gained it by one maggot, and reduced it by 
many : nevertheless, there remained a hand- 
some inheritance for his children. His son 
proved as maggoty as the father, ran 
through a good fortune, and when confined 
in the King's Bench prison for debt, wrote 
a book upon the Art of cheap living in 
London ! 



The father's local fame, though it has not 
reached to the third and fourth generation, 
survived him far into the second ; and for 
many years after his retirement from prac- 
tice, and even after his death, every travel- 
ling mountebank in the northern counties 
adopted the name of Dr. Green. 

At the time to which this chapter refers, 
Dr. Green was in his meridian career, and 
enjoyed the highest reputation throughout 
the sphere of his itinerancy. Ingleton lay 
in his rounds, and whenever he came there 
he used to send for the schoolmaster to pass 
the evening with him. He was always glad 
if he could find an opportunity also of 
conversing with the elder Daniel, as the 
Flossofer of those parts. William Dove 
could have communicated to him more 
curious things relating to his own art ; but 
William kept out of the presence of strangers, 
and had happily no ailments to make him 
seek the Doctor's advice ; his occasional 
indispositions were but slight, and he treated 
them in his own way. That way was some- 
times merely superstitious, sometimes it was 
whimsical, and sometimes rough. If his 
charms failed when he tried them upon 
himself, it was not for want of faith. When 
at any time it happened that one of his eyes 
was blood- shot, he went forthwith in search 
of some urchin whose mother, either for 
laziness, or in the belief that it was whole- 
some to have it in that state, allowed his 
ragged head to serve as a free warren for 
certain " small deer." One of these hexa- 
peds William secured, and " using him as if 
he loved him," put it into his eye ; when 
according to William's account the insect 
fed upon what it found, cleared the eye, and 
disappearing he knew not where or how, 
never was seen more. 

His remedy for the cholic was a pebble 
posset ; white pebbles were preferred, and 
of these what was deemed a reasonable 
quantity was taken in some sort of milk 
porridge. Upon the same theory he some- 
times swallowed a pebble large enough as 
he said to clear all before it ; and for that 
purpose they have been administered of 
larger calibre than any bolus that ever came 



THE DOCTOR. 



63 



from the hands of the most merciless apo- 
thecary, as large indeed sometimes as a 
common sized walnut. Does the reader 
hesitate at believing this of an ignorant man, 
living in a remote part of the country ? 
Well might William Dove be excused, for a 
generation later than his John Wesley pre- 
scribed, in his Primitive Physic, quicksilver 
to be taken ounce by ounce, to the amount 
of one, two, or three pounds, till the desired 
effect was produced. And a generation 
earlier, Richard Baxter of happy memory 
and unhappy digestion, having read in Dr. 
Gerhard " the admirable effects of the 
swallowing of a gold bullet upon his father," 
in a case which Baxter supposed to be like 
his own, got a gold bullet of between twenty 
and thirty shillings weight, and swallowed 
it. " Having taken it," says he, " I knew 
not how to be delivered of it again. I took 
clysters and purges for about three weeks, 
but nothing stirred it ; and a gentleman 
having done the like, the bullet never came 
from him till he died, and it was cut out. 
But at last my neighbours set a day apart to 
fast and pray for me, and I was freed from 
my danger in the beginning of that day ! " 



CHAPTER XXV. P. I. 

Hiatus valde lacrymdbilis. 

Time flies away fast, 
The while we never remember 

How soon our life here 

Grows old with the year 
That dies with the next December ! Herrick. 

I must pass over fourteen years, for were I 
to pursue the history of our young Daniel's 
boyhood and adolescence into all the rami- 
fications which a faithful biography requires, 
fourteen volumes would not contain it. 
They would be worth reading, for that costs 
little ; they would be worth writing, though 
that costs much. They would deserve the 
best embellishments that the pencil and the 
graver could produce. The most poetical 
of artists would be worthily employed in 
designing the sentimental and melancholy 



I scenes ; Cruikshank for the grotesque ; 
Wilkie and Richter for the comic and serio- 
comic ; Turner for the actual scenery ; 
Bewick for the head and tail pieces. They 
ought to be written ; they ought to be read. 
They should be written — and then they 
wculd be read. But time is wanting : 

Eheu ! fugaces Postkume, Posthume, 
Labuntur annil 

and time is a commodity of which the value 
rises as long as we live. We must be con- 
tented with doing not what we wish, but 
what we can, — our possible as the French 
call it. 

One of our Poets* — (which is it?) — 
speaks of an everlasting now. If such a 
condition of existence were offered to us in 
this world, and it were put to the vote 
whether we should accept the offer and fix 
all things immutably as they are, who are 
they whose voices would be given in the 
affirmative ? 

Not those who are in pursuit of fortune, 
or of fame, or of knowledge, or of enjoy- 
ment, or of happiness ; though with regard 
to all of these, as far as any of them are 
attainable, there is more pleasure in the 
pursuit than in the attainment. 

Not those who are at sea, or travelling in 
a stage coach. 

Not the man who is shaving himself. 

Not those who have the tooth-ache, or 
who are having a tooth drawn. 

The fashionable beauty might ; and the 
fashionable singer, and the fashionable opera 
dancer, and the actor who is in the height of 
his power and reputation. So might the 
alderman at a city feast. So would the heir 
who is squandering a large fortune faster 
than it was accumulated for him. And the 
thief who is not taken, and the convict who 
is not hanged, and the scoffer at religion 
whose heart belies his tongrue. 



* Cowley's Davideis, book i. vol. i. p. 302., and note 
p. 364. The Latin version is in vol. ii. p. 513. 

" Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, 
But an eternal wow* does always last." 

It is needless to add that the term originated with the 
Schoolmen. 



64 



THE DOCTOR. 



Not the wise and the good. 

Not those who are in sickness or in sorrow. 

Not I. 

But were I endowed with the power of 
suspending the effect of time upon the 
things around me, methinks there are some 
of my flowers which should neither fall nor 
fade : decidedly my kitten should never 
attain to cathood : and I am afraid my little 
boy would continue to "mis-speak half- 
uttered words ;" and never, while I live, 
outgrow that epicene dress of French grey, 
half European, half Asiatic in its fashion. 



CHAPTER XXVI. P. I. 

DANIEL AT DONCASTER ; THE REASON WHY 
HE WAS DESTINED FOR THE MEDICAL 
PROFESSION, RATHER THAN HOLY ORDERS ; 
AND SOME REMARKS UPON SERMONS. 

Je tie veux dissimuler, amy Lecteur, que je n'aye Men 
preveu, et me tiens pour deiiement adverty, que ne puis 
eviler la reprehension d'aucuns, et les calomnies de 
plusieurs, ausquels cest escrit desplaira du tout. 

Chiustofle de Hericourt. 

Fourteen years have elapsed since the 
scene took place which is related in the 
twenty-second chapter : and Daniel the 
younger, at the time to which this present 
chapter refers, was residing at Doncaster 
with Peter Hopkins who practised the 
medical art in all its branches. He had 
lived with him eight years, first as a pupil, 
latterly in the capacity of an assistant, and 
afterwards as an adopted successor. 

How this connection between Daniel and 
Peter Hopkins was brought about, and the 
circumstances which prepared the way for 
it, would have appeared in some of the non- 
existent fourteen volumes, if it had pleased 
Fate that they should have been written. 

Some of my readers, and especially those 
who pride themselves upon their knowledge 
of the world, or their success in it, will think it 
strange, perhaps, that the elder Daniel, when 
he resolved to make a scholar of his son, did 
not determine upon breeding him either to 
the Church or the Law, in either of which 



professions the way was easier and more 
inviting. Now though this will not appear 
strange to those other readers who have 
perceived that the father had no knowledge 
of the world, and could have none, it is 
nevertheless proper to enter into some ex- 
planation upon that point. 

If George Herbert's Temple, or his Re- 
mains, or his life by old Izaak Walton, had 
all or any of them happened to be among 
those few but precious books which Daniel 
prized so highly and used so well, it is likely 
that the wish of his heart would have been 
to train up his Son for a Priest to the 
Temple. But so it was that none of his 
reading was of a kind to give his thoughts 
that direction ; and he had not conceived 
any exalted opinion of the Clergy from the 
specimens which had fallen in his way. A 
contempt which was but too general had 
been brought upon the Order by the igno- 
rance or the poverty of a great proportion 
of its members. The person who served 
the humble church which Daniel dutifully 
attended was almost as poor as a Capuchine, 
and quite as ignorant. This poor man had 
obtained in evil hour from some easy or 
careless Bishop a licence to preach. It was 
reprehensible enough to have ordained one 
who was destitute of every qualification 
that the office requires ; the fault was still 
greater in promoting him from the desk to 
the pulpit. 

"A very great Scholar" is quoted by 
Dr. Eachard as saying, " that such preach- 
ing as is usual is a hindrance of salvation 
rather than the means to it." This was said 
when the fashion of conceited preaching, 
which is satirised in Frey Gerundio, had 
extended to England, and though that 
fashion has so long been obsolete, that many 
persons will be surprised to hear it had ever 
existed among us, it may still reasonably be 
questioned whether sermons, such as they 
commonly are, do not quench more devotion 
than they kindle. 

My Lord ! put not the book aside in dis- 
pleasure ! (I address myself to whatever 
Bishop may be reading it.) Unbiassed 1 
will not call myself, for I am a true and 



THE DOCTOR. 



65 



orthodox churchman, and have the interests 
of the Church zealously at heart, because I 
believe and know them to be essentially and 
inseparably connected with those of the 
commonwealth. But I have been an atten- 
tive observer, and as such, request a hear- 
ing. Receive my remarks as coming from 
one whose principles are in entire accord 
with your Lordship's, whose wishes have 
the same scope and purport, and who, while 
he offers his honest opinion, submits it with 
proper humility to your judgment. 

The founders of the English Church did 
not intend that the sermon should invariably 
form a part of the Sunday services.* It 
became so in condescension to the Puritans, 
of whom it has long been the fashion to 
speak with respect, instead of holding them 
up to the contempt and infamy and abhor- 
rence which they have so richly merited. 
They have been extolled by their descend- 
ants and successors as models of patriotism 
and piety ; and the success with which this 
delusion has been practised is one of the 
most remarkable examples of what may be 
effected by dint of effrontery and persever- 
ing falsehood. 

That sentence I am certain will not 
be disapproved at Fulham or Lambeth. 
Dr. Southey, or Dr. Phillpots, might have 
written it. 

The general standard of the Clergy has 
undoubtedly been very much raised since 
the days when they were not allowed to 
preach without a licence for that purpose 
from the Ordinary. Nevertheless it is cer- 
tain that many persons who are in other, 
and more material respects well, or even 
excellently, qualified for the ministerial func- 
tions, may be wanting in the qualifications 
for a preacher. A man may possess great 
learning, sound principles and good sense, 
and yet be without the talent of arranging 
and expressing his thoughts well in a 
written discourse : he may want the power 
of fixing the attention, or reaching the 



* Selden's words are not to be readily forgotten. 

"Preaching, for the most part, is the glory of the 

Preacher, to show himself a fine man. Catechising would 
do much better." Table Talk. 



hearts of his hearers ; and in that case the 
discourse, as some old writer has said in 
serious jest, which was designed for edifi- 
cation turns to edification. The evil was 
less in Addison's days, when he who dis- 
trusted his own abilities availed himself of 
the compositions of some approved Divine, 
and was not disparaged in the opinion of his 
congregation by taking a printed volume 
into the pulpit. This is no longer practised ; 
but instead of this, which secured whole- 
some instruction to the people, sermons are 
manufactured for sale, and sold in manu- 
script, or printed in a cursive type imitating 
manuscript. The articles which are pre- 
pared for such a market are, for the most 
part, copied from obscure books, with more 
or less alteration of language, and generally 
for the worse ; and so far as they are drawn 
from such sources they are not likely to 
contain any thing exceptionable on the 
score of doctrine : but the best authors will 
not be resorted to, for fear of discovery, and 
therefore when these are used, the congre- 
gation lose as much in point of instruction, 
as he who uses them ought to lose in self- 
esteem. 

But it is more injurious when a more 
scrupulous man composes his own dis- 
courses, if he be deficient either in judg- 
ment or learning. He is then more likely 
to entangle plain texts than to unravel 
knotty ones ; rash positions are sometimes 
advanced by such preachers, unsound argu- 
ments are adduced by them in support of 
momentous doctrines, and though these 
things neither offend the ignorant and care- 
less, nor injure the well-minded and well- 
informed, they carry poison with them when 
they enter a diseased ear. It cannot be 
doubted that such sermons act as corrobora- 
tives for infidelity. 

Nor when they contain nothing that is 
actually erroneous, but are merely unim- 
proving, are they in that case altogether 
harmless. They are not harmless if they 
are felt to be tedious. They are not harm- 
less if they torpify the understanding : a 
chill that begins- there may extend to the 
vital regions. Bishop Taylor (the great 



66 



THE DOCTOR. 



Jeremy) says of devotional books, that 
" they are in a large degree the occasion of 
so great indevotion as prevails among the 
generality of nominal Christians, being," he 
says, " represented naked in the conclusions 
of spiritual life, without or art or learn- 
ing; and made apt for persons who can 
do nothing but believe and love, not for 
them that can consider and love." This 
applies more forcibly to bad sermons than 
to common-place books of devotion ; the 
book may be laid aside if it offend the 
reader's judgment, but the sermon is a 
positive infliction upon the helpless hearer. 

The same Bishop, — and his name ought 
to carry with it authority among the wise 
and the good, — has delivered an opinion 
upon this subject, in his admirable Apology 
for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy. 
" Indeed," he says, " if I may freely declare 
my opinion, I think it were not amiss, if the 
liberty of making sermons were something 
more restrained than it is ; and that such 
persons only were entrusted with the liberty, 
for whom the church herself may safely be 
responsive, — that is, men learned and pious ; 
and that the other part, the vulgus cleri, 
should instruct the people out of the foun- 
tains of the church and the public stock, till 
by so long exercise and discipline in the 
schools of the Prophets they may also be 
intrusted to minister of their own unto the 
people. This I am sure was the practice 
of the Primitive Church." 

" I am convinced," said Dr. Johnson, 
" that I ought to be at Divine Service more 
frequently than I am ; but the provocations 
given by ignorant and affected preachers too 
often disturb the mental calm which other- 
wise would succeed to prayer. I am apt to 
whisper to myself on such occasions, ' How 
can this illiterate fellow dream of fixing at- 
tention, after Ave have been listening to the 
sublimest truths, conveyed in the most chaste 
and exalted language, throughout a liturgy 
which must be regarded as the genuine off- 
spring of piety impregnated by wisdom ! ' " 
— " Take notice, however," he adds, "though 
I make this confession respecting myself, I 
do not mean to recommend the fastidious- 



ness that sometimes leads me to exchange 
congregational for solitary worship." 
The saintly Herbert says, 

" Judge not the Preacher, for he is thy Judge ; 
If thou mislike him thou conceiv'st him not. 
God calleth preaching folly. Do not grudge 
To pick out treasures from an earthen pot. 
The worst speak something good. If all want sense, 
God takes a text and preacheth patience. 

He that gets patience and the blessing which 
Preachers conclude with, hath not lost his pains." 

This sort of patience was all that Daniel 
could have derived from the discourses of 
the poor curate ; and it was a lesson of which 
his meek and benign temper stood in no 
need. Nature had endowed him with this 
virtue, and this Sunday's discipline exercised 
without strengthening it. While he was, in 
the phrase of the Religious Public, sitting 
under the preacher, he obeyed to a certain 
extent George Herbert's precept, — that is, 
he obeyed it as he did other laws with the 
existence of which he was unacquainted, — 

Let vain or busy thoughts have there no part : 
Bring not thy plough, thy plots, thy pleasure thither. 

Pleasure made no part of his speculations 
at any time. Plots he had none. For the 
Plough, — it was what he never followed in 
fancy, patiently as he plodded after the fur- 
row in his own vocation. And then for 
worldly thoughts they were not likely in that 
place to enter a mind which never at any 
time entertained them. But to that sort of 
thought (if thought it may be called) which 
cometh as it listeth, and which when the 
mind is at ease and the body in health, is the 
forerunner and usher of sleep, he certainly 
gave way. The curate's voice passed over 
his ear like the sound of the brook with 
which it blended, and it conveyed to him as 
little meaning and less feeling. During the 
sermon, therefore, he retired into himself, 
with as much or as little edification as a 
Quaker finds at a silent meeting. 

It happened also that of the few clergy 
within the very narrow circle in which 
Daniel moved, some were in no good repute 
for their* conduct, and none displayed either 
that zeal in the discharge of their pastoral 
functions, or that earnestness and ability in 
performing the service of the Church, which 



THE DOCTOR. 



67 



are necessary for commanding the respect 
and securing the affections of the parish- 
ioners. The clerical profession had never 
presented itself to him in its best, which is 
really its true light ; and for that cause he 
would never have thought of it for the boy, 
even if the means of putting him forward in 
this path had been easier and more obvious 
than they were. And for the dissenting 
ministry, Daniel liked not the name of a 
Nonconformist. The Puritans had left be- 
hind them an ill savour in his part of the 
country, as they had done every where else ; 
and the extravagances of the primitive 
Quakers, which during his childhood were 
fresh in remembrance, had not yet been 
forgotten. 

It was well remembered in those parts 
that the Yicar of Kirkby Lonsdale, through 
the malignity of some of his puritanical 
parishioners, had been taken out of his bed 
— from his wife who was then big with 
child — and hurried away to Lancaster jail, 
where he was imprisoned three years for no 
other offence than that of fidelity to his 
Church and his King. And that the man 
who was a chief instigator of this persecu- 
tion, and had enriched himself by the spoil 
of his neighbour's goods, though he flourished 
for awhile, bought a field and built a fine 
house, came to poverty at last, and died in 
prison, having for some time received his 
daily food there from the table of one of this 
very Vicar's sons. It was well remembered 
also that, in a parish of the adjoining county- 
palatine, the puritanical party had set fire 
in the night to the Rector's barns, stable, 
and parsonage; and that he and his wife and 
children had only as it were by miracle 
escaped from the flames. 

William Dove had also among his tradi- 
tional stores some stories of a stranger kind 
concerning the Quakers, these parts of the 
North having been a great scene of their 
vagaries in their early days. He used to 
relate how one of them went into the church 
at Brough, during the reign of the Puritans, 
with a white sheet about his body, and a 
rope about his neck, to prophesy before the 
people and their Whig Priest (as he called 



him) that the surplice which was then pro- 
hibited should again come into use, and that 
the Gallows should have its due ! And how 
when their ringleader, George Fox, was put 
in prison at Carlisle, the wife of Justice 
Benson would eat no meat unless she par- 
took it with him at the bars of his dungeon, 
declaring she was moved to do this ; where- 
fore it was supposed he had bewitched her. 
And not without reason ; for when this old 
George went, as he often did, into the Church 
to disturb the people, and they thrust him 
out, and fell upon him and beat him, sparing 
neither sticks nor stones if they came to 
hand, he was presently, for all that they had 
done to him, as sound and as fresh as if 
nothing had touched him ; and when they 
tried to kill him, they could not take away 
his life ! And how this old George rode a 
great black horse, upon which he was seen 
in the course of the same hour at two places, 
threescore miles distant from each other ! 
And how some of the women who followed 
this old George used to strip off all their 
clothes, and in that plight go into the church 
at service time on the Sunday, to bear testi- 
mony against the pomps and vanities of the 
world ; " and to be sure," said William, 
" they must have been witched, or they 
never would have done this." " Lord de- 
liver us ! " said Dinah, " to be sure they 
must ! " — " To be sure they must, Lord 
bless us all ! " said Haggy. 



CHAPTER XXVII. P. I. 

A PASSAGE IN PROCOPIUS IMPROVED. A 
STORY CONCERNING UR1M AND THUMMIM ; 
AND THE ELDER DANIEL,' S OPINION OF THE 
PROFESSION OF THE DAW. 

Here is Domine Picklock, 
My man of Law, sollicits all my causes, 
Follows my business, makes and compounds my quarrels 
Between my tenants and me ; sows all my strifes 
And reaps them too, troubles the country for me, 
And vexes any neighbour that I please. Bun Jonson. 

Among the people who were converted to 
the Christian faith during the sixth century 



68 



THE DOCTOR. 



were two tribes or nations called the Lazi 
and the Zani. Methinks it had been better 
if they had been left unconverted ; for they 
have multiplied prodigiously among us, 
so that between the Lazy Christians and 
the Zany ones, Christianity has grievously 
suffered. 

It was one of the Zany tribe whom Guy 
once heard explaining to his congregation 
what was meant by Urim and Thummim, 
and in technical phrase improving the text. 
Urim and Thummim, he said, were two 
precious stones, or rather stones above all 
price, the Hebrew names of which have been 
interpreted to signify Light and Perfection, 
or Doctrine and Judgment, (which Luther 
prefers in his Bible, and in which some of 
the northern versions have followed him,) or 
the Shining and the Perfect, or Manifesta- 
tion and Truth, the words in the original 
being capable of any or all of these signi- 
fications. They were set in the High Priest's 
breast-plate of judgment ; and when he 
consulted them upon any special occasion 
to discover the will of God, they displayed 
an extraordinary brilliancy if the matter 
which was referred to this trial were 
pleasing to the Lord Jehovah, but they gave 
no lustre if it were disapproved. " My 
Brethren," said the Preacher, " this is what 
learned Expositors, Jewish and Christian, 
tell me concerning these two precious stones. 
The stones themselves are lost. But, my 
Christian Brethren, we need them not, for 
we have a surer means of consulting and 
discovering the will of God ; and still it is 
by Urim and Thummim, if we alter only a 
single letter in one of those mysterious words. 
Take your Bible, my brethren ; use him and 
thumb him — use him and thumb him well, — 
and you will discover the will of God as 
surely as ever the High Priest did by the 
stones in his breast-plate ! " 

What Daniel saw of the Lazi, and what 
he heard of the Zani, prevented him from 
ever forming a wish to educate his son for 
a North country cure, which would have 
been all the preferment that lay within his 
view. And yet, if any person to whose 
judgment lie, deferred, had reminded him 



that Bishop Latimer had risen from as hum- 
ble an origin, it might have awakened in 
him a feeling of ambition for the boy, not 
inconsistent with his own philosophy. 

But no suggestions could ever have in- 
duced Daniel to choose for him the profes- 
sion of the Law. The very name of Lawyer 
was to him a word of evil acceptation. Mon- 
taigne has a pleasant story of a little boy 
who when his mother had lost a lawsuit, 
which he had always heard her speak of as 
a perpetual cause of trouble, ran up to her 
in great glee to tell her of the loss as a mat- 
ter for congratulation and joy ; the poor 
child thought it was like losing a cough, or 
any other bodily ailment. Daniel enter- 
tained the same sort of opinion concerning 
all legal proceedings. He knew that laws 
were necessary evils ; but he thought they 
were much greater evils than there was any 
necessity that they should be ; and believing 
this to be occasioned by those who were 
engaged in the trade of administering them, 
he looked upon lawyers as the greatest pests 
in the country — 

Because, their end being merely avarice, 

Winds up their wits to such a nimble strain 

As helps to blind the Judge, not give him eyes.* 

He had once been in the Courts at Lancas- 
ter, having been called upon as witness in 
a civil suit, and the manner in which he was 
cross-examined there by one of those "young 
spruce Lawyers," *whom Donne has so hap- 
pily characterised as being 

■ " all impudence and tongue" 

had confirmed him in this prejudice. What 
he saw of the proceedings that day induced 
him to agree with Beaumont and Fletcher, 
that 

Justice was a Cheese-monger, a mere cheese-monger, 
Weighed nothing to the world but mites and maggots 
And a main stink ; Law, like a horse-courser, 
Her rules and precepts hung with gauds and ribbands, 
And pampered up to cozen him that bought her, 
When she herself was hackney, lame and founder'd.f 

His was too simple and sincere an under- 
standing to admire in any other sense than 
that of wondering at them — 



* Loud Brooke. 



f Women Pleased. 



THE DOCTOR. 



69 



Men of that large profession that can speak 
To every cause, and things mere contraries, 
Till they are hoarse again, yet all be law ! 
That with most quick agility can turn 
And re-return ; can make knots and undo them, 
Give forked counsel, take provoking gold 
On either hand, and put it up. These men 
He knew would thrive ; — * 

but far was he from wishing that a son of 
his should thrive by such a perversion of his 
intellectual powers, and such a corruption 
of his moral nature. 

On the other hand he felt a degree of 
respect amounting almost to reverence for 
the healing art, which is connected with so 
many mysteries of art and nature. And 
therefore when an opportunity offered of 
placing his son with a respectable practi- 
tioner, who he had every reason for believing 
would behave toward him with careful and 
prudent kindness, his entire approbation was 
given to the youth's own choice. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

PETER HOPKINS. EFFECTS OF TIME AND 
CHANGE. DESCRIPTION OF HIS DWELLING- 
HOUSE. 

Combien de changemens depuis que suis au monde, 
Qui n'est qu'un point du terns ! Pasqcieh. 

Peter Hopkins was a person who might 
have suffered death by the laws of Solon, if 
that code had been established in this coun- 
try ; for though he lived in the reigns of 
George L and George II., he was neither 
Whig nor Tory, Hanoverian nor Jacobite. 
When he drank the King's health with any 
of his neighbours, he never troubled him- 
self with considering which King was in- 
tended, nor to which side of the water their 
good wishes were directed. Under George 
or Charles he would have been the same 
quiet subject, never busying himself with a 
thought about political matters, and having 
no other wish concerning them than that 
they might remain as they were, — so far he 



was a Hanoverian, and no farther. There 
was something of the same temper in his 
religion ; he was a sincere Christian, and 
had he been born to attendance at the Mass 
or the Meeting House would have been 
equally sincere in his attachment to either 
of those extremes : for his whole mind was 
in his profession. He was learned in its 
history ; fond of its theories ; and skilful in 
its practice, in which he trusted little to 
theory and much to experience. 

Both he and his wife were at this time 
well stricken in years ; they had no children, 
and no near kindred on either side ; and 
being both kind-hearted people, the liking 
which they soon entertained toward Daniel 
for his docility, his simplicity of heart, his 
obliging temper, his original cast of mind, 
and his never-failing good-humour, ripened 
into a settled affection. 

Hopkins lived next door to the Mansion 
House, which edifice was begun a few years 
after Daniel went to live with him. There 
is a view of the Mansion House in Dr. 
Miller's History of Doncaster, and in that 
print the dwelling in question is included. 
It had undergone no other alteration at the 
time this view was taken than that of hav- 
ing had its casements replaced by sash 
windows, an improvement which had been 
made by our Doctor, when the frame-work 
of the casements had become incapable of 
repair. The gilt pestle and mortar also had 
been removed from its place above the door. 
Internally the change had been greater ; for 
the same business not being continued there 
after the Doctor's decease, the shop had 
been converted into a sitting room, and the 
very odour of medicine had passed away. 
But I will not allow myself to dwell upon 
this melancholy subject. The world is full 
of mutations ; and there is hardly any that 
does not bring with it some regret at the 
time, — and alas, more in the retrospect ! I 
have lived to see the American Colonies 
separated from Great Britain, the Kingdom 
of Poland extinguished, the Republic of 
Venice destroyed, its territory seized by 
one Usurper, delivered over in exchange to 
another, and the transfer sanctioned ajid con- 



70 



THE DOCTOE. 



firmed by all the Powers of Europe in 
Congress assembled ! I have seen Heaven 
knows how many little Principalities and 
States, proud of their independence, and 
happy in the privileges connected with it, 
swallowed up by the Austrian or the Prus- 
sian Eagle, or thrown to the Belgic Lion, 
as his share in the division of the spoils. I 
have seen constitutions spring up like mush- 
rooms and kicked down as easily. I have 
seen the rise and fall of Napoleon. 

I have seen Cedars fall 
And in their room a mushroom grow ; 
I have seen Comets, threatening all, 
Vanish themselves ; * 

wherefore then should I lament over what 
time and mutability have done to a private 
dwelling-house in Doncaster ? 

It was an old house, which when it was 
built had been one of the best in Doncaster ; 
and even after the great improvements which 
have changed the appearance of the town, 
had an air of antiquated respectability about 
it. Had it been near the church it would 
have been taken for the Vicarage ; standing 
where it did, its physiognomy was such that 
you might have guessed it was the Doctor's 
house, even if the pestle and mortar had 
not been there as his insignia. There were 
eight windows and two doors in front. It 
consisted of two stories, and was oddly built, 
the middle part having, something in the 
Scotch manner, the form of a gable end 
towards the street. Behind this was a single 
chimney, tall, and shaped like a pillar. In 
windy nights the Doctor was so often con- 
sulted by Mrs. Dove concerning the stability 
of that chimney, that he accounted it the 
plague of his life. But it was one of those 
evils which could not be removed without 
bringing on a worse, the alternative being 
whether there should be a tall chimney, or 
a smoky house. And after the mansion 
house was erected, there was one wind which, 
in spite of the chimney's elevation, drove the 
smoke down, — so inconvenient is it some- 
times to be fixed near a great neighbour. 

This unfortunate chimney, being in the 

* IIabinoton. 



middle of the house, served for four apart- 
ments ; the Doctor's study and his bed- 
chamber on the upper floor, the kitchen and 
the best parlour on the lower, — that parlour, 
yes, Reader, that very parlour wherein, as 
thou canst not have forgotten, Mrs. Dove 
was making tea for the Doctor on that ever 
memorable afternoon with which our history 
begins. 



CHAPTER XXIX. P. I. 

A HINT OF REMINISCENCE TO THE READER. 
THE CLOCK OF ST. GEORGE'S. A WORD IN 
HONOUR OF ARCHDEACON MARKHAM. 

There is a ripe season for every thing, and if you slip 
that or anticipate it, you dim the grace of the matter be 
it never so good. As we say by way of Proverb that an 
hasty birth brings forth blind whelps, so a good tale 
tumbled out before the time is ripe for it, is ungrateful to 
the hearer. Bishop Hackett. 

The judicious reader will now have per- 
ceived that in the progress of this narrative, 
— which may be truly said to 

bear 

A music in the ordered history 
It lays before us, 

we have arrived at that point which de- 
termines the scene and acquaints him with 
the local habitation of the Doctor. He will 
perceive also that in our method of narra- 
tion, nothing has been inartificially antici- 
pated ; that, there have been no premature 
disclosures, no precipitation, no hurry, or 
impatience on my part ; and that, on the 
other hand, there has been no unnecessary 
delay, but that we have regularly and 
naturally come to this development. The 
author who undertakes a task like mine, 

— must nombre al the hole cyrcumstaunce 
Of hys matter with brevyacion, 

as an old Poet * says of the professors of the 
rhyming art, and must moreover be careful 

That he walke not by longe continuance 
The perambulate way, 



* Hawe's " Pastime of Pleasure.' 



THE DOCTOR. 



71 



as I have been, O Reader ! and as it is my 
fixed intention still to be. Thou knowest, 
gentle Reader, that I have never wearied 
thee with idle and worthless words ; thou 
knowest that the old comic writer spake 
truly when he said, that the man who speaks 
little says too much, if he says what is not 
to the point ; but that he who speaks well 
and wisely, will never be accused of speak- 
ing at too great length, 

Tov t&h Xiyovrtx. ratv Siovrw (jly^i si» 
M«s;gov vbf<uZ,i, Kot.v W titty <rv\\u,{Sot.s . 
Tov §' iZ Xiyovrm, f*'/i v'opuZ? tTvxi fjt.a.z(pv, 
M--5§' a,v trqiihg t'itryj xoXXk, xou xoXvv x^ovov.* 

My good Readers will remember that, as 
was duly noticed in our first chapter P I. 
the clock of St. George's had just struck 
five, when Mrs. Dove was pouring out the 
seventh cup of tea for her husband, and 
when our history opens. I have some ob- 
servations to make concerning both the tea 
and the tea service, which will clear the 
Doctor from any imputation of intemper- 
ance in his use of that most pleasant, salu- 
tiferous and domesticising beverage : but it 
would disturb the method of my narration 
were they to be introduced in this place. 
Here I have something to relate about the 
Clock. Some forty or fifty years ago a 
Butcher, being one of the Churchwardens 
of the year, and fancying himself in that 
capacity invested with full power to alter 
and improve any thing in or about the 
Church, thought proper to change the posi- 
tion of the clock, and, accordingly, had it 
removed to the highest part of the tower, 
immediately under the battlements. Much 
beautiful Gothic work was cut away to 
make room for the three dials, which he 
placed on three sides of this fine tower ; and 
when he was asked what had induced him 
thus doubly to disfigure the edifice, by mis- 
placing the dials, and destroying so much 
of the ornamental part, the great and greasy 
killcow answered that by fixing the dials so 
high, he could now stand at his own shop- 
door and see what it was o'clock ! That 
convenience this arrant churchwarden had 



* Philemon. 



the satisfaction of enjoying for several years, 
there being no authority that could call him 
to account for the insolent mischief he had 
done. But Archdeacon Markham (to his 
praise be it spoken), at the end of the last 
century, prevailed on the then church- 
wardens to remove two of the dials, and 
restore the architectural ornaments which 
had been defaced. 

This was the clock which, with few inter- 
vals, measured out by hours the life of 
Daniel Dove from the seventeenth year of 
his age, when he first set up his rest within 
its sound. 

Perhaps of all the works of man sun-dials 
and church-clocks are those which have 
conveyed most feeling to the human heart ; 
the clock more than the sun-dial, because it 
speaks to the ear as well as to the eye, and 
by night as well as by day. Our forefathers 
understood this, and, therefore, they not 
only gave a Tongue to Time *, but provided 
that he should speak often to us, and re- 
mind us that the hours are passing. Their 
quarter-boys and their chimes were de- 
signed for this moral purpose as much as 
the memento which is so commonly seen 
upon an old clock-face, — and so seldom 
upon a new one. I never hear chimes that 
they do not remind me of those which were 
formerly the first sounds I heard in the 
morning, which used to quicken my step on 
my way to school, and which announced my 
release from it, when the same tune me- 
thought had always a merrier import. When 
I remember their tones, life seems to me 
like a dream, and a train of recollections 
arises, which, if it were allowed to have its 
course, would end in tears. 



The bell strikes one. We take no note of time 
But from its loss. To give it then a tongue 
Is wise in man." 

Young's Night Thoughts. Night 



72 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER XXX. P. I. 

THE OLD BELLS RUNG TO A NEW TUNE. 

If the bell have any sides the clapper will find 'em. 

Ben Jonson. 

That same St. George's Church has a peal 
of eight tunable bells, in the key of E. b. 
the first bell weighing seven hundred, one 
quarter, and fourteen pounds. 

Tra tutte quante le musiche humane, 
Signor mio gentil, tra le piic care 
Gioje del mondo, e 'I suon delle campane j 
Don don don don don don, eke ve ne pare ? * 

They were not christened, because they 
were not Roman Catholic bells ; for in 
Roman Catholic countries church bells are 
christened with the intention of causing 
them to be held in greater reverence, — 

— perb ordinb n'un consistoro 

Un certo di quei buon papi alV antica, 
Che non ci lavoravan di straforo, 

Che la campana si, si benedica, 
Pot sibattezzi, e se le ponga il nome, 
Prima che' m campanil V ufizio dica. 

Gli organi, ck' anco lor san si ben come 
Si dica il vespro, e le messe cantate, 
Non hanno questo honor sopra le chiome. 

Che le lor canne non son baltezzate, 
Ne' nome ha V una Pier, V altra Maria 
Come hanno le campane prelibate.* 

The bells of St. George's, Doncaster, I 
say, were not christened, because they were 
Protestant bells ; for distinction's sake, how- 
ever, we will name them as the bells stand 
in the dirge of that unfortunate Cat whom 
Johnny Green threw into the well. 

But it will be better to exhibit their 
relative weights in figures, so that they may 
be seen synoptically. Thus then ; — 





Cwt. 


qr. 


lb. 


Bim the first 


7 


1 


14 


Bim the second 


8 





18 


Bim the third 


8 


2 


6 


Bim the fourth 


10 


3 


15 


Bim the fifth 


13 


1 





Bim the sixth 


15 


2 


16 


Bom 


22 


1 





Bull - - 


29 


1 


20 


* AONOLO FlRENZUOLA. 





I cannot but admit that these appellations 
are not so stately in appearance as those 
of the peal which the Bishop of Chalons 
recently baptized, and called a " happy and 
holy family " in the edifying discourse that 
he delivered upon the occasion. The first 
of these was called Marie, to which — or to 
whom — the Duke and Duchess of Dander- 
ville (so the newspapers give this name) 
stood sponsors. " It is you, Marie," said the 
Bishop, " who will have the honour to an- 
nounce the festivals, and proclaim the glory 
of the Lord ! You appear among us under 
the most happy auspices, presented by those 
respectable and illustrious hands to which 
the practices of piety have been so long 
familiar. And you, Anne," he pursued, 
addressing the second bell,- — "an object 
worthy of the zeal and piety of our first 
magistrate (the Prefect), and of her who so 
nobly shares his solicitude, — you shall be 
charged with the same employment. Your 
voice shall be joined to Marie's upon im- 
portant occasions. Ah ! what touching les- 
sons will you not give in imitation of her 
whose name you bear, and whom we reve- 
rence as the purest of Virgins ! You, also, 
Deodate, will take part in this concert, you 
whom an angel, a new-born infant, has con- 
jointly with me consecrated to the Lord ! 
Speak, Deodate ! and let us hear your 
marvellous accents." This Angel and God- 
mother, in whose name the third bell was 
given, was Mademoiselle Deodate Boisset, 
then in the second month of her age, 
daughter of Viscount Boisset. " And you, 
Stephanie, crowned with glory," continued 
the orator, in learned allusion to the Greek 
word orecpavoc, " you are not less worthy 
to mingle your accents with the melody of 
your sisters. And you, lastly, Seraphine 
and Pudentienne, you will raise your voices 
in this touching concert, happy all of you 
in having been presented to the benedic- 
tions of the Church, by these noble and 
generous souls, so praiseworthy for the 
liveliness of their faith, and the holiness of 
their example." And then the Bishop con- 
cluded by calling upon the congregation to 
join with him in prayer that the Almighty 



THE DOCTOR. 



73 



would be pleased to preserve from all 
accidents this " happy and holy family of 
the bells." 

We have no such sermons from our 
Bishops ! The whole ceremony must have 
been as useful to the bells as it was edify- 
ing to the people. 

Were I called upon to act as sponsor 
upon such an occasion, I would name my 
bell Peter Bell, in honour of Mr. Words- 
worth. There has been a bull so called, and 
a bull it was of great merit. But if it were 
the great bell, then it should be called 
Andrew, in honour of Dr. Bell ; and that 
bell should call the children to school. 

There are, I believe, only two bells in 
England which are known by their christian 
names, and they are both called Tom ; but 
Great Tom of Oxford, which happens to be 
much the smaller of the two, was christened 
in the feminine gender, being called Mary, 
in the spirit of catholic and courtly adula- 
tion at the commencement of the bloody 
Queen's reign. Tresham, the Vice-Chan- 
cellor, performed the ceremony, and his 
exclamation, when it first summoned him 
to mass, has been recorded : — " O delicate 
and sweet harmony ! - O beautiful Mary ! 
how musically she sounds ! how strangely 
she pleaseth my ear ! " 

In spite of this christening, the object of 
Dr. Tresham's admiration is as decidedly a 
Tom-Bell as the Puss in Boots who ap- 
peared at a Masquerade (Theodore Hook 
remembers when and where) was a Tom 
Cat. Often as the said Tom-Bell has been 
mentioned, there is but one other anecdote 
recorded of him ; it occurred on Thursday 
the thirteenth day of March, 1806, and was 
thus described in a letter written two hours 
after the event : — " An odd thing happened 
to-day, about half-past four, Tom suddenly 
went mad ; he began striking as fast as 
he could about twenty times. Every body 
went out doubting whether there was an 
earthquake, or whether the Dean was dead, 
or the College on fire. However, nothing 
was the matter but that Tom was taken ill 
in his bowels : in other words, something 
had happened to the works, but it was not 



of any serious consequence, for he has 
struck six as well as ever, and bids fair to 
toll 101 to-night as well as he did before 
the attack." 

This was written by a youth of great 
natural endowments, rare acquirements, 
playful temper, and affectionate heart. If 
his days had been prolonged, his happy 
industry, his inoffensive wit, his sound judge- 
ment and his moral worth, favoured as they 
were by all favourable circumstances, must 
have raised him to distinction ; and the name 
of Barre Roberts, which is now known only 
in the little circle of his own and his father's 
friends, would have had its place with those 
who have deserved well of their kind and 
reflected honour upon their country. 

But I return to a subject, which would 
have interested him in his antiquarian 
pursuits, — for he loved to wander among 
the Ruins of Time. We will return there- 
fore to that ceremony of christening Church 
Bells, which, with other practices of the 
Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, 
has been revived in France. 

Bells, say those Theologians in issimi who 
have gravely written upon this grave matter, 
— Bells, say they, are'not actually baptized 
with that baptism which is administered for 
the remission of sins ; but they are said to 
be christened because the same ceremonies 
which are observed in christening children 
are also observed in consecrating them, 
such as the washing, the anointing, and the 
imposing a name ; all which, however, may 
more strictly be said to represent the signs 
and symbols of baptism than they may be 
called baptism itself. 

Nothing can be more candid ! Bells are 
not baptized for the remission of sins, because 
the original sin of a bell would be a flaw in 
the metal, or a defect in the tone, neither of 
which the Priest undertakes to remove. 
There was however a previous ceremony of 
blessing the furnace when the bells were 
cast within the precincts of a monastery, as 
they most frequently were in former times, 
and this may have been intended for the 
prevention of such defects. The Brethren 
stood round the furnace ranged in proees- 



74 



THE DOCTOR. 



sional order, sang the 150th Psalm, and then 
after certain prayers blessed the molten 
metal, and called upon the Lord to infuse 
into it his grace and overshadow it with his 
power, for the honour of the Saint to whom 
the bell was to be dedicated and whose name 
it was to bear. 

When the time of christening came, the 
officiating Priest and his assistant named 
every bell five times, as a sort of prelude, 
for some unexplained reason which may 
perhaps be as significant and mystical as the 
other parts of the ceremony. He then 
blessed the water in two vessels which were 
prepared for the service. Dipping a clean 
linen cloth in one of these vessels, he washed 
the bell within and without, the bell being 
suspended over a vessel wider in circum- 
ference than the bell's mouth, in order that 
no drop of the water employed in this wash- 
ing might fall to the ground ; for the water 
was holy. Certain psalm? were said or 
sung (they were the 96th and the four last in 
the psalter) during this part of the ceremony 
and while the officiating Priest prepared the 
water in the second vessel : this he did by 
sprinkling salt in it, and putting holy oil 
upon it, either with his thumb, or with a 
stick ; if the thumb were used, it was 
to be cleaned immediately by rubbing 
it well with salt over the same water. Then 
he dipt another clean cloth in this oiled and 
salted water, and again washed the bell 
within and without : after the service the 
cloths were burnt lest they should be pro- 
faned by other uses. The bell was then 
authentically named. Then it was anointed 
with chrism in the form of a cross four times 
on the broadest part of the outside, thrice 
on the smaller part, and four times on the 
inside, those parts being anointed with most 
care against which the clapper was to strike. 
After this the name was again given. Myrrh 
and frankincense were then brought, the 
bell was incensed while part of a psalm was 
recited, and the bell was authentically named 
a third time ; after which the priest care- 
fully wiped the chrism from the bell with 
tow, and the tow was immediately burnt in 
the censer. Next the Priest struck each 



bell thrice with its clapper, and named it 
again at every stroke ; every one of the 
assistants in like manner struck it and 
named it once. The bells were then care- 
fully covered each with a cloth and immedi- 
diately hoisted that they might not be con- 
taminated by any irreverent touch. The 
Priest concluded by explaining to the con- 
gregation, if he thought proper, the reason 
for this ceremony of christening the bells, 
which was that they might act as preserva- 
tives against thunder and lightning, and 
hail and wind, and storms of every kind, 
and moreover that they might drive away 
evil Spirits. To these and their other 
virtues the Bishop of Chalons alluded in his 
late truly Gallican and Roman Catholic 
discourse. " The Bells," said he, " placed 
like sentinels on the towers, watch over us 
and turn away from us the temptations of 
the enemy of our salvation, as well as storms 
and tempests. They speak and pray for us 
in our troubles ; they inform heaven of the 
necessities of the earth." 

Now were this edifying part of the Roman 
Catholic ritual to be re-introduced in the 
British dominions, — as it very possibly may 
be now that Lord Peter has appeared in his 
robes before the King, and been introduced 
by his title, — the opportunity would no 
doubt be taken by the Bishop or Jesuit 
who might direct the proceedings, of com- 
plimenting the friends of their cause by 
naming the first "holy and happy family " 
after them. And to commemorate the ex- 
traordinary union of sentiment which that 
cause has brought about between persons 
not otherwise remarkable for any similitude 
of feelings or opinions, they might unite two 
or more names in one bell (as is frequently 
done in the human subject), and thus with 
a peculiar felicity of compliment show who 
and who upon this great and memorable 
occasion have pulled together. In such a 
case the names selected for a peal of eight 
tunable bells might run thus : — 

Bim 1st. — Canning O'Connel. 

Bim 2d. — Plunkett Shiel. 

Bim 3d. — Augustus Frederick Cobbett. 



THE DOCTOR. 



75 



Bim 4th. 


— Williams Wynn '. 




Waithman. 


Bim 5th. 


— Grenville Wood. 


Bim 6th. 


— Palmer ston Hume. 


Bom 


— Lawless Brougham. 


Bell 


— Lord King, per se ; 



Burdett 



— alone par excellence, as the thickest and 
thinnest friend of the cause, and moreover 
because 

None but himself can be his parallel ; 

and last in order because the base note 
accords best with him ; and because for the 
decorum and dignity with which he has at 
all times treated the Bishops, the clergy and 
the subject of religion, he must be allowed 
to bear the bell not from his compeers alone 
but from all his contemporaries. 



CHAPTER XXXI. P. I. 

MORE CONCERNING BELLS. 

Lord, ringing changes all our bells hath marr'd ; 

Jangled they have and jarr'd 
So long, they're out of tune, and out of frame ; 

They seem not now the same. 
Put them in frame anew, and once begin 
To tune them so, that they may chime all in ! 

Herbert. 

There are more mysteries in a peal of bells 
than were touched upon by the Bishop of 
Chalons in his sermon. There are plain 
bob-triples, bob-majors, bob-majors re- 
versed, double bob-majors, and grandsire- 
bofa-cators, and there is a Bob-maximus. 
Who Bob was, and whether he were Bob 
Major, or Major Bob, that is whether Major 
were his name or his rank, and if his rank, to 
what service he belonged, are questions which 
inexorable Oblivion will not answer, how- 
ever earnestly adjured. And there is no 
Witch of Endor who will call up Bob from 
the grave to answer them himself. But 
there are facts in the history of bell- ringing 
which Oblivion has not yet made her own, 
and one of them is that the greatest per- 
formance ever completed by one person in the 
world was that of Mr. Samuel Thurston at 



the New Theatre Public House in the City 
of Norwich, on Saturday evening, July 1, 
1809, when he struck all these intricate 
short peals, the first four upon a set of eight 
musical hand-bells, the last on a peal of ten. 

But a performance upon hand-bells when 
compared to bell-ringing is even less than 
a review in comparison with a battle. 
Strength of arm as well as skill is required 
for managing a bell-rope. Samuel Thurs- 
ton's peal of plain bob-triples was " nobly 
brought round" in two minutes and three 
quarters, and his grandsire-bob-cators were 
as nobly finished in five minutes and four- 
teen seconds. The reader shall now see 
what real bell-ringing is. 

The year 1796 was remarkable for the 
performance of great exploits in this manly 
and English art, — for to England the art 
is said to be peculiar, the cheerful carrillons 
of the continent being played by keys. In 
that year, and in the month of August, the 
Westmoreland youths rang a complete peal 
of 5040 grandsire-triples in St. Mary's 
Church, Kendal, being the whole number of 
changes on seven bells. The peal was divided 
into ten parts, or courses of 504 each ; the 
bobs were called by the sixth, a lead single 
was made in the middle of the peal, and 
another at the conclusion, which brought the 
bells home. Distinct leads and exact di- 
visions were observed throughout the whole, 
and the performance was completed in three 
hours and twenty minutes. A like per- 
formance took place in the same month at 
Kidderminster in three hours and fourteen 
minutes. Stephen Hill composed and called 
the peal, it was conducted through with one 
single, which was brought to the 4984th 
change, viz. 1,267,453. This was allowed by 
those who were conversant in the art to 
exceed any peal ever yet rung in this king- 
dom by that method. 

Paulo majora canamus. The Society of 
Cambridge youths that same year rang, in 
the Church of St. Mary the Great, a true 
and complete peal of Bob-maximus in five 
hours and five minutes. This consisted of 
6600 changes, and for regularity of striking 
and harmony throughout the peal was 



76 



THE DOCTOR. 



allowed by competent judges to be a very 
masterly performance. In point of time the 
striking was to such a nicety that in each 
thousand changes the time did not vary one 
sixteenth of a minute, and the compass of 
the last thousand was exactly equal to the 
first. 

Eight Birmingham youths (some of them 
were under twenty years of age) attempted 
a greater exploit ; they ventured upon *a 
complete peal of 15,120 bob-major. They 
failed indeed, magnis tamen ausis. For after 
they had rang upwards of eight hours and 
a half, they found themselves so much 
fatigued that they desired the caller would 
take the first opportunity to bring the bells 
home. This he soon did by omitting a bob, 
and so brought them round, thus making a 
peal of 14,224 changes in eight hours and 
forty -five minutes; the longest which was 
ever rung in that part of the country, or 
perhaps any where else. 

In that same year died Mr. Patrick, the 
celebrated composer of church-bell music, 
and senior of the Society of Cumberland 
Youths, — an Hibernian sort of distinction 
for one in middle or later life. He is the 
same person whose name was well known in 
the scientific world as a maker of barome- 
ters ; and he it was who composed the whole 
peal of Stedman's triples, 5040 changes, 
(which his obituarist says had till then been 
deemed impracticable, and for the discovery 
of which he received a premium of 50/. 
offered for that purpose by the Norwich 
amateurs of the art,) "his productions of 
real double and treble bob-royal being a 
standing monument of his unparalleled and 
superlative merits." This Mr. Patrick was 
interred on the afternoon of Sunday, June 
2G, in the churchyard of St. Leonard, 
Shoreditch ; the corpse was followed to the 
grave by all the Ringing Societies in London 
and its environs, each sounding hand-bells 
with muffled clappers, the church bells at 
the same time ringing a dead peal : 

'ils 0'1'y' a.fx.<ph*ov ra.Qov Hotr^ixo; (BoCSoia.ju.oio. 

James Ogdcn was interred with honours 
of the same kind at Ashton-under-Line, in 



the year of this present writing, 1827. His 
remains were borne to the grave by the 
ringers of St. Michael's Tower. in that town, 
with whom he had rung the tenor bell for 
more than fifty years, and with whom he 
performed "the unprecedented feat" of 
ringing five thousand on that bell (which 
weighed 28 cwt.) in his sixty-seventh year. 
After the funeral his old companions rang a 
dead peal for him of 828 changes, that being 
the number of the months of his life. Such 
in England are thw funeral honours of the 
BsXrtffTOt. \ 

It would take ninety- one years to ring 
the changes upon twelve bells, at the rate of 
two strokes to a second ; the changes upon 
fourteen could not be rung through at the 
same rate in less than 16,575 years; and 
upon four and twenty they would require 
more than 117,000 billions of years. 

Great then are the mysteries of bell-ring- 
ing ! And this may be said in its praise, 
that of all devices which men have sought 
out for obtaining distinction by making a 



CHAPTER XXXII. P.I. 

AN INTRODUCTION TO CERTAIN PRELIMI- 
NARIES ESSENTIAL TO THE PROGRESS OP 
THIS WORK. 

Mas demos ya el asicnto en lo importante, 
Que el tiempo huye del mundo par laposta. 

Balbuena. 

The subject of these memoirs heard the bells 
of St. George's ring for the battles of Dcttin- 
gen and Culloden ; for Commodore Anson's 
return and Admiral Hawke's victory ; for 
the conquest of Quebec ; for other victories, 
important in their day, though in the retro - 



* Some readers may not be displeased with these old 
lines. 

TlNTINNABULUM SONAT ! 

Laudo Deum Vcrum, plebem voco, eongrego clerum ; 
Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro. 



THE DOCTOR. 



77 



m 



spect they may seem to have produced little 
effect ; and for more than one Peace ; for 
the going out of the Old Style, and for the 
coming in of the New ; for the accession, 
marriage, and coronation of George III. ; for 
the birth of George IV. ; and 
that of all his royal brethren ., 

and sisters ; — and what was ffw?^ 

to him a subject of nearer and 
dearer interest than any of 
these events, — for his own *J 
wedding. 

What said those bells to him 
that happy day ? for that bells can convey 
articulate sounds to those who have the 
gift of interpreting their language, Whit- 
tington, Lord Mayor of London Town, 
knew by fortunate experience. 

So did a certain Father Confessor in the 
Netherlands, whom a buxom widow con- 
sulted upon the perilous question whether 
she should marry a second husband, or con- 
tinue in widowed blessedness. The prudent 
Priest deemed it too delicate a point for him 
to decide ; so he directed her to attend to 
the bells of her church when next they 
chimed — (they were but three in number) 

— and bring him word what she thought 
they said ; and he exhorted her to pray in 
the mean time earnestly for grace to under- 
stand them rightly, and in the sense that 
might be most for her welfare here and here- 
after, as he on his part would pray for her. 

— She listened with mouth and ears the 
first time that the bells struck up ; and the 
more she listened, the more plainly they 
said " Nempt een man, Nempt een man ! — 
Take a Spouse, Take a Spouse!" "Aye, 
Daughter!" said the Confessor, when she 
returned to him with her report, " if the 
bells have said so, so say I ; and not I alone, 
but the Apostle also, and the Spirit who 
through that Apostle hath told us when it is 
best for us to marry ! " Reader, thou mayest 
thank the Leonine poet Gummarus Van 
Craen for this good story. 

What said the Bells of Doncaster to our 
dear Doctor on that happy morning which 
made him a whole man by uniting to him the 
rib that he till then had wanted? They said 



to him as distinctly as they spoke to Whit- 
tington, and to the Flemish Widow, — 

Daniel Dove brings Deborah home. 
Daniel Dove brings Deborah home. 



&0 



wz — m~ 



Daniel Dove brings Deborah home. 

But whither am I hurrying ? It was not 
till the year 1761 that that happy union was 
effected ; and the fourteen years whose 
course of events I have reluctantly, yet of 
necessity, pretermitted, bring us only to 1748, 
in which year the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle 
was made. Peter Hopkins and Mrs. Hop- 
kins were then both living, and Daniel had 
not attained to the honours of his diploma. 
Before we come to the day on which the 
bells rang that joyful peal, I must enter into 
some details for the purpose of showing how 
he became qualified for his degree, and how 
he was enabled to take it ; and it will be 
necessary therefore to say something of the 
opportunities of instruction which he en- 
joyed under Hopkins, and of the state of 
society in Doncaster at that time. And 
preliminary to, as preparatory for all this, 
some account is to be given of Doncaster 
itself. 

Reader, you may skip this preliminary 
account if you please, but it will be to your 
loss if you do ! You perhaps may be one of 
those persons who can travel from Dan to 
Beersheba, and neither make inquiry con- 
cerning, nor take notice of, any thing on the 
way ; but, thank Heaven, I cannot pass 
through Doncaster in any such mood of 
mind. If, however, thou belongest to a better 
class, then may I promise that in what is 
here to follow thou wilt find something to 
recompense thee for the little time thou wilt 
employ in reading it, were that time more 
than it will be, or more valuable than it is. 
For I shall assuredly either tell thee of 
something which thou didst not know before 



78 



THE DOCTOR. 



(and let me observe by the bye that I never 
obtained any information of any kind which 
did not on some occasion or other prove 
available) — or I shall waken irp to pleasur- 
able consciousness thy napping knowledge. 
Snuff the candles therefore, if it be candle- 
light, and they require it (I hope, for thine 
eyes' sake, thou art not reading by a lamp!) 
— stir the fire, if it be winter, and it be 
prudent to refresh it with the poker ; and 
then comfortably begin a new chapter : 

Faciam ut kujus loci semper memineris.* 



CHAPTER XXXIII. P. I. 

DONCASTRIANA. THE RIVER DON. 

Rivers from bubbling springs 
Have rise at first ; and great from abject things. 

Middleton. 

How would it have astonished Peter Hop- 
kins if some one gifted with the faculty of 
second-sight had foretold to him that, at the 
sale of Pews in a new Church at Doncaster, 
eighteen of those Pews should produce up- 
wards of sixteen hundred pounds, and that 
one of them should be bought at the price 
of ^138, — a sum for which, in his days, 
lands enough might have been purchased to 
have qualified three men as Yorkshire Free- 
holders ! How would it have surprised him 
to have been told that Doncaster races would 
become the greatest meeting in the North 
of England ; that Princes would attend 
them, and more money would annually be 
won and lost there than might in old times 
have sufficed for a King's ransom ! But the 
Doncaster of George the Fourth's reign is 
nol more like the Doncaster of George the 
Second's, than George the Fourth himself, 

in "i;ii re, habit, character, and person is 

like his royal Great Grandfather; — not 
more like than to the Doncaster ofthe United 
States, if such a place there be there; or 



to the Doncaster that may be in New South 
Wales, Van Diemen's or Swan-river-land. 
It was a place of considerable importance 
when young Daniel first became an inhabit- 
ant of it ; but it was very far from having 
attained all the advantages arising from its 
well -endowed corporation, its race-ground, 
and its position on the great north road. . 

It is beyond a doubt that Doncaster may 
be identified with the Danum of Antoninus 
and the Notitia, the Caer Daun of Nennius, 
and the Dona-cester ofthe Saxons ; whether 
it were the Campo-Donum of Bede, — a 
royal residence of the Northumbrian Kings, 
where Paulinus the Romish Apostle of Nor- 
thumbria built a Church, which, with the 
town itself, was burnt by the Welsh King 
Cadwallon, and his Saxon Ally the Pagan 
Penda, after a battle in which Edwin fell, — 
is not so certain : antiquaries differ upon this 
point, but they who maintain the affirmative 
appear to have the strongest case. In the 
charter granted to it by Richard Cceur de 
Lion the town is called Danecastre. 

The name indicates that it was a Roman 
Station on the river Dan, Don or Dun, " so 
called," says Camden, " because 'tis carried 
in a low deep channel, for that is the signifi- 
cation of the British word Dan." I thank 
Dr. Prichard for telling me what it was not 
possible for Camden to know, — that Don in 
the language of the Ossetes, a Caucassian 
tribe, means water ; and that in a country 
so remote as New Guinea, Dan has the same 
meaning. Our Doctor loved the river for 
its name's sake ; and the better because the 
river Dove falls into it. Don however, 
though not without some sacrifice of feeling, 
he was content to call it, in conformity to 
the established usage. A more satisfactory 
reason to him would have been that of pre- 
serving the identity of name with the Don 
of Aberdeenshire and of the Cossacks, and 
the relationship in etymology with the Don- 
au; but that the original pronunciation, which 
was, as he deemed, perverted in that latter 
name, was found in Danube ; and that by 
calling his own river Don it ceased to be 
homonymous with that Dan which adds its 
waters and its name to the Jor. 



THE DOCTOR. 

« — 



79 



But the Yorkshire Don might be liked 
also for its own sake. Hear how its course 
is described in old prose and older verse ! 
" The River Don or Dun," says Dodsworth 
in his Yorkshire collections, " riseth in the 
upper part of Pennystone parish, near Lady's 
Cross — (which may be called our Apennines, 
because the rain-water that falleth sheddeth 
from sea to sea) — cometh to Birchworth, so 
to Pennystone, thence to Boleterstone by 
Medop, leaveth Wharncliffe Chase (stored 
with roebucks, which are decayed since the 
great frost) on the north (belonging to Sir 
Francis Wortley, where he hath great iron- 
works. The said Wharncliffe affordeth two 
hundred dozen of coal for ever to his said 
works. In this Chase he had red and fallow 
deer and roes), and leaveth Bethuns, a Chase 
and Tower of the Earl of Salop, on the 
south side. By Wortley to W'addsley, where 
in times past Everingham of Stainber had 
a park, now disparked ; thence to Sheffield, 
and washeth , the castle wall ; keepeth its 
course to Attercliffe, where is an iron forge 
of the Earl of Salop ; fromthence to Winke- 
bank, Kymberworth and Eccles, where it 
entertaineth the Rother; cometh presently 
to Rotherham, thence to Aldwark Hall, the 
Fitzwilliams' ancient possession; then to 
Thriberg Park, the seat of Reresbyes Knights ; 
then to Mexborough, where hath been a 
Castle ; then to Conisborough Park and 
Castle of the Earls of Warrens, where there 
is a place called Horsas Tomb ; from thence 
to Sprotebrough, the ancient seat of the 
famous family of Fitzwilliam, who have 
nourished since the Conquest ; thence by 
Newton to Donecastre, Wheatley, and Kirk 
Sandal, to Barnby-Dunn; byBramwith and 
Stainforth to Fishlake ; thence to Turnbrig, 
a port town serving indifferently for all the 
west parts, where he pays his tribute to the 
Ayre." 

Hear Michael Drayton next, who being 
as determined a personificator as Darwin 
himself, makes " the wide West Riding " 
thus address her favourite River Don : 

Thou first of all my floods, whose banks do bound my 
south 
And offerest up thy stream to mighty Humber's mouth ; 



Of yew and climbing elm that crown'd with many a spray, 
From thy clear fountain first thro' many a mead dost play, 
Till Rother, whence the name of Rotherham first begun, 
At that her christened town doth lose her in my Don ; 
Which proud of her recourse, towards Doncaster doth 

drive, 
Her great and chiefest town, the name that doth derive 
From Don's near bordering banks ; when holding on her 

race, 
She, dancing in and out, indenteth Hatfield Chase, 
Whose bravery hourly adds new honors to her bank: 
When Sherwood sends her in slow Iddle that, made rank 
With her profuse excess, she largely it bestows 
On Marshland, whose swoln womb with such abundance 

flows, 
As that her battening breast her fatlings sooner feeds, 
And with more lavish waste than oft the grazier needs ; 
Whose soil, as some reports, that be her borderers, note, 
With water under earth undoubtedly doth float, 
For when the waters rise, it risen doth remain 
High, while the floods are high, and when they fall again, 
It falleth : but at last when as my lively Don 
Along by Marshland side her lusty course hath run, 
The little wandering Trent, won by the loud report 
Of the magnific state and height of Humber's court, 
Draws on to meet with Don, at her approach to Aire. 

Seldon's rich commentary does not extend 
to that part of the Polyolbion in which these 
lines occur, but a comment upon the sup- 
posed rising and falling of the Marshland 
with the waters is supplied by Camden. 
" The Don," he says, after it has passed 
Hatfield Chase, " divides itself, one stream 
running towards the river Idel, which comes 
out of Nottinghamshire, the other towards 
the river Aire ; in both which they continue 
till they meet again, and fall into the ^Estu- 
ary of Humber. Within the island, or that 
piece of ground encompassed by the branches 
of these two rivers, are Dikemarsh, and 
Marshland, fenny tracts, or rather river- 
islands, about fifteen miles round, which 
produce a very green rank grass, and are as 
it were set round with little villages. Some 
of the inhabitants imagine the whole island 
floats upon the water ; and that sometimes 
when the waters are increased 'tis raised 
higher ; just like what Pomponius Mela tells 
us of the Isle of Autrum in Gaul." Upon 
this passage Bishop Gibson remarks, " As to 
what our author observes of the ground 
being heaved up, Dr. Johnston affirms he 
has spoke with several old men, who told 
him that the turf-moor between Thorne and 
Gowle was so much higher before the drain- 
ing, especially in winter time, than it is now, 
that before they could see little of the church 



80 



THE DOCTOR. 



steeple, whereas now they can see the church- 
yard wall." 

The poet might linger willingly with Ebe- 
nezer Elliott amid 

rock, vale and wood, — 

Haunts of his early days, and still loved well, — 
And where the sun, o'er purple moorlands wide, 
Gilds Wharncliffe's oaks, while Don is dark below ; 
And where the blackbird sings on Rother's side, 
And where Time spares the age of Conisbro' ; 

but we must proceed with good matter-of- 
fact prose. 

The river has been made navigable to 
Tinsley, within three miles of Sheffield, and 
by this means Sheffield, Rotherham and 
Doncaster carry on a constant intercourse 
with Hull. A cut was made for draining 
that part of Hatfield Chase called the Levels, 
by an adventurous Hollander, Cornelius 
Vermuyden by name, in the beginning of 
Charles the First's reign. Some two hun- 
dred families of French and Walloon refu- 
gees were induced to colonise there at that 
time. They were forcibly interrupted in 
their peaceful and useful undertaking by the 
ignorant people of the country, who were 
instigated and even led on by certain of the 
neighbouring gentry, as ignorant as them- 
selves ; but the Government was then strong 
enough to protect them ; they brought about 
twenty -four thousand acres into cultivation, 
and many of their descendants are still set- 
tled upon the ground which was thus re- 
claimed. Into this new cut, which is at this 
day called the Dutch river, the Don was 
turned, its former course having been through 
Eastoft; but the navigation which has 
since proved so beneficial to the country, 
and toward which this was the first great 
measure, produced at first a plentiful crop 
of lawsuits, and one of the many pamphlets 
which this litigation called forth bears as an 
alius in its title, " the Devil upon Don." 

Many vestiges of former cultivation were 
discovered when this cut was made, — such 
(according to Gibson's information) as gates, 
ladders, hammers, and shoes. The land was 
observed in sonic places to lie in ridges and 
furious, as if it had been ploughed; and 
oaks and fir trees were frequently dug up, 
some of which were found lying along, with 



their roots still fastened ; others, as if cut or 
burnt, and severed from the ground. Roots 
were long to be seen in the great cut, some 
very large and standing upright, others with 
an inclination toward the east. 

About the year 1665 the body of a man 
was found in a turf-pit, some four yards 
deep, lying with his head toward the north. 
The hair and nails were not decayed, and 
the skin was like tanned leather ; but it had 
lain so long there that the bones had become 
spongy. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. P. I. 

MORAL INTEREST OF TOPOGRAPHICAL WORKS. 
LOCAL ATTACHMENT. 

Let none our Author rudely blame 
Who from the story has thus long digrest ; 

But for his righteous pains may his fair fame 
For ever travel, whilst his ashes rest. 

Sir William Davenant. 

Reader, if thou carest little or nothing for 
the Yorkshire river Don and for the town 
of Doncaster, and for the circumstances 
connected with it, I am sorry for thee. My 
venerable friend the Doctor was of a dif- 
ferent disposition. He was one who loved, 
like Southey, 

' uncontrolled, as in a dream 

To muse upon the course of human things ; 
Exploring sometimes the remotest springs, 
Far as tradition lends one guiding gleam ; 
Or following upon Thought's audacious wings 
Into Futurity the endless stream. 

He could not only find 

tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing, — * 

but endeavoured to find all he could in them, 
and for that reason delighted to inquire into 
the history of places and of things, and to 
understand their past as well as their present 
state. The revolutions of a mansion house 
within his circuit were as interesting to him 
as those of the Mogul Empire ; and he had 
as much satisfaction in being acquainted 
with the windings of a brook from its springs 

* Shakespeare. 



THE DOCTOR. 



81 



to the place where it fell into the Don, as 
he could have felt in knowing that the 
sources of the Nile had been explored, or 
the course and termination of the Niger. 

Hear, Reader, what a journalist says upon 
rivers in the newest and most approved 
style of critical and periodical eloquence ! 
He says, and he regarded himself no doubt 
with no small complacency while so saying, 

'• An acquaintance with" Rivers " well 
deserves to be erected into a distinct science. 
We hail Potamology with a cordial greeting, 
and welcome it to our studies, parlours, 
schools, reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, me- 
chanics' institutes and universities. There 
is no end to the interest which Rivers excite. 
They may be considered physically, geogra- 
phically, historically, politically, commer- 
cially, mathematically, poetically, pictorially, 
morally, and even religiously — in the 
world's anatomy they are its veins, as the 
primitive mountains, those mighty structures 
of granite, are its bones ; they minister to 
the fertility of the earth, the purity of the 
air, and the health of mankind. They mark 
out nature's kingdoms and provinces, and are 
the physical dividers and subdividers of 
continents. They welcome the bold dis- 
coverer into the heart of the country, to 
whose coast the sea has borne his adventur- 
ous bark. The richest freights have floated 
on their bosoms, and the bloodiest battles 
have been fought upon their banks. They 
move the wheels of cotton mills by their 
mechanical power, and madden the souls of 
poets and painters by their picturesque 
splendour. They make scenery and are 
scenery, and land yields no landscape with- 
out water. They are the best vehicle for 
the transit of the goods of the merchant, and 
for the illustration of the maxims of the 
moralist. The figure is so familiar, that we 
scarcely detect a metaphor when the stream 
of life and the course cf time flow on into 
the ocean of Eternity." 

Hear, hear, oh hear ! 
I'd He — 

Fiumi correnti. e rive. — 
E woi — fontane five ! * 

* Gusto de' Conte. 



Yet the person who wrote this was neither 
deficient in feeling, nor in power ; it is the 
epidemic vice prevailing in an age of jour- 
nals that has infected him. They who frame 
their style ad captandum fall into this vein, 
and as immediate effect is their object they 
are wise in their generation. The public to 
which they address themselves are attracted 
by it, as flies swarm about treacle. 

We are advanced from the Age of Reason 
to the Age of Intellect, and this is the 
current eloquence of that age ! — let us get 
into an atmosphere of common sense. 

Topographical pursuits, my Doctor used 
to say, tend to preserve and promote the 
civilisation of which they are a consequence 
and a proof. They have always prospered 
in prosperous countries, and flourished most 
in flourishing times, when there have been 
persons enough of opulence to encourage such 
studies, and of leisure to engage in them. 
Italy and the Low Countries therefore took 
the lead in this branch of literature ; the Spa- 
niards and Portuguese cultivated it in their 
better days ; and beginning among ourselves 
with Henry YHL it has been continued with 
increasing zeal down to the present time. 

Whatever strengthens our local attach- 
ments is favourable both to individual and 
national character. Our home, — our birth 
place, — our native land, — think for awhile 
what the virtues are which arise out of the 
feelings connected with these words ; and if 
thou hast any intellectual eyes thou wilt then 
perceive the connection between topography 
and patriotism. 

Show me a man who cares no more for 
one place than another, and I will show you 
in that same person one who loves nothing 
but himself. Beware of those who are 
homeless by choice ! You have no hold on 
a human being whose affections are without 
a tap-root. The laws recognise this truth 
in the privileges which they confer upon 
freeholders ; and public opinion acknow- 
ledges it also, in the confidence which it re- 
poses upon those who have what is called a 
stake in the country. Vagabond and rogue 
are convertible terms; and with how much 
propriety any one may understand who 



82 



THE DOCTOR. 



knows what are the habits of the wandering 
classes, such as gypsies, tinkers, and potters. 

The feeling of local attachment was pos- 
sessed by Daniel Dove in the highest degree. 
Spurzheim and the crazyologists would 
have found out a bump on his head for its 
local habitation ; — letting that quackery 
pass, it is enough for me to know that he 
derived this feeling from his birth as a 
mountaineer, and that he had also a right to 
it by inheritance, as one whose ancestors 
had from time immemorial dwelt upon the 
same estate. Smile not contemptuously at 
that word, ye whose domains extend over 
more square miles than there were square 
roods upon his patrimony ! To have held 
that little patrimony unimpaired, as well as 
unenlarged, through so many generations, 
implies more contentment, more happiness, 
and a more uniform course of steadiness and 
good conduct, than could be found in the 
proudest of your genealogies ! 

The most sacred spot upon earth to him 
was his father's hearth-stead. Rhine, Rhone, 
Danube, Thames or Tyber, the mighty 
Ganges or the mightier Maranon, even 
Jordan itself, affected his imagination less 
than the Greta, or Wease as he was wont to 
call it, of his native fields ; whose sounds in 
his boyhood were the first which he heard at 
morning and the last at night, and during so 
many peaceful and happy years made as it 
were an accompaniment to his solitary mu- 
sings, as he walked between his father's house 
and his schoolmaster's, to and fro. 

Next to that wild river Wease whose 
visible course was as delightful to the eye 
and ear, as its subterranean one was to the 
imagination, he loved the Don. He was 
not one of those refined persons who like to 
lessen their admiration of one object by 
comparing it with another. It entered as 
little into his mind to depreciate the Don 
because it was not a mountain stream, as it 
did into Corporal Trim's or Uncle Toby's 
to think the worse of Bohemia because it 
has no sea coast. What if it had no falls, 
no rapids or resting-places, no basins whose 
pellucid water might tempt Diana and the 
Oreades to bathe in it ; instead of these the 



Don had beauties of its own, and utilities 
which give to such beauties when combined 
with them an additional charm. There was 
not a more pleasing object in the landscape 
to his eyes than the broad sail of a barge 
slowly moving between the trees, and bear- 
ing into the interior of England the produce 
of the Baltic, and of the East and West. 

The place in the world which he loved 
best was Ingleton, because in that little 
peaceful village, as in his childhood it was, 
he had once known every body and every 
body had known him ; and all his recollec- 
tions of it were pleasurable, till time cast 
over them a softening but a pensive hue. 
But next to Ingleton he loved Doncaster. 

And wherefore did he thus like Don- 
caster ? For a better reason than the 
epigrammatist could give for not liking Dr. 
Fell, though perhaps many persons have no 
better than that epigrammatist had in this 
case, for most of their likings and dislikings. 
He liked it because he must have been a 
very unreasonable man if he had not been 
thankful that his lot had fallen there — be- 
cause he was useful and respected there, 
contented, prosperous, happy; finally be- 
cause it is a very likeable place, being one 
of the most comfortable towns in England : 
for it is clean, spacious, in a salubrious 
situation, well-built, well-governed, has no 
manufactures, few poor, a greater propor- 
tion of inhabitants who are not engaged in 
any trade or calling, than perhaps any other 
town in the kingdom, and moreover it sends 
no members to parliament. 



INTERCHAPTER IH. 

THE AUTHOR QUESTIONS THE PROPRIETY OP 
PERSONIFYING CIRCUMSTANCE. DENIES THE 
UNITY AND INDIVISIBILITY OP THE PUBLIC, 
AND MAY EVEN BE SUSPECTED OF DOUBT- 
ING ITS OMNISCIENCE AND ITS INFALLI- 
BILITY. 

Haforse 
Testa la plebe, ove si chiuda in vece 
Di senno, altro che nebbia ? o forma voce 
Chi sta piii saggia, che un bebu d'armento ? 

Chiabrera. 

" What a kind of Being is circumstance ! " 



THE DOCTOR. 



83 



says Horace Walpole in his atrocious tragedy 
of the Mysterious Mother. — A very odd 
kind of Being indeed. In the course of my 
reading I remember but three Beings equally 
remarkable, — as personified in prose and 
verse. Social-Tie was one ; Catastrophe 
another ; and Inoculation, heavenly Maid ! 
the third. 

But of all ideal Beings the most extra- 
ordinary is that which we call the Public. 
The Public and Transubstantiation I hold 
to be the two greatest mysteries in or out 
of nature. And there are certain points of 
resemblance between them. — For as the 
Priest creates the one mystery, so the author, 
or other appellant to the said Public, creates 
the other, and both bow down in worship, 
real or simulated, before the Idol of their 
own creation. And as every fragment of the 
wafer, break it into as many as you may, 
contains in itself the whole entire mystery of 
transubstantiation, just in the same manner 
every fractional part of the Public assumes 
to itself the powers, privileges and preroga- 
tives of the whole, as virtually, potentially 
and indefeasably its own. Nay, every in- 
dividual who deems himself a constituent 
member of the said Public arrogates them 
also, and when he professes to be acting pro 
bono publico, the words mean with him all 
the good he can possibly get for himself. 

The old and famous illustration of Hermes 
may be in part applied to the Public ; it is 
a circle of which the centre is every where : 
in part I say, for its circumference is de- 
fined. It is bounded by language, and has 
many intercircles. It is indeed a confused 
multiciplity of circles intersecting each 
other, perpetually in motion and in change. 
Every man is the centre of some circle, and 
yet involved in others ; he who is not some- 
times made giddy by their movements, has a 
strong head ; and he who is not sometimes 
thrown off his balance by them, stands well 
upon his legs. 

Again, the Public is like a nest of patent 
coffins packed for exportation, one within 
another. There are Publics of all sizes, 
from the genus generalissimum, the great 
general universal Public, whom London is 



not large enough to hold, to the species 
specialissima, the little Thinking Public, 
which may find room in a nutshell. 

There is the fashionable Public, and the 
Religious Public, and the Play-going Public, 
and the Sporting Public, and the Commercial 
Public, and the Literary Public, and the 
Reading Public, and heaven knows how 
many Publics more. They call themselves 
Worlds sometimes, — as if a certain number 
of worldlings made a World ! 

He who pays his homage to any or all of 
these Publics, is a Publican and a Sinner. 

" Nunquam valui populo placere ; nam quce ego scio 
non probat populus > quce probat populus, ego nescio." * 

" Bene et Me, quisquis fuit, (ambigitur enim de auctore.) 
cum qucereretur ab Mo, quo tanta diligentia artis spec- 
taret ad paucissimos perventurcef Satis sunt, inquit, 
mihi pauci ; satis est unus ; satis est nullus."* 



CHAPTER XXXV. P. I. 

DONCASTRIANA. POTTERIC CARR. SOMETHING 
CONCERNING THE MEANS OF EMPLOYING 
THE POOR, AND BETTERING THEIR CON- 
DITION. 

"Why should I sowen draf out of my fist, 
When I may sowen wheat, if that me list ? 

Chaucer. 

Doncaster is built upon a peninsula, or 
ridge of land, about a mile across, having a 
gentle slope from east to west, and bounded 
on the west by the river ; this ridge is com- 
posed of three strata, to wit, — of the allu- 
vial soil deposited by the river in former 
ages, and of limestone on the north and west ; 
and of sandstone to the south and east. To 
the south of this neck of land lies a tract 
called Potteric Carr, which is much below 
the level of the river, and was a morass, or 
range of fens, when our Doctor first took 
up his abode in Doncaster. This tract ex- 
pends about four miles in length and nearly 
three in breadth, and the security which it 
afforded against an attack on that side, while 
the river protected the peninsula by its 

** Seneca, 2, 79. 



84 



THE DOCTOR. 



semicircular bend on the other, was evi- 
dently one reason why the Romans fixed 
upon the site of Doncaster for a station. In 
Brockett's Glossary of North-Country words, 
Carr is interpreted to mean "flat marshy 
land ; a pool or lake ; " but the etymology 
of the word is yet to be discovered. 

These fens were drained and enclosed 
pursuant to an act of Parliament which was 
obtained for that purpose in the year 1766. 
Three principal drains were then cut, four- 
teen feet wide, and about four miles long, 
into which the water was conducted from 
every part of the Carr, southward, to the 
little river Torne, at Rossington Bridge, 
whence it flows into the Trent. Before these 
drainings the ground was liable to frequent 
inundations, and about the centre there was 
a decoy for Avild ducks : there is still a deep 
water there of considerable extent, in which 
very large pike and eels are found. The 
soil, which was so boggy at first that horses 
were lost when attempting to drink at the 
drains, has been brought into good cultiva- 
tion (as all such ground may be) to the 
great improvement of the district ; for till 
this improvement was effected intermittent 
fevers and sore throats were prevalent there, 
and they have ceased from the time that the 
land was drained. The most unhealthy 
season now is the Spring, when cold winds 
from the North and North East usually 
prevail during some six weeks ; at other 
times Doncaster is considered to be a healthy 
place. It has been observed that when en- 
demic diseases arrive there, they uniformly 
come from the south ; and that the state of 
the weather may be foretold from a know- 
ledge of what it has been at a given time 
in London, making an allowance of about 
three days, for the chance of winds. Here, 
as in all places which lie upon a great and 
frequented road, the transmission of diseases 
lias been greatly facilitated by the increase 
of travelling. 

But before we leave Potteric Carr, let us 
try, reader, whether we cannot improve it in 
another way, that is, in the dissenting and 
so-called evangelical sense of the word, in 
which sense the battle of Trafalgar was im- 



proved, in a sermon by the Reverend John 
Evans. Gentle Reader, let you and I in 
like manner endeavour to improve this en- 
closure of the Carr. 

Four thousand acres of bog whereof that 
Carr consisted, and upon which common 
sand, coal ashes, and the scrapings of a lime- 
stone road were found the best manure, 
produce now good crops of grain, and ex- 
cellent pasturage. 

There are said to be in England and 
Wales at this time 3,984,000 acres of uncul- 
tivated but cultivable ground ; 5,950,000 in 
Scotland; 4,900,000 in Ireland; 160,000 in 
the smaller British Islands. Crags, woods, 
and barren land are not included in this 
statement. Here are 15,000,000 acres, the 
worst of which is as good as the morass 
which has been reclaimed near Doncaster, 
and the far greater part very materially 
better. 

I address myself now to any one of my 
readers who pays poor rates ; but more 
especially to him who has any part in the 
disposal of those rates ; and most especially 
to a clergyman, a magistrate, and a mem- 
ber of Parliament. 

The money which is annually raised for 
poor-rates in England and Wales has for some 
years amounted to from five to six millions. 
With all this expenditure cases are con- 
tinually occurring of death from starvation, 
either of hunger or cold, or both together ; 
wretches are carried before the magistrates 
for the offence of lying in the streets or in 
unfinished houses, when they have not where 
to hide their heads ; others have been found 
dead by the side of limekilns, or brickkilns, 
whither they had crept to save themselves 
from perishing for cold ; and untold num- 
bers die of the diseases produced by scanty 
and unwholesome food. 

This money, moreover, is for the most 
part so applied, that they who have a right- 
ful claim upon it, receive less than injustice, 
in humanity, and according to the intent of 
a law wisely and humanely enacted, ought 
to be their portion; while they who have 
only a legal claim upon it, that claim arising 
from an evil usage which has become pre- 



THE DOCTOK. 



85 



scriptive, receive pay, where justice, policy, 
and considerate humanity, and these very 
laws themselves, if rightly administered, 
would award restraint or punishment. 

Thus it is in those parts of the United 
Kingdom, where a provision for the poor is 
directly raised by law. In Scotland the pro- 
portion of paupers is little less, and the evils 
attendant upon poverty are felt in an equal 
or nearly equal degree. In Ireland they 
exist to a far greater extent, and may truly 
be called terrible. 

Is it fitting that this should be while there 
are fifteen millions of cultivable acres lying 
waste ? Is it possible to conceive grosser im- 
providence in a nation, grosser folly, grosser 
ignorance of its duty and interest, or grosser 
neglect of both, than are manifested in the 
continuance and growth and increase of this 
enormous evil, when the means of checking 
it are so obvious, and that too by a process 
in which every step must produce direct and 
tangible good ? 

But while the Government is doing those 
things which it ought not to have done, and 
leaves undone those which it ought to do, 
let Parishes and Corporations do what is in 
their power for themselves. And bestir 
yourselves in this good work, ye who can ! 
The supineness of the Government is no ex- 
cuse for you. It is in the exertions of indi- 
viduals that all national reformation must 
begin. Go to work cautiously, experiment- 
ally, patiently, charitably, and in faith ! I 
am neither so enthusiastic as to suppose, 
nor so rash as to assert, that a cure may 
thus be found for the complicated evils 
arising from the condition of the labouring 
classes. But it is one of those remedial 
means by which much misery may be re- 
lieved, and much of that profligacy that 
arises from hopeless wretchedness be pre- 
vented. It is one of those means from which 
present relief may be obtained, and future 
good expected. It is the readiest way in 
which useful employment can be provided 
for the industrious poor. And if the land 
so appropriated should produce nothing 
more than is required for the support of 
those employed in cultivating it, and who 



must otherwise be partly or wholly supported 
by the poor-rates, such cultivation would, 
even then, be profitable to the public. 
Wherever there is heath, moor or fen, — 
which there is in every part of the Island, — 
there is work for the spade ; employment 
and subsistence for man is to be found there, 
and room for him to encrease and multiply 
for generations. 

Reader, if you doubt that bog and bad 
land may be profitably cultivated, go and 
look at Potteric Carr, (the members of both 
Houses who attend Doncaster Races, may 
spare an hour for this at the next meeting). 
If you desire to know in whatananner the 
poor who are now helpless may be settled 
upon such land, so as immediately to earn 
their own maintenance, and in a short time to 
repay the first cost of their establishment, 
read the account of the Pauper Colonies in 
Holland ; for there the experiment has been 
tried, and we have the benefit of their 
experience. 

As for the whole race of Political Econo- 
mists, our Malthusites, Benthamites, Utili- 
tarians or Futilitarians, they are to the 
Government of this Country such counsellors 
as the magicians were to Pharaoh ; whosoever 
listens to them has his heart hardened. — 
But they are no conjurors. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. P. I. 

REMARKS ON AN OPINION OF MR. CRABBE's. 
TOPOGRAPHICAL POETRY. DRAYTON. 

Do, pious marble, let thy readers know 

What they and what their children owe 

To Drayton's name, whose sacred dust 

We recommend unto thy trust. 

Protect his memory, and preserve his story ; 

Remain a lasting monument of his glory ; 

And when thy ruins shall disclaim 

To be the Treasurer of his name, 

His name that cannot fade, shall be 

An everlasting monument to thee. 

Epitaph in Westminster Abbey. 

The Poet Crabbe has said that there subsists 
an utter repugnancy between the studies of 
topography and poetry. He must have 
intended by topography, when he said so, 



86 



THE DOCTOR. 



the mere definition of boundaries and speci- 
fication of land-marks, such as are given in 
the advertisement of an estate for sale ; and 
boys in certain parts of the country are 
taught to bear in mind by a remembrance 
in tail when the bounds of a parish are walked 
by the local authorities. Such topography 
indeed bears as little relation to poetry as a 
map or chart to a picture. 

But if he had any wider meaning, it is 
evident, by the number of topographical 
poems, good, bad and indifferent, with 
which our language abounds, that Mr. 
Crabbe's predecessors in verse, and his con- 
temporaries also, have differed greatly from 
him in opinion upon this point. The Poly- 
olbion, notwithstanding its common-place 
personifications and its inartificial transitions, 
which are as abrupt as those in the Meta- 
morphoses and the Fasti, and not so graceful, 
is nevertheless a work as much to be valued 
by the students and lovers of English litera- 
ture, as by the writers of local history. 
Drayton himself, whose great talents were 
deservedly esteemed by the ablest of his 
contemporaries in the richest age of English 
poetry, thought he could not be more 
worthily employed than in what he calls the 
Herculean task of this topographical poem 5 
and in that belief he was encouraged by his 
friend and commentator Selden, to whose 
name the epithet of learned was in old times 
always and deservedly affixed. With how 
becoming a sense of its dignity and variety 
the Poet entered upon his subject, these 
lines may shew : 

Thou powerful God of flames, in verse divinely great, 
Touch my invention so with thy true genuine heat, 
That high and noble things I slightly may not tell, 
Nor light and idle toys my lines may vainly swell ; 
But as my subject serves so high or low to strain, 
And to the varying earth so suit my varying strain, 
That Nature in my work thou mayest thy power avow ; 
That as thou first found'st art, and didst her rules allow, 
So 1, to thine own self that gladly near would he, 
May herein do the best in imitating thee. 
As thou hast here a hill, a vale there, there a flood, 
A mead here, there a heath, and now and then a wood, 
These things so in my song I naturally may show ; 
Now as the mountain high, then as the valley low ; 
Here fruitful as the mead ; there as the heath be bare, 
Then as the gloomy wood I may be rough, tho' rare. 

I would not say of this Poet, as Kirkpatrick 
says of him, that when he 



— his Albion sung 
With their own praise the echoing vallies rung ; 
His bounding Muse o'er every mountain rode, 
And every river warbled where he flowed; 

but I may say that if instead of sending his 
Muse to ride over the mountains, and 
resting contented with her report, he had 
ridden or walked over them himself, his 
poem would better have deserved that praise 
for accuracy which has been bestowed upon 
it by critics who had themselves no know- 
ledge which could enable them to say 
whether it were accurate or not. Camden 
was more diligent ; he visited some of the 
remotest counties of which he wrote. 

This is not said with any intention of 
detracting from Michael Drayton's fame : 
the most elaborate criticism could neither 
raise him above the station which he holds 
in English literature, nor degrade him from 
it. He is extolled not beyond the just 
measure of his deserts in his epitaph, which 
has been variously ascribed to Ben Jonson, 
to Randolph, and to Quarles, but with most 
probability to the former, who knew and 
admired and loved him. 

He was a poet by nature, and carefully 
improved his talent ; — one who sedulously 
laboured to deserve the approbation of such 
as were capable of appreciating, and cared 
nothing for the censures which others might 
pass upon him. " Like me that list," he 
says, 

— my honest rhymes, 
Nor care for critics, nor regard the times. 

And though he is not a poet virum volitare 
per ora, nor one of those whose better 
fortune it is to live in the hearts of their 
devoted admirers, yet what he deemed his 
greatest work will be preserved by its 
subject ; some of his minor poems have 
merit enough in their execution to ensure 
their preservation, and no one who studies 
poetry as an art will think his time mis-spent 
in perusing the whole, — if he have any real 
love for the art which he is pursuing. The 
youth who enters upon that pursuit without 
a feeling of respect and gratitude for those 
elder poets, who by their labours have pre- 
pared the way for him, is not likely to 



THE DOCTOR. 



87 



produce any thing himself that will be held 
in remembrance by posterity. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. P. I. 

ANECDOTES OF PETER HETLTN AND LIGHT- 
FOOT, EXEMPLIFYING THAT GREAT KNOW- 
LEDGE IS NOT ALWAYS APPLICABLE TO 
LITTLE THINGS : AND THAT AS CHARITY 
BEGINS AT HOME, SO IT MAY WITH EQUAL 
TRUTH SOMETIMES BE SAID THAT KNOW- 
LEDGE ENDS THERE. 

A scholar in his study knows the stars, 

Their motion and their influence, which are fix'd, 

And which are wandering ; can decypher seas, 

And give each several land his proper bounds : 

But set him to the compass, he's to seek, 

Where a plain pilot can direct his course 

From hence unto both the Indies. Heywood. 

There was a Poet who wrote a descriptive 
poem, and then took a journey to see the 
scenes which he had described. Better late 
then never, he thought ; and thought wisely 
in so thinking. Drayton was not likely to 
have acted thus upon after consideration, if 
in the first conception of his subject he did 
not feel sufficient ardour for such an under- 
taking. It would have required indeed a 
spirit of enterprise as unusual in those days 
as it is ordinary now. Many a long day's 
ride must he have taken over rough roads, 
and in wild countries ; and many a weary 
step would it have cost him, and many a 
poor lodging must he have put up with at 
night, where he would have found poor fare, 
if not cold comfort. So he thought it 
enough, in many if not most parts, to travel 
by the map, and believed himself to have 
been sufficiently " punctual and exact in 
giving unto every province its peculiar 
bounds, in laying out their several land- 
marks, tracing the course of most of the 
principal rivers, and setting forth the situa- 
tion and estate of the chiefest towns." 

Peter Heylyn, who speaks thus of his own 
exactness in a work partaking enough of 
the same nature as the Poly-olbion to be 
remembered here, though it be in prose and 
upon a wider subject, tells a humorous 



anecdote of himself, in the preface to his 
Cosmography. " He that shall think this 
work imperfect, " says he, " (though I 
confess it to be nothing but imperfections) 
for some deficiencies of this kind, may be 
likened to the country fellow, (in Aristo- 
phanes, if my memory fail not), who picked 
a great quarrel with the map because he 
could not find where his own farm stood. 
And such a country customer I did meet 
with once, a servant of my elder brother, 
sent by him with some horses to Oxford, to 
bring me and a friend of mine unto his 
house ; who having lost his way as we passed 
through the forest of Whichwood, and not 
being able to recover any beaten track, did 
very earnestly entreat me to lead the way, 
till I had brought him past the woods to the 
open fields. Which when I had refused to 
do, as I had good reason, alledging that I 
had never been there before, and therefore 
that I could not tell which way to lead him ; 
' that's strange ! ' said he ; 'I have heard 
my old master, your father, say that you 
made a book of all the world ; and cannot 
you find your way out of the wood ?'" 

Peter Heylyn was one who fell on evil 
times, and on whom, in consequence, evil 
tongues have fallen. But he was an able, 
honest, brave man, who " stood to his 
tackling when he was tasted." And if thou 
hast not read his Survey of the State of 
France, Reader, thou hast not read one of 
our liveliest books of travels in its lighter 
parts ; and one of the wisest and most replete 
with information that ever was written by a 
young man. 

His more learned contemporary Lightfoot, 
who steered a safer but not so straight a 
course, met with an adventure not unlike 
that of Heylyn's in the forest ; but the ap- 
plication which in the cosmographist's case 
was ridiculously made by an ignorant and 
simple man, was in this instance self-ori- 
ginated. 

Lightfoot had promised to set forth as an 
accompaniment to his Harmony of the 
Evangelists, " A chorographical description 
of the land of Canaan, and those adjoining 
places, that we have occasion to look upon 



THE DOCTOR. 



as we read the Gospels." — "I went on in 
that work," he says, " a good while, and that 
with much cheerfulness and content ! for 
methought a Talmudical survey and history 
of the land of Canaan, (not omitting collec- 
tions to be taken up out of the Scripture, 
and other writers,) as it would be new and 
rare, so it might not prove unwelcome nor 
unprofitable to those that delighted in such 
a subject." — It cost him as much pains to 
give the description as it would have done 
to travel thither ; but says one of his Edi- 
tors, " the unhappy chance that hindered the 
publishing this elaborate piece of his, which 
he had brought to pretty good perfection, 
was the edition of Doctor Fuller's Pisgah 
Sight ; great pity it was that so good a book 
should have done so much harm ; for that 
book, handling the same matters and pre- 
venting his, stopped his resolution of letting 
his labours on that subject see the light. 
Though he went a way altogether different 
from Dr. Fuller ; and so both might have 
shown their face together in the world ; and 
the younger sister, if we may make com- 
parisons, might have proved the fairer of the 
two." 

It is pleasant to see how liberally and 
equitably both Lightfoot and Fuller speak 
upon this matter ; — "But at last, says the 
former, I understood that another workman, 
a far better artist than myself, had the de- 
scription of the Land of Israel, not only in 
hand, but even in the press ; and was so far 
got before me in that travel that he was 
almost at his journey's end, when I was but 
little more than setting out. It was grievous 
to me to have lost my labour, if I should 
now sit down ; and yet I thought it wisdom 
not to lose more in proceeding farther, when 
one on the same subject, and of far more 
abilities in it, had got the start so far before 
me. 

" And although I supposed, and at last 
was assured, even by that Author himself 
(my very learned and worthy friend) that 
we should not thrust nor hinder one another 
iiny whit lit all, though we both went at 
once in the perambulation of that land, 
because he had not meddled with that Rab- 



binic way that I had gone ; yet, when I 
considered what it was to glean after so clean 
a reaper, and how rough a Talmudical pencil 
would, seem after so fine a pen, I resolved to 
sit down, and to stir no more in that matter, 
till time and occasion did show me more 
encouragement thereunto, than as yet I saw. 
And thus was my promise fallen to the 
ground, not by any carelessness or forget- 
fulness of mine, but by the happy preven- 
tion of another hand, by whom the work is 
likely to be better done. Yet was I unwil- 
ling to surfer my word utterly to come to 
nothing at all, though I might evade my 
promise by this fair excuse : but I was 
desirous to pay the reader something in 
pursuance of it, though it were not in this 
very same coin, nor the very same sum, that 
I had undertaken. Hereupon I turned my 
thoughts and my endeavours to a description 
of the Temple after the same manner, and 
from the same authors, that I had intended 
to have described the Land ; and that the 
rather, not only that I might do some thing 
towards making good my promise ; but also, 
that by a trial in a work of this nature of a 
lesser bulk, I might take some pattern and 
assay how the other, which would prove of 
a far larger pains and volume, would be 
accepted, if I should again venture upon it." 
Lightfoot was sincere in the commenda- 
tion which he bestowed upon Fuller's dili- 
gence, and his felicitous way of writing. 
And Fuller on his part rendered justice in 
the same spirit to Lightfoot's well known 
and peculiar erudition. " Far be it from 
me," he says, " that our pens should fall 
out, like the herdsmen of Lot and Abraham, 
the land not being able to bear them both, 
that they might dwell together. No such 
want of room in this subject, being of such 
latitude and receipt, that both we and hun- 
dreds more, busied together therein, may 
severally lose ourselves in a subject of such 
capacity. The rather, because we embrace 
several courses in this our description ; it 
being my desire and delight, to stick only 
to the written word of God, whilst my 
worthy friend takes in the choicest Rabbi- 
nical and Talmudical relations, being so 



THE DOCTOR. 



8<J 



well seen in these studies, that it is ques- 
tionable whether his skill or my ignorance 
be the greater therein." 

Now then — (for now and then go thus 
lovingly together, in familiar English) — 
after these preliminaries, the learned Light- 
foot, who at seven years of age, it is said, 
could not only read fluently the biblical 
Hebrew, but readily converse in it, may tell 
his own story. 

" Here by the way," he says, " I cannot 
but mention, and I think I can never for- 
get, a handsome and deserved check that 
mine own heart, meeting with a special 
occasion, did give me, upon the laying down 
j of the other task, and the undertaking of 
this, for my daring to enter either upon the 
one or the other. That very day wherein I 
first set pen to paper to draw up the de- 
scription of the Temple, having but imme- 
diately before laid aside my thoughts of the 
description of the Land, I was necessarily 
called out, towards the evening, to go to 
view a piece of ground of mine own, con- 
cerning which some litigiousness was emerg- 
ing, and about to grow. The field was but 
a mile from my constant residence and habi- 
tation, and it had been in mine owning 
divers years together ; and yet till that very 
time, had I never seen it, nor looked after 
it, nor so much as knew whereabout it lay. 
It was very unlikely I should find it out 
myself, being so utterly ignorant of its situa- 
tion ; yet because I desired to walk alone, 
for the enjoying of my thoughts upon that 
task that I had newly taken in hand, I took 
some direction which way to go, and would 
venture to find out the field myself alone. 
I had not gone far, but I was at a loss ; and 
whether I went right or wrong I could not 
tell ; and if right thither, yet I knew not 
how to do so farther ; and if wrong, I knew 
not which way would prove the right, and 
so in seeking my ground I had lost myself. 
Here my heart could not but take me to 
task ; and, reflecting upon what my studies 
were then, and had lately been upon, it could 
not but call me fool ; and methought it spake 
as true to me, as ever it had done in all my 
life, — but only when it called me sinner. 



A fool that was so studious, and had been so 
searching about things remote, and that so 
little concerned my interest, — and yet was 
so neglective of what was near me, both in 
place, and in my particular concernment ! 
And a fool again, who went about to de- 
scribe to others, places and buildings that 
lay so many hundred miles off, as from hence 
to Canaan, and under so many hundred 
years' ruins, — and yet was not able to know, 
or find the way to a field of mine own, that 
lay so near me ! 

" I could not but acknowledge this re- 
proof to be both seasonable, and seasoned 
both with truth and reason ; and it so far 
prevailed with me, that it not only put me 
upon a resolution to lay by that work that I 
had newly taken in hand that morning, but 
also to be wiser in my bookishness for the 
time to come, than for it, and through it, to 
neglect and sink my estate as I had done. 
And yet within a little time after, I know 
not how, I was fallen to the same studies and 
studiousness again, — had got my laid-up 
task into my hands again before I was aware, 
— and was come to a determination to go on 
in that work, because I had my notes and 
collections ready by me as materials for it ; 
and when that was done, then to think of the 
advice that my heart had given me, and to 
look to mine own business. 

" So I drew up the description of the 
Temple itself, and with it the History of the 
Temple - service." 

Lightfoot's heart was wise when it ad- 
monished him of humility ; but it was full of 
deceit when it read him a lesson of worldly 
wisdom, for which his conscience and his 
better mind would have said to him " Thou 
Fool ! " if he had followed it. 



90 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

THE READER IS LED TO INFER THAT A 
TRAVELLER WHO STOPS UPON THE WAY 
TO SKETCH, BOTANISE, ENTOMOLOGISE, OR 
MINERALOGISE, TRAVELS WTTH MORE 
PLEASURE AND PROPIT TO HIMSELF THAN 
IF HE WERE IN THE MAIL COACH. 

Non servio materice sed indulgco ; quam quo ducit se- 
quendum est, non quo invitat. Seneca. 

Fear not, my patient reader, that I should 
lose myself and bewilder you, either in the 
Holy land, or Whichwood forest, or in the 
wide fields of the Poly-olbion, or in Potteric 
Carr, or in any part of the country about 
Doncaster, most fortunate of English towns 
for circumstances which I have already 
stated and henceforth to be the most illus- 
trious, as having been the place where 
my never-to-be-forgotten Philosopher and 
friend passed the greater part of his inno- 
cent and useful and happy life. Good patient 
reader, you may confide in me as in one who 
always knows his whereabout, and whom 
the Goddess Upibilia will keep in the right 
way. 

In treating of that flourishing and every 
way fortunate town, I have not gone back 
to visionary times, like the author who 
wrote a description and drew a map of Angle- 
sea as it was before the flood. Nor have I 
touched upon the ages when hyenas prowled 
over what is now Doncaster race-ground, 
and great lizards, huge as crocodiles, but 
with long necks and short tails, took 
their pleasure in Potteric Carr. 1 have 
not called upon thee, gentle and obse- 
quious reader, to accompany me into a 
Prseadamite world, nor even into the ante- 
diluvian one. We began with the earliest 
mention of Doncaster — no earlier; and 
shall carry our summary notices of its his- 
tory to the Doctor's time, — no later. And 
if sometimes the facts on which I may touch 
should call forth thoughts, and those thoughts 
remind me of other facts, anecdotes lead- 
ing to reflection, and reflection producing 
more anecdotes, thy pleasure will be con- 



sulted in all this, my good and patient 
reader, and thy profit also as much as mine ; 
nay, more in truth, for I might think upon 
all these things in silence, and spare myself 
the trouble of relating them. 

O Reader, had you in your mind 
Such stores as silent thought can bring, 

O gentle Reader, you would find 
A Tale in every thing ! * 

I might muse upon these things and let 
the hours pass by unheeded as the waters of 
a river in their endless course. And thus 
I might live in other years, — with those who 
are departed, in a world of my own, by force 
of recollection ; — or by virtue of sure hope 
in that world which is their's now, and to 
which I shall, ere long, be promoted. 

For thy pleasure, Reader, and for thy 
improvement, I take upon myself the pains 
of thus materialising my spiritual stores. 
Alas ! their earthly uses would perish with 
me unless they were thus embodied ! 

" The age of a cultivated mind," says an 
eloquent and wise and thoughtful author, 
" is often more complacent and even more 
luxurious, than the youth. It is the reward 
of the due use of the endowments bestowed 
by nature : while they who in youth have 
made no provision for age, are left like an 
unsheltered tree, stripped of its leaves and 
its branches, shaking and withering before 
the cold blasts of winter. 

" In truth, nothing is so happy to itself, 
and so attractive to others, as a genuine and 
ripened imagination, that knows its own 
powers, and throws forth its treasures with 
frankness and fearlessness. The more it 
produces, the more capable it becomes of 
production ; the creative faculty grows by 
indulgence ; and the more it combines, the 
more means and varieties of combinations 
it discovers. 

" When death comes to destroy that mys- 
terious and magical union of capacities and 
acquirements which has brought a noble 
genius to this point of power, how frightful 
and lamentable is the effect of the stroke 
that stops the current which was wont to 



* Wordsworth. 



THE DOCTOR. 



91 



put this mighty formation into activity ! 
Perhaps the incomprehensible Spirit may 
have acted in conjunction with its corporeal 
adherents to the last. Then in one moment, 
what darkness and destruction follows a 
sii gle gasp of breath ! " * 

This fine passage is as consolatory in its 
former part, as it is gloomy at the con- 
clusion ; and it is gloomy there, because the 
view which is there taken is imperfect. Our 
thoughts, our reminiscences, our intellectual 
acquirements, die with us to this world, — 
but to this world only. If they are what 
they ought to be, they are treasures which 
we lay up for Heaven. That which is of 
the earth, earthy, perishes with wealth, rank, 
honours, authority, and other earthly and 
perishable things ; but nothing that is 
worth retaining can be lost. When Ovid 
says, in Ben Jonson's play, — 

We pour out our affections with our blood, 
And with our blood's affections fade our loves, 

the dramatist makes the Roman Poet speak 
like a sensualist, as he was, and the philo- 
sophy is as false as it is foul. Affections 
well placed and dutifully cherished ; friend- 
ships happily formed and faithfully main- 
tained; knowledge acquired with worthy 
intent, and intellectual powers that have been 
diligently improved as the talents which our 
Lord and Master has committed to our 
keeping : these will accompany us into ano- 
ther state of existence, as surely as the 
soul in that state retains its identity and its 
consciousness. 



INTERCHAPTER IV. 

ETYMOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES CONCERNING THE 
REMAINS OF VARIOUS TRIBES OR FAMILIES 
MENTIONED IN SCRIPTURAL HISTORY. 

All things are big with jest ; nothing that's plain 
But may be witty if thou hast the vein. Herbert. 

That the lost Ten Tribes of Israel may be 
found in London, is a discovery which any 



* Sir Egerton Brydges. 



person may suppose he has made, when he 
walks for the first time from the city to 
Wapping. That the tribes of Judah and 
Benjamin flourish there is known to all 
mankind ; and from them have sprung the 
Scripites, and the Omniumites, and the 
Threepercentites. 

But it is not so well known that many 
other tribes noticed in the Old Testament are 
to be found in this Island of Great Britain. 

There are the Hittites, who excel in one 
branch of gymnastics. And there are the 
Amorites, who are to be found in town and 
country ; and there are the Gadites, who 
frequent watering places, and take pictur- 
esque tours. 

Among the Gadites I shall have some of 
my best readers, who, being in good humour 
with themselves and with every thing else, 
except on a rainy day, will even then be 
in good humour with me. There will be 
Amorites in their company ; and among the 
Amorites, too, there will be some, who, in the 
overflowing of their love, will have some 
liking to spare for the Doctor and his faith- 
ful memorialist. 

The Poets, those especially who deal in 
erotics, lyrics, sentimentals or sonnets, are 
the Ah-oh-ites. 

The gentlemen who speculate in chapels 
are the Puh-ites. 

The chief seat of the Simeonites is at 
Cambridge ; but they are spread over the 
land. So are the Man-ass-ites, of whom the 
finest specimens are to be seen in St. James's- 
Street, at the fashionable time of day for 
exhibiting the dress and the person upon the 
pavement. 

The free-masons are of the family of the 
Jachinites. 

The female Haggites are to be seen in 
low life wheeling barrows, and in high life 
seated at card tables. 

The Shuhamites are the cordwainers. 

The Teamanites attend the sales of the 
East India Company. 

Sir James Mackintosh, and Sir James 
Scarlett, and Sir James Graham, belong to 
the Jim-nites. 

Who are the Gazathites if the people of 



92 



THE DOCTOR. 



London are not, where any thing is to be 
seen ? All of them are Gettites when they 
can, all would be Havites if they could. 

The journalists should be Geshurites, if 
they answered to their profession : instead 
of this they generally turn out to be Geshu- 
wrongs. 

There are, however, three Tribes in Eng- 
land, not named in the Old Testament, who 
considerably outnumber all the rest. These 
are the High Yulgarites, who are the chil- 
dren of Rahank and Phashan; the Mid- 
dle Vulgarites, who are the children of 
Mammon and Terade, and the Low Vul- 
garites, who are the children of Tahag, 
Rahag, and Bohobtay-il. 

With the Low Vulgarites I have no con- 
cern, but with the other two tribes, much. 
Well it is that some of those who are fruges 
consumere nati, think it proper that they 
should consume books also : if they did not, 
what a miserable creature wouldst thou be, 
Henry Colburn, who art their Bookseller ! I 
myself have that kind of respect for the 
consumers which we ought to feel for every 
tiling useful. If not the salt of the earth 
they are its manure, without which it 
could not produce so abundantly. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

A CHAPTER FOR THE INFORMATION OF THOSE 
WHO MAY VISIT DONC ASTER, AND ESPE- 
CIALLY OF THOSE WHO FREQUENT THE 
RACES THERE. 

My good Lord, there is a Corporation, 

A body, — a kind of body. Middleton. 

Well, reader, I have told thee something 
concerning the topography of Doncaster : 
and now in due order, and as in duty bound, 
will I give thee a sketch of its history ; 
" sumrna so quar fasti gia rerum" with becom- 
ing brevity, according to my custom, and in 
conformity with the design of this book. 
Tin- Nobility and Gentry who attend the 
races there, will find it very agreeable to be 
well acquainted with every thing relating 



to the place ; and I particularly invite their 
attention to that part of the present chapter 
which concerns the Doncaster charters, be- 
cause as a wise and ancient author hath said, 
turpe est homini nobili ejus civitatis in qua 
versetur, jus ignorare, which may be thus 
applied, that every gentleman who frequents 
Doncaster races ought to know the form 
and history of its corporation. 

In Edward the Confessors reign, the 
soccage part of Doncaster and of some ad- 
joining townships was under the manor of 
Hexthorp, though in the topsy-turveying 
course of time Hexthorp has become part of 
the soke of Doncaster. Earl Tostig was the 
Lord of that manor, one of Earl Godwin's 
sons, and one who holds, like his father, no 
honourable place in the records of those 
times, but who in the last scene of his life 
displayed a heroism that may well redeem 
his name. The manor being two miles and 
a half long, and one and a half broad, was 
valued at eighteen pounds yearly rent ; but 
when Doomsday book was compiled that rent 
had decreased one third. It had then been 
given by the Conqueror to his half-brother 
Robert Earl of Montaigne in Normandy, 
and of Cornwall in England. The said Earl 
was a lay-pluralist of the first magnitude, 
and had no fewer than seven hundred and 
fifty manors bestowed upon him as his allot- 
ment of the conquered kingdom. He granted 
the lordship and soke of Doncaster with 
many other possessions to Nigel de Fossard, 
which Nigel is believed to have been the 
Saxon noble who at the time of the conquest 
held these same possessions under the crown. 

The Fossard family ended in an heiress in 
Cceur-de -Lion's reign; and the only daughter 
of that heiress was given in marriage by 
John Lackland to Peter de Malolieu or 
Maulay, as a reward for his part in the 
murder of Prince Arthur. Peter de Maulay 
bore, as such a service richly deserved, an 
ill name in the nation, being moreover a 
favourite of King John's, and believed to be 
one of his evil counsellors as well as of his 
wicked instruments : but the name was in 
good odour with his descendants, and was 
borne accordingly by eight Peters in succes- 



THE DOCTOK. 



93 



sion. The eighth had no male issue ; he 
left two daughters, and daughters are said 
by Fuller to be " silent strings, sending no 
sound to posterity, but losing their own sur- 
names in their matches." Ralph Salvayne 
or Salvin, a descendant of the younger co- 
heiress, in the reign' of James I., claimed the 
Lordship of Doncaster ; and William his son 
after a long suit with the Corporation, re- 
signed his claim for a large sum of money. 

The Burgesses had obtained their Charter 
from Richard L, in the fifth year of his 
reign, that king confirming to them their 
Soke, and Town or Village of Danecastre, 
to hold of him and his heirs, by the ancient 
rent, and over and above that rent, by an 
annual payment at the same time of twenty- 
five marks of silver. For this grant the 
Burgesses gave the king fifty marks of silver, 
and were thereby entitled to hold their Soke 
and Town " effectually and peaceably, freely 
and quietly, fully and honourably, with all 
the liberties and free customs to the same 
appertaining, so that none hereupon might 
them disturb." This charter, with all and 
singular the things therein contained, was 
ratified and confirmed by Richard II., to his 
beloved the then Burgesses of the aforesaid 
Town. 

The Burgesses fearing that they might be 
molested in the enjoyment of these their 
liberties and free customs, through defect of 
a declaration and specification of the same, 
petitioned Edward IV., in the seventh year 
of his reign, that he would graciously con- 
descend those liberties and free customs, 
under specifical declaration and express 
terms, to them and their heirs and succes- 
sors, incorporating them, and making them 
persons fit and capable, with perpetual suc- 
cession. Accordingly the king granted that 
Doncaster should be a free borough, and 
that the burgesses, tenants, resiants, and in- 
habitants and their successors, should be free 
burgesses and might have a Gild Merchant, 
and continue to have the same liberties and 
free customs, as they and their predecessors 
had theretofore reasonably used and enjoyed. 
And that they from thenceforth might be, in 
reality and name, one body and one perpe- 



tual community ; and every year choose out 
of themselves one fit person to be the Mayor, 
and two other fit persons for the Serjeants 
at Mace, of the same town, within the same 
town dwelling, to rule and govern the com- 
munity aforesaid, for ever. And further of 
his more abundant grace the king granted 
that the cognizance of all manner of pleas 
of debt, trespass, covenant, and all manner 
of other causes and contracts whatsoever 
within the same borough, should be holden 
before the Mayor. He granted also to the 
corporation the power of attachment . for 
debt, by their Serjeants at Mace ; and of his 
abundant grace that the Mayor should hold 
and exercise the office of Coroner also, 
during his year ; and should be also a Justice 
and Keeper of the King's peace within the 
said borough. And he granted them of his 
same abundant grace the right of having a 
Fair at the said Borough every year upon 
the vigil, and upon the feast, and upon the 
morrow of the Annunciation of the Blessed 
Virgin Mary, to be held, and for the same 
three days to continue, with all liberties and 
free customs to this sort of fair appertaining, 
unless that fair should be to the detriment 
of the neighbouring fairs. 

There appear to this Charter among others 
as witnesses, the memorable names of " our 
dearest brothers, George of Clarence, and 
Richard of Gloucester, Dukes ; Richard 
Wydeville de Ry vers, our Treasurer of Eng- 
land, Earl; and our beloved and faithful 
William Hasty nges deHastynges, Chamber- 
lain of our Household, and Anthony Wyde- 
vile de Scales, Knights. The charter is 
moreover decorated with the armorial bear- 
ings of the Corporation, a Lion sejeant, 
upon a cushion powdered ermine, holding in 
his paws and legs a banner with the castle 
thereon depicted, and this motto, Son Com- 
fort et Liesse, his Comfort and Joy. 

Henry VII. enlarged the charter, giving of 
his special grace, to the Mayor and Commu- 
nity all and singular the messuages, marshes, 
lands, tenements, rents, reversions and ser- 
vices, advowsons of churches, chantries and 
chapels, possessions and all hereditaments 
whatsoever within the Lordship and its de- 



94 



THE DOCTOR. 



pendencies, " with the court-leets, view-of- 
frank-pledges-courts, waters, mills, entry 
and discharge of waters, fairs, markets, tolls, 
picages, stallages, pontages, passages, and all 
and singular profits, commodities and emolu- 
ments whatsoever within that lordship and 
its precincts to the King, his heirs and suc- 
cessors howsoever appertaining, or lately 
belonging. And all and singular the issues, 
revenues, and profits of the aforesaid courts, 
view of frank pledge, waters, mills, fairs, 
markets, tolls, picages, stallages, pontages, 
passages, and the rest of the premises in what 
manner so ever accruing or arising." For 
this the Mayor and Community were to pay 
into the Exchequer yearly in equal portions, 
at the feasts of St. Michael the Archangel, 
and Easter, without fee, or any other charge, 
the sum of seventy and four pounds, thirteen 
shillings eleven pence and a halfpenny. 
Further of his more extensive grace, he 
granted them to hold twice in every year a 
leet or view of frank pledge ; and that they 
might have the superintendency of the 
assize of bread and ale, and other victuals 
vendible whatsoever, and the correction and 
punishment of the same, and all and what- 
soever, which to a leet or view of frank 
pledge appertaineth, or ought to appertain. 
And that they might have all issues and 
profits and perquisites, fines, penalties, re- 
demptions, forfeitures, and amerciaments in 
all and singular these kind of leets, or frank 
pledge to be forfeited, or assessed, or im- 
posed; and moreover wayf, strayf, infang- 
thief, and outfang- thief ; and the goods and 
chattels of all and singular felons, and the 
goods of fugitives, convicts and attainted, 
and the goods and chattels of outlaws and 
waived ; and the wreck of sea when it should 
happen, and goods and chattels whatsoever 
confiscated within the manor, lordship, soke, 
towns, villages, and the rest of the premises 
of the precincts of the same, and of every of 
them found, or to be found for ever." 

In what way any wreck of sea could be 
thrown upon any part of the Doncastrian 
jurisdiction is a question which might have 
occasioned a curious discussion between 
Corporal Trim and his good master. How 



it could happen I cannot comprehend, unless 
" the fatal Welland," according to old saw, 

which God forbid ! 

Should drown all Holland with his excrement.* 

Nor indeed do I see how it could happen 
then, unless Humber should at the same 
time drown all Lindsey, and the whole of 
the Yorkshire plain, and Trent bear a part 
also with all his thirty tributary streams, 
and the plain land of all the midland coun- 
ties be once more flooded, " as it was in the 
days of Noah." But if the official person 
who drew up this charter of Henry the 
Seventh contemplated any such contingency, 
he must have been a whimsical person ; and 
moreover an unreasonable one not to have 
considered that Doncaster itself must be de- 
stroyed by such a catastrophe, and conse- 
quently that its corporation even then could 
derive no benefit from wreck at sea. 

Further of his more abundant grace King 
Henry granted to the Mayor and Community 
that they might hold two markets in the 
week for ever, to wit every Tuesday and 
every Saturday ; and that they might hold 
a second fair, which was to be upon the 
vigil, and upon the day of St. James the 
Apostle, and upon the morrow of the day 
immediately following to continue : and that 
they might choose a Recorder ; and hold a 
weekly court in their Guild Hall, which 
court should be a Court of Record: and 
that the Recorder and three of the Aldermen 
should be Justices as well as the Mayor, and 
that they might have a gaol within the pre- 
cincts of their town. 

Henry VIII. confirmed this his father's 
charter, and Elizabeth that her father's con- 
firmation. In the next reign when the cor- 
poration, after having " endured the charge 
of many great and tedious suits," had com- 
pounded with Ralph Salvin for what they 
called his pretended title, they petitioned the 
King that he would be pleased to accept 
from them a surrender of their estates, to- 
gether with an assurance of Salvin's title, 
and then graciously assure and convey the 

* Spenser. 



THE DOCTOR. 



9.5 



said manors and premises to them and their 
successors, so to secure them against any 
farther litigation. 

This accordingly was done. In the fourth 
year after the Restoration theJVIafiror, Alder- 
men and Burgesses petitioned for a ratifica- 
tion of their existing privileges and for an 
enlargement of them, which Charles II. 
granted, " the borough being an ancient and 
populous borough, and he being desirous 
that for the time to come, for ever, one cer- 
tain and invariable method might be had of, 
for, and in the preservation of our peace, 
and in the rule and governance of the same 
borough, and of our people in the same in- 
habiting, and of others resorting thither; 
and that that borough in succeeding times, 
might be, and remain a borough of harmony 
and peace, to the fear and terror of the 
wicked, and for the support and reward of 
the good." Wherefore he the King of his 
special grace, certain knowledge and mere 
motion, willed, granted, constituted, declared 
and confirmed, and by his then presents did 
will, grant, constitute, declare and confirm, 
that Doncaster should be, and continue for 
ever, a free borough itself; and that the 
Mayor and community, or commonalty 
thereof, should be one body corporate and 
politic in reality, deed and name, by the 
name of Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of 
the borough of Doncaster in the County of 
York, and by that name be capacitated and 
enabled to plead, and to be impleaded, an- 
swer and be answered ; defend and be de- 
fended ; and to have, purchase, receive, 
possess, give, grant and demise." 

This body corporate and politic, which 
was to have perpetual succession, was by 
the Charter appointed to consist of one 
Mayor, twelve Aldermen, and twenty-four 
capital Burgesses, the Aldermen to be " of 
the better and more excellent inhabitants 
of the borough," and the capital Burgesses 
of the better, more reputable and discreet, 
and these latter were to be "for ever in 
perpetual future times, the Common Council 
of the borough." The three Estates of the 
Borough as they may be called, in court or 
convocation gathered together and assem- 



bled, were invested with full authority, 
power, and ability of granting, constituting, 
ordaining, making, and rendering firm, from 
time to time, such kind of laws, institutes, 
bye-laws, ordinances, and constitutions, 
which to them, or the greater part of them, 
shall seem to be, according to their sound 
understandings, good, salutary, profitable, 
honest, or honourable, and necessary for the 
good rule and governance of the Mayor, 
Aldermen, and Burgesses, and of all and 
singular, and other the inhabitants of the 
borough aforesaid ; and of all the officers, 
ministers, artificers, and resiants whatsoever 
within the borough aforesaid, for the time 
being ; and for the declaring in what manner 
and form, the aforesaid Mayor, Aldermen, 
and Burgesses, and all and singular other the 
ministers, officers, artificers, inhabitants, and 
resiants of the borough aforesaid, and their 
factors or agents, servants and apprentices, in 
their offices, callings, mysteries, artifices, and 
businesses, within the borough aforesaid, 
and the liberties of the same for the time 
being, shall have, behave, and use themselves, 
and otherwise for the more ultimate public 
good, common utility and good regimen of 
the borough aforesaid." And for the vic- 
tualling of the borough, and for the better 
preservation, governance, disposing, letting, 
and demising of the lands, tenements, pos- 
sessions, revenues, and hereditaments, vested 
in their body corporate, they had power to 
ordain and enforce such punishments, penal- 
ties, inflictions, and imprisonments of the 
body, or by fines and amerciaments, or by 
both of them, against and upon all delin- 
quents and offenders against these their 
laws as might to them seem necessary, so 
that nevertheless this kind of laws, ordi- 
nances, institutions, and constitutions, be 
not repugnant, nor contrary to the laws and 
statutes of the kingdom. 

Persons refusing to accept the office of 
Mayor, Alderman, Capital Burgess, or any 
other inferior office of the borough, except 
the Recorders, might be committed to gaol, 
till they consented to serve, or fined at the 
discretion of the Corporation, and held fast 
in their gaol till the fine was paid. 



96 



THE DOCTOR. 



This Charter also empowered the Corpora- 
tion to keep a fair on the Saturday before 
Easter, and thenceforth on every alternate 
Saturday until the feast of St. Andrew, for 
cattle, and to hold at such times a court of 
pie-powder. 

James II. confirmed the corporation in 
all their rights and privileges, and by the 
Charter of Charles II., thus confirmed, Don- 
caster is governed at this day. 

It was during the mayoralty of Thomas 
Pheasant that Daniel Dove took up his 
abode in Doncaster. 



CHAPTER XL. P. I. 

REMARKS ON THE ART Or VERBOSITY. A 
RULE OF COCCEIUS, AND ITS APPLICATION 
TO THE LANGUAGE AND PRACTICE OF THE 
LAW. 

If they which employ their labour and travail about the 
public administration of justice, follow it only as a trade, 
with unquenchable and unconscionable thirst of gain, 
being not in heart persuaded that justice is God's own 
work, and themselves his agents in this business, — the 
sentence of right, God's own verdict, and themselves his 
priests to deliver it ; formalities of justice do but serve to 
smother right, and that which was necessarily ordained 
for the common good, is through shameful abuse made 
the cause of common misery. Hooker. 

Reader, thou mayest perhaps have thought 
me at times disposed to be circumambagious 
in my manner of narration. But now, 
having cast thine eyes over, the Doncaster 
charters, even in the abridged form in which 
I have considerately presented them, thou 
knowest what a round-about style is when 
amplified with all possible varieties of pro- 
fessional tautology. 

You may hear it exemplified to a certain 
degree, in most sermons of the current 
standard, whether composed by those who 
inflict them upon their congregation, or 
purchased ready made and warranted ortho- 
dox as well as original. In a still greater 
degree you may hear it in the extempore 
prayers of any meeting-house, and in those 
with which the BO-called Evangelical Cler- 
gymen of the Establishment think proper 



sometimes to prologize and epilogize their 
grievous discourses. But in tautology the 
Lawyers beat the Divines hollow. 

Cocceius laid it down as a fundamental 
rule of interpretation in theology, that the 
words and phrases of scripture are to be 
understood in every sense of which they are 
susceptible ; that is, that they actually sig- 
nify every thing that they can possibly sig- 
nify. The Lawyers carry this rule farther 
in their profession than the Leyden Pro- 
fessor did in his : they deduce from words 
not only every thing that they can possibly 
signify, but sometimes a great deal more ; 
and sometimes they make them bear a sig- 
nification precisely opposite to what they 
were intended to express. 

That crafty politician who said the use of 
language is to conceal our thoughts, did not 
go farther in his theory, than the members 
of the legal profession in their practice ; as 
every deed which comes from their hands 
may testify, and every Court of Law bears 
record. You employ them to express your 
meaning in a deed of conveyance, a marriage 
settlement, or a will ; and they so smother 
it with words, so envelope it with techni- 
calities, so bury it beneath redundancies of 
speech, that any meaning which is sought 
for may be picked out, to the confusion of 
that which you intended. Something at 
length comes to be contested : you go to a 
Court of Law to demand your right ; or you 
are summoned into one to defend it. You 
ask for justice, and you receive a nice dis- 
tinction — a forced construction, — a verbal 
criticism. By such means you are defeated 
and plundered in a civil cause ; and in a 
criminal one a slip of the pen in the indict- 
ment brings off the criminal scot free. As if 
slips of the pen in such cases were always 
accidental ! But because Judges are incor- 
ruptible (as, blessed be God, they still are in 
this most corrupt nation), and because Bar- 
risters are not to be suspected of ever inten- 
tionally betraying the cause which they are 
-fee'd to defend, it is taken for granted that 
the same incorruptibility, and the same 
principled integrity, or gentlemanly sense of 
honour which sometimes is its substitute, 



THE DOCTOR, 



97 



are to be found among all those persons 
who pass their miserable lives in quill- 
driving, day after day, from morning till 
night, at a scrivener's desk, or in an attor- 
ney's office ! 



CHAPTER XLI. P. I. 

REVENUE OF THE CORPORATION OF DON- 
CASTER WELL APPLIED. 

Play not for gain but sport : who plays for more 
Than he can lose with pleasure, stakes his heart ; 
Perhaps his wife's too, and whom she hath bore. 

Herbert. 

Well, gentle Reader, we have made our 
way through the Charters, and seen that the 
Borough of Doncaster is, as it may be called, 
an imperium in imperio — or regnum, or 
rather, if there were such word, regnulum, 
in regno — (such a word there ought to be, 
and very probably was, and most certainly 
would be if the Latin were a living lan- 
guage) — a little kingdom in itself, modelled 
not unhappily after the form of that greater 
one whereof it is a part ; differing from it, 
for reasons so evident that it would be a 
mere waste of words and time to explain 
them, — in being an elective instead of an 
hereditary monarchy, and also because the 
monarchy is held only for a year, not for 
life ; and differing in this respect likewise, 
that its three estates are analogous to the 
vulgar and mistaken notion of the English 
constitution, not to what that constitution 
is, as transmitted to us by our fathers. 

We have seen that its Mayor (or Monarch), 
its twelve Aldermen (or House of Lords), 
all being of the better and more excellent 
inhabitants, and its four-and-twenty capital 
Burgesses (or House of Commons,) all of 
the better, more reputable and discreet 
Doncastrians, constitute one body corporate 
and politic in reality, deed, and name, to the 
fear and terror of the wicked, and for the 
support and reward of the good ; and that 
the municipal government has been thus 
constituted expressly to the end that Don- 
caster might remain for ever a borough of 



harmony and peace : to the better effecting 
of which most excellent intent, a circum- 
stance which has already been adverted to, 
contributes greatly, to wit, that Doncaster 
sends no members to Parliament. 

Great are the mysteries of Corporations ; 
and great the good of them when they are 
so constituted, and act upon such principles 
as that of Doncaster. 

There is an old Song which says — 

Oh London is a gallant town 

A most renowned city ; 
'Tis governed by the scarlet gown, 

Indeed, the more's the pity. 

The two latter verses could never be ap- 
plied to Doncaster. In the middle of the 
last century the revenues of the Corpora- 
tion did not exceed 1500/. a-year : at the 
beginning of this they had increased to 
nearly 6000/., and this income wis prin- 
cipally expended, as it ought to be, for the 
benefit of the Town. The public buildings 
have been erected from these funds ; and 
liberal donations made from them to the 
Dispensary and other eleemosynary institu- 
tions. There is no constable- assessment, 
none for paving and lighting the street ; 
these expenses are defrayed by the cor- 
poration, and families are supplied with 
river water chiefly at its expense. 

Whether this body corporate should be 
commended or condemned for encouraging 
the horse-races, by building a grand stand 
upon the course, and giving annually a 
plate of the value of fifty pounds, to be run 
for, and two sums of twenty guineas each 
toward the stakes, is a question which will 
be answered by every one according to his 
estimate of right and wrong. Gentlemen 
of the Turf will approve highly of their con- 
duct, so will those Gentlemen whose charac- 
teristics are either light fingers or black 
legs. Put it to the vote in Doncaster, and 
there will be few voices against them : take 
the sense of the nation upon it by uni- 
versal suffrage, and there would be a trium- 
phant majority in their favour. 

In this, and alas ! in too many other cases, 
vox populi est vox diaboli. 

A greater number of families are sai.l to 



98 



THE DOCTOR. 



meet each other at Doncaster races, than at 
any other meeting of the same kind in 
England. That such an assemblage con- 
tributes greatly to the gaiety and prosperity 
of the town itself, and of the country round 
about, is not to be disputed. But horse 
races excite evil desires, call forth evil pas- 
sions, encourage evil propensities, lead the 
innocent into temptation, and give oppor- 
tunities to the wicked. And the good which 
arises from such amusements, either as mere 
amusement — (which is in itself unequivo- 
cally a good when altogether innocent),— or 
by circulating money in the neighbourhood, 

— or by tending to keep up an excellent 
breed of horses, for purposes of direct 
utility, — these consequences are as dust in 
the balance, when compared with the guilt 
and misery that arise from gambling. 

Lord Exeter and the Duke of Grafton 
may, perhaps, be of a different opinion. So 
should Mr. Gully, whom Pindar may seem 
to have prophetically panegyrised as 

, 0\uf/.x , iovixxv 

"An^u, — sry| i«£T«v 

That gentleman, indeed, may, with great 
propriety, congratulate himself upon his 
knowledge of what is called the world, and 
the ability with which he has turned it to 
a good practical account. But Lord Bur- 
leigh, methinks, would shake his head in 
the ante-chamber of Heaven if he could read 
there the following paragraph from a Sun- 
day Newspaper. 

" Pleasures and Profits of the Turf. 

— We stated in a former number that Lord 
Exeter's turf-profits were, for the previous 
season, 26,000/., this was intended to include 
bets. But we have now before us a correct 
and consecutive account of the Duke of 
Grafton's winnings, from 18 1 1 to 1829 in- 
clusive, taking in merely the value of the 
stakes for which the horses ran, and which 
amounts to no less a sum than 99,21 ll.3s.4d., 
or somewhat more than 5000/. per annum. 
Tins, <;ven giving in a good round sum for 
training and outlay, will leave a sufficiently 



Olymp. vii. 1G2. 



pleasant balance in hand ; to say nothing of 
the betting book, not often, we believe, 
light in figures. His Grace's greatest win- 
nings were in 1822 and 1825 : in the former 
of these years they amounted to 11,364/. 5s. 
— in the latter, 12,668/. 16s. 86/." 

It is to be hoped that the Duke has with 
his crest and coronet his motto also upon 
the covers of his racing and betting books, 
and upon his prize plates and cups : 
Et Decus et Pretium Recti. 

Before we pass from the Race-ground, 
let me repeat to the reader a wish of Horace 
Walpole's that " some attempt were made 
to ennoble our horse-races, by associating 
better arts with the courses, as by con- 
tributing for odes, the best of which should 
be rewarded by medals. Our nobility," 
says he, " would find their vanity gratified ; 
for, as the pedigrees of their steeds would 
soon grow tiresome, their own genealogies 
would replace them, and, in the mean time, 
poetry and medals would be improved. 
Their lordships would have judgment 
enough to know if the horse (which should 
be the impression on one side) were not 
well executed ; and, as I hold that there is 
no being more difficult to draw well than a 
horse, no bad artist could be employed. 
Such a beginning would lead farther; and 
the cup or plate for the prize might rise into 
beautiful vases." 

Pity that the hint has not been taken, and 
an auxiliary sporting society formed for 
promoting the education of Pindars and 
Benvenuto Cellinis ! 



INTERCHAPTER v. 

WHEREIN THE AUTHOR MAKES KNOWN HIS 
GOOD INTENTIONS TO ALL READERS, AND 
OFFERS GOOD ADVICE TO SOME OF THEM. 

T can write, and talk too, as soft as other men, trith 
submission to better judgements, — and I leave it to you 
(Untie men. lam but one. and I ahvays distrust myself. 
1 only hint my thoughts : You'll please to consider whether 
you will not think that it may seem to deserve your con- 
sideration — This is a taking way of speaking. But 
much good may do them that use it ! Asoill. 

Reader, my compliments to you! 

This is a form of courtesy which the Turks 



THE DOCTOR. 



S9 



use in their compositions, and being so 
courteous a form, I have here adopted it. 
Why not ? Turks though they are, we 
learnt inoculation from them, and the use of 
coffee; and hitherto we have taught them 
nothing but the use of tobacco in return. 

Reader, my compliments to you ! 

Why is it that we hear no more of Gentle 
Readers ? Is it that having become critical 
in this age of Magazines and Reviews, they 
have ceased to be gentle ? But all are not 
critical ; 

The baleful dregs 
Of these late ages, — that Circaean draught 
Of servitude and folly, have not yet, — 
Yet have not so dishonour'd, so deform'd 
The native judgement of the human soul.* 

In thus applying these lines I mean the 
servitude to which any rational man de- 
grades his intellect, when he submits to 
receive an opinion from the dictation of 
another, upon a point whereon he is just as 
capable of judging for himself; — the intel- 
lectual servitude of being told by Mr. A. B. 
or C. whether he is to like a book or not, — 
or why he is to like it : and the folly of 
supposing that the man who writes anony- 
mously, is on that very account entitled to 
more credit for judgment, erudition, and 
integrity, than the author who comes for- 
war in his own person, and stakes his 
character upon what he advances. 

All Readers, however, — thank Heaven, 
and what is left among us of that best and 
rarest of all senses called Common Sense, — 
all Readers, however, are not critical. There 
are still some who are willing to be pleased, 
and thankful for being pleased ; and who do 
not think it necessary that they should be 
able to parse their pleasure, like a lesson, 
and give a rule or a reason why they are 
pleased, or why they ought not to be pleased. 
There are still readers who have never read 
an Essay upon Taste ; — and if they take 
my advice they never will ; for they can no 
more improve their taste by so doing, than 
they could improve their appetite or their 
digestion by studying a cookery-book. 

I have something to say to all classes of 



Readers : and, therefore, having thus begun 
to speak of one, with that class I will 
proceed. It is to the youthful part of 
my lectors — (why not lectors as well as 
» auditors ?) it is virginibus puerisque that I 
now address myself. Young Readers, you 
whose hearts are open, whose understand- 
ings are not yet hardened, and whose 
feelings are neither exhausted nor encrusted 
by the world, take from me a better rule 
than any professors of criticism will teach 
you ! 

Would you know whether the tendency 
of a book is good or evil, examine in what 
state of mind you lay it down. Has it 
induced you to suspect that what you have 
been accustomed to think unlawful may 
after all be innocent, and that that may be 
harmless which you have hitherto been 
taught to think dangerous ? Has it tended 
to make you dissatisfied and impatient 
under the control of others ; and disposed 
you to relax in that self-government, with- 
out which both the laws of God and man 
tell us there can be no virtue — and conse- 
quently no happiness ? Has it attempted 
to abate your admiration and reverence for 
what is great and good, and to diminish in 
you the love of your country and your fel- 
low-creatures ? Has it addressed itself to 
your pride, your vanity, your selfishness, or 
any other of your evil propensities ? Has 
it defiled the imagination with what is loath- 
some, and shocked the heart with what is 
monstrous ? Has it disturbed the sense of 
right and wrong which the Creator has im- 
planted in the human soul ? If so — if you 
are conscious of all or any of these effects, 
— or if, having escaped from all, you have 
felt that such were the effects it was in- 
tended to produce, throw the book in the 
fire, whatever name it may bear in the title- 
page! Throw it in the fire, young man, 
though ' it should have been the gift of a 
friend! — young lady, away with the whole 
set, though it should be the prominent fur- 
niture of a rosewood bookcase ! 



100 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER XLII. P. I. 

DONCASTEIt CHURCH. THE RECTORIAL TITHES 
SECURED BY ARCHBISHOP SHARP FOR HIS 
OWN FAMILY. 

Say, ancient edifice, thyself with years 
Grown grey, how long upon the hill has stood 
Thy weather-braving tower, and silent mark'd 
The human leaf in constant bud and fall V 
The generations of deciduous man, 
How often hast thou seen them pass away ! 

Hurdis. 

The ecclesiastical history of Doncaster is 
not so much to the credit of all whom it 
concerns, as the municipal. Nigel Fossard, 
in the year 1100, granted the advowson of 
its church to St. Mary's Abbey, York ; and 
it was for rather more than two .hundred 
years a rectory of two medieties, served 
by two resident rectors whom the Ab- 
bey appointed. In 1303, Archbishop Cor- 
bridge appropriated it to the abbey, and 
ordained it a perpetual vicarage. Fifty 
marks a year out of the profits of the rec- 
tory were then allowed for the Vicar's sup- 
port, and he held the house and garden 
also which had formerly appertained to 
one of the Rectors. When, upon the disso- 
lution of the monasteries, it fell to the 
crown, Henry VIII. gave it with other 
monastic impropriations to Archbishop Hol- 
gate, as some compensation for the valu- 
able manors which he made the see of York 
alienate to himself. The church of Doncaster 
gained nothing by this transfer. The rec- 
tory was secured by Archbishop Sharp for 
his own family. At the beginning of the 
present century it was worth from 1000Z. 
to 1200Z. a year, while the Vicar had only 
an annual income of 80/. charged upon 
that rectory, and 201. charged upon a cer- 
tain estate. He had no tithes, no Easter 
offerings, and no other glebe than the church- 
yard, and an orchard attached to the vicar- 
age : and he had to pay a curate to do the 
duly at Loversall church. 

There is one remarkable epitaph in this 
church upon a monument of the altar form, 
placed just behind the reading-desk. 



How, how, who is here ? 
I Robin of Doncaster, and Margaret my fere. 

That I spent, that I had ; 

That I gave, that I have ; 

That I left, that I lost. A. D. 1579. 
Quoth Robertus Byrkes who in this world did reign 
Threescore years and seven, and yet lived not one. 

Robin of Doncaster, as he is now familiarly 
called by persons connected, or acquainted 
with the church, is remembered only by 
this record which he has left of himself : per- 
haps the tomb was spared for the singularity 
of the epitaph, when prouder monuments 
in the same church were despoiled. He 
seems to have been one who, thinking little 
of any thing beyond the affairs of this world 
till the last year of his pilgrimage, lived 
during that year a new life. It may also be 
inferred that his property was inherited by 
persons to whom he was bound by no other 
ties than those of cold affinity ; for if he 
had felt any concern for their welfare, he 
would not have considered those possessions 
as lost which were left to them. 

Perhaps a farther inference may be fai ly 
drawn, that though the deceased had stood 
in this uncomfortable relation to his heirs- 
at-law, he was too just a man to set aside 
the course of succession which the law ap- 
pointed. They who think that in the testa- 
mentary disposal of their property they have 
a right to do whatever it is legally in their 
power to do, may find themselves wofully 
mistaken when they come to render their 
account. Nothing but the weightiest moral 
considerations can justify any one in depriv- 
ing another of that which the law of the 
land would otherwise in its due course have 
assigned him. But rights of descent cease 
to be held 6acred in public opinion in pro- 
portion as men consider themselves exempt 
from all duty to their forefathers ; and that 
is in proportion as principles become sophis- 
ticated, and society more and more corrupt. 

St. George's is the only church in Don- 
caster, a town which in the year 1800 con- 
tained 1246 houses, 5697 souls: twenty 
years afterwards the houses had increased 
to 1729, and the inhabitants to 8544. The 
state having made no other provision for 



the religious instruction of the townspeople 



1 



THE DOCTOR. 



101 



than one church, one vicar, and one curate — 
if the vicar, from other revenues than those 
of his vicarage, can afford to keep one — 
the far greater part of the inhabitants are 
left to be absenters by necessity, or dissent- 
ers by choice. It was the boast of the 
corporation in an address to Charles II. that 
they had not "cne factious seditious person" 
in their town, " being all true sons of the 
Church of England and loyal subjects ;" 
and that " in the height of all the late 
troubles and confusion (that is, during the 
civil wars and the commonwealth, — which 
might more truly have been called the com- 
mon-woe) they never had any conventicle 
amongst them, the nurseries and seed plots 
of sedition and rebellion." — There are con- 
venticles there now of every denomination. 
And this has been occasioned by the great 
sin of omission in the Government, and the 
great sin of commission in that Prelate who 
appropriated the property of the church to 
his own family. 

Hollis Pigot was Vicar when Daniel Dove 
began to reside in Doncaster ; and Mr. 
Fawkes was his Curate. 



CHAPTER XLIII. P. I. 

ANTIQUITIES OF DONCASTER. THE DE^ 
MATRES. SAXON FONT. THE CASTLE. THE 
HALL CROSS. 

Vieux monuments, — 

Las, peu a peu cendre vous devenez, 

Fable du peuple et publiques rapines ! 

Et bien quau Temps pour un temps facent guerre 

Les bastimens, si est ce que le Temps 

(Euvres et noms Enablement atterre. 

JOACHHM DU BELLAY. 

The oldest monument in Doncaster is a 
Roman altar, which was discovered in the 
year 1781, in digging a cellar six feet deep, 
in St. Sepulchre's gate. An antiquary of 
Ferrybridge congratulated the corporation 
" on the great honour resulting therefrom." 
Was it a great honour to Doncaster, — 
meaning by Doncaster its Mayor, its Alder- 
men, its capital burgesses, and its whole 



people, — was it, I say, an honour, a great 
honour to it, and these, and each and all of 
these, that this altar should have been dis- 
covered ? Did the corporation consider it 
to be so ? Ought it to be so considered ? 
Did they feel that pleasurable though fever- 
ish excitement at the discovery which is felt 
by the fortunate man at the moment when 
his deserts have obtained their honourable 
meed ? Richard Staveley was Mayor that 
year : Was it an honour to him and his 
mayoralty as it was to King Ferdinand of 
Spain that, when he was King, Christopher 
Columbus discovered the New World, — or 
to Queen Elizabeth, that Shakespeare flou- 
rished under her reign ? Was he famous 
for it, as old Mr. Bramton Gurdon of As- 
sington in Suffolk was famous, about the 
year 1627, for having three sons parliament 
men ? If he was thus famous, did he "blush 
to find it fame," or smile that it should be 
accounted so ? What is fame ? -what is 
honour ? But I say no more. " He that hath 
knowledge spareth his words; and he that 
shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of under- 
standing." 

It is a votive altar, dedicated to the Decs 
Matres, with this inscription : 

Matribtjs 
M. Nan- 
ton ius. 
Orbiotal. 
vottjm. solvit. lubens. merito. 

and it is curious because it is only the third 
altar dedicated to those Goddesses which 
has yet been found : the other two were 
also found in the North of England, one at 
Binchester near Durham, the other at Rib- 
chester in Lancashire. 

Next in antiquity to this Roman altar, 
is a Saxon font in the church ; its date, 
which is now obliterated, is said to have 
been A. D. 1061. 

Not a wreck remains of any thing that 
existed in Doncaster between the time when 
Orbiotal erected his altar to the local God- 
desses, and when the baptismal font was 
made : nor the name of a single individual ; 
nor memorial, nor tradition of a single event. 



1C2 



THE DOCTOR 



There was a castle there, the dykes of 
which might partly be seen in Iceland's time, 
and the foundation of part of the walls, — 
nothing more, so long even then had it been 
demolished. In the area where it stood the 
church was built, and Leland thought that 
great part of the ruins of one building were 
used for the foundations of the other, and for 
filling up its walls. It is not known at what 
time the church was founded. There was 
formerly a stone built into its east end, with 
the date of A. D. 1071 ; but this may more 
probably have been originally placed in the 
castle than the church. Different parts of 
the building are of different ages, and the 
beautiful tower is supposed to be of Henry 
the Third's age. 

The Hall Cross, as it is now called, bore 
this inscription : 

jcest : est : lacruice : ote : n : tilli : a : 
ki : alme : deu : en : face : meeci : am : 

There can be little doubt that this Otto de 
Tilli is the same person whose name appears 
as a witness to several grants about the 
middle of the twelfth century, and who was 
Seneschal to the Earl of Conisborough. It 
stood uninjured till the Great Rebellion, when 
the Earl of Manchester's army, on their way 
from the South to the siege of York in the 
year 1644, chose to do the Lord service by de- 
facing it. " And the said Earl of Manches- 
ter's men, endeavouring to pull the whole 
shank down, got a smith's forge-hammer 
and broke off the four corner crosses ; and 
then fastened ropes to the middle cross, 
which was stronger and higher, thinking by 
that to pull the whole shank down. But a 
stone breaking off", and falling upon one of 
the men's legs, which was nearest it, and 
breaking his leg, they troubled themselves 
no more about it." This account, with a 
drawing of the cross in its former state, was 
in Fairfax's collection of antiquities, and 
came afterwards into Thorcsby's possession. 
The Antiquarian Society published an en- 
graving of it by that excellent and upright 
artist Vertue, of whom it is recorded that 
In- never would engrave a fictitious portrait. 
The pillar was composed of five columns, 



a large one in the middle, and four smaller 
ones around it, answering pretty nearly to 
the cardinal points : each column was sur- 
mounted by a cross, that in the middle being 
the highest and proportionally large. There 
were numeral figures on the south face, near 
the top, which seem to have been intended 
for a dial ; the circumference of the pillar 
was eleven feet seven, the height eighteen 
feet. 

William Paterson, in the year of his 
mayoralty, 1678, "beautified it with four 
dials, ball and fane :" in 1792, when Henry 
Heaton was Mayor, it was taken down, 
because of its decayed state, and a new one 
of the same form was erected by the road- 
side, a furlong to the south of its former 
site, on Hop-cross hill. This was better 
than destroying the cross; and as either 
renovation or demolition had become neces- 
sary, the Corporation are to be commended 
for what they did. But it is no longer the 
same cross, nor on the same site which had 
once been consecrated, and where many a 
passing prayer had been breathed in sim- 
plicity and sincerity of heart. 

What signifies the change? Both place 
and monument had long been desecrated. 
As little religious feeling was excited by it 
as would have been by the altar to the Decs 
Matres if it had stood there. And of the 
hundreds of travellers who daily pass it, in 
or outside of stage coaches, in their own 
carriages, on horseback, or on foot ; and of 
the thousands who flock thither during the 
races ; and of the inhabitants of Doncaster 
itself, not a single soul cares whether it be 
the original cross or not, nor where it was 
originally erected, nor when, nor wherefore, 
nor by whom ! 

" I wish I did not ! " said Dr. Dove, when 
some one advanced this consideration with 
the intent of reconciling him to the change. 
" I am an old man," said he, " and in age we 
dislike all change as naturally, and therefore, 
no doubt, as fitly, as in youth we desire it. 
The youthful generation, in their ardour for 
improvement and their love of novelty, strive 
to demolish what ought religiously to be pre- 
served ; the elders, in their caution and their 



THE DOCTOR. 



103 



fear, endeavour to uphold what has become 
useless, and even injurious. Thus, in the 
order of Providence, we have both the ne- 
cessary impulse and the needful check. 

" But I miss the old cross from its old 
place. More than fifty years had I known 
it there ; and if fifty years' acquaintance did 
not give us some regard even for stocks and 
stones, we must be stocks and stones our- 
selves." 



CHAPTER XLIY. P. I. 

HISTORICAL CIRCU?yI STANCES connected with 
DONCASTER. THOMAS, EARL OF LANCASTER. 
EDWARD IV. ASKE'S INSURRECTION. ILLUS- 
TRIOUS VISITORS. JAMES I. BARNABEE. 
CHARLES I. CHURCH LIBRARY. 

They unto whom we shall appear tedious, are in no 
wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to 
spare that labour which they are not willing to endure. 

Hooker. 

Nothing more than the scanty notices 
which have already been mentioned is re- 
corded concerning the history of Doncaster, 
till King John ordered it " to be enclosed 
with hertstone and pale, according as the 
ditch required ; and that a light brecost or 
barbican should be made upon the bridge, 
to defend the town if need should be." The 
bridge was then of wood ; in the following 
reign the townsmen " gave aid to make a 
stone bridge there : " in that reign a hospital 
for sick and leprous people was built there, 
the priories of St. James and St. Nicholas 
founded, a Dominican convent, and a Fran- 
ciscan one. Henry III. slept there on his 
way to York. In the 23d year of Edward I. 
the borough was first summoned to send 
members to Parliament, from which burthen, 
as it was then considered, it was relieved in 
the ensuing year. 

In 1321, Thomas Earl of Lancaster held a 
council here with other discontented Barons 
against Edward II. ; in its results it brought 
many of them to an untimely death, and 
Lancaster himself suffered by the axe at 
Pomfret, as much in revenge for Gaveston, 



as for this rebellion. " In this sort," says an 
old chronicler, " came the mighty Earl of 
Lancaster to his end, being the greatest 
Peer in this realm, and one of the mightiest 
Earls in Christendom: for when he began 
to levy war against the King, he was pos- 
sessed of five earldoms, Lancaster, Lincoln, 
Salisbury, Leicester, and Derby, beside 
other seigniories, lands, and possessions, 
great to his advancement in honour and 
puissance. But all this was limited within 
prescription of time, which being expired 
both honour and puissances were cut off 
with dishonour and death ; for (O miserable 
state !) 

Invida fatorum series, summisque negaium 
Stare diu. 

" But now touching the foresaid Earl of Lan- 
caster, great strife rose afterwards amongst 
the people, whether he ought to be reputed 
for a saint, or no. Some held that he ought 
to be no less esteemed, for that he did many 
alms-deeds in his lifetime, honoured men of 
religion, and maintained a true quarrel till 
his life's end. Also his enemies continued 
not long after, but came to evil ends. 
Others conceived another opinion of him, 
alleging that he favoured not his wife, but 
lived in spouse-breach, defiling a great num- 
ber of damsels and gentlewomen. If any 
offended him, he slew him shortly after in 
his wrathful mood. Apostates and other 
evil doers he maintained, and would not 
suffer them to be punished by due order of 
law. All his doings he used to commit to 
one of his secretaries, and took no heed him- 
self thereof; and as for the manner of his 
death, he fled shamefully in the fight, and 
was taken and put to death against his will ; 
yet by reason of certain miracles which were 
said to be done near the place both where he 
suffered and where he was buried, caused 
many to think he was a Saint. Howbeit, at 
length by the King's commandment, the 
church doors of the Priory where he was 
buried were shut and closed, so that no man 
might be suffered to come to the tomb to 
bring any offerings, or to do any other kind 
of devotion to the same. Also the hill 
where he suffered was kept by certain 



104 



THE DOCTOR. 



Gascoigners appointed by the Lord Hugh 
Spenser his son, then lying at Pomfret, to 
the end that no people should come and 
make their prayers there in worship of the 
said Earl, whom they took verily for a 
martyr." 

The next confederacy at Don caster was 
more successful, though it led eventually to 
bloodier consequences. Bolingbroke, after 
landing at Ravensburg, was met here by 
Northumberland, Hotspur, Westmorland, 
and others, who engaged with him there, 
some of them probably not knowing how 
far his ambitious views extended, and who 
afterwards became the victims of their own 
turbulent policy. The Dragon's teeth which 
were then sown produced a plentiful harvest 
threescore years afterwards, when more than 
six-and-thirty thousand Englishmen fell by 
each others hands at Towton, between this 
town and York. Edward IV. beheaded 
Sir Robert Willis and Sir Ralph Grey here, 
whom he had taken in the rou f . of Lose-coat 
field ; and when he mustered his people here 
to march against Warwick and Clarence, 
whose intentions began then to be dis- 
covered, " it was said that never was seen in 
England so many goodly men and so well 
arranged in a field." Afterwards he passed 
through Doncaster when he returned from 
exile, on the way to his crowning victory at 
Barnet. 

Richard III. also passed through this place 
on the way to York, where he was crowned. 
In Henry VIII.'s reign it became the actual 
seat of war, and a battle would have been 
fought there, if the Don had not, by its 
sudden rising, twice prevented Aske and his 
army of insurgents from attacking the Duke 
of Norfolk, with so superior a force that 
success would have been almost certain, 
and the triumph of the popish party a pro- 
bable result. Here Norfolk, profiting by 
that delay, treated with the insurgents, and 
finally, by offering them a free pardon, and 
engaging that a free Parliament should be 
hold in the North, induced them to disperse. 

In 1538 John Grigge, the Mayor, lost a 
thumb in an affray at Marshgate, and next 
year the Prior of Doncaster was hanged for 



treason. In 1551 the town was visited by 
the plague: in that of 1582, 908 persons 
died here. 

The next noticeable circumstance in the 
annals of Doncaster is, that James I. lodged 
there, at the sign of the Sun and Bear, on 
his way from Scotland to take possession of 
the Crown of England. 

The maypole in the market-place was 
taken down in 1634, and the market cross 
erected there in its place. But the removal 
of the maypole seems to have been no proof 
of any improved state of morals in the town ; 
for Barnabee, the illustrious potator, saw 
there the most unbecoming sight that he 
met with in all his travels. On his second 
visit the frail Levite was dead ; and I will 
not pick out a name from the succession of 
Vicars which might suit the time of the 
poem, because, though Doncaster was the 
scene, it does not follow that the Vicar was 
the actor ; and whoever he may have been, 
his name can be no object of legitimate 
curiosity, though Barnabee's justly was, till 
it was with so much ingenuity determined 
by Mr. Haslewood. 

When the army which had been raised 
against the Scots was disbanded, Charles I. 
dined there at the house of Lady Carlingford, 
and a pear tree, which he is said to have 
planted, is now standing there in Mr. Maw's 
garden. Charles was there again in 1644, 
and attended service in the church. And 
from a house in the butter market it was 
that Morris with two companions attempted 
to carry off the parliamentary commander 
Rainsborough at noon-day, and failing in 
the attempt, killed him upon the spot. 

A Church Library was founded here by 
the contributions of the clergy and gentry of 
the surrounding country in 1726. A cham- 
ber over the church porch was appropriated 
for the books, with the Archbishop's licence ; 
and there was one curate of this town whose 
love of reading was so great, that he not 
only passed his days in this library, but had 
a bed fixed there, and spent his nights there 
also. 

In 1731 all the streets were new paved, 
and the sign-posts taken down ; and in 1739, 



THE DOCTOR. 



105 



Daniel Dove, in remembrance of whom these 
volumes are composed, came to reside in 
Doncaster. 



CHAPTER XLV. P. I. 

CONCERNING THE WORTHIES, OR GOOD MEN, 
WHO WERE NATIVES OF DONCASTER OR 
OTHERWISE CONNECTED WITH THAT TOWN. 



Fir bonus est quis ? 



Teuence. 



Let good old Fuller answer the well-known 
question which is conveyed in the motto to 
this chapter. " And here," he says, " be it 
remembered, that the same epithet in several 
places accepts sundry interpretations. He is 
called a Good Man in common discourse, 
who is not dignified with gentility ; a Good 
Man upon the Exchange, who hath a re- 
sponsible estate ; a Good Man in a Camp, 
who is a tall man of his arms ; a Good Man 
in the Church, who is pious and devout in 
his conversation. Thus, whatever is fixed 
therein in other relations, that person is a 
Good Man in history, whose character 
affords such matter as may please the palate 
of an ingenuous reader." 

Two other significations may be added 
which Fuller has not pretermitted, because 
he could not include them, they being rela- 
tively to him, of posthumous birth. A Good 
Man upon State trials, or in certain Com- 
mittees which it might not be discreet to 
designate, is one who will give his verdict 
without any regard to his oath in the first 
case or to the evidence in both. And in 
the language of the Pugilists it signifies one 
who can bear a great deal of beating : Hal 
Pierce, the Game Chicken and unrivalled 
glory of the ring, pronounced this eulogium 
upon Mr. Gully, the present honourable 
member for Pontefract, when he was asked 
for a candid opinion of his professional 
merits : — " Sir, he was the very Best Man 
as ever I had." 

Among the Good Men, in Fuller's accept- 
ation of the term, who have been in any 



way connected with Doncaster, the first in 
renown as well as in point of time, is Robin 
Hood. Many men talk of him who never 
shot in his bow ; but many think of him 
when they drink at his Well, which is at 
Skelbroke by the way-side, about six miles 
from Doncaster on the York road. There 
is a small inn near with Robin Hood for its 
sign. This country has produced no other 
hero whose popularity has endured so long. 
The Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of 
Cumberland, and the Marquis of Granby have 
flourished upon sign-posts, and have faded 
there ; so have their compeers Prince Eu- 
gene and Prince Ferdinand. Rodney and 
Nelson are fading ; and the time is not far 
distant when Wellington also will have had 
his day. But while England shall be Eng- 
land, Robin Hood will be a popular name.* 

Near Robin Hood's Well, and nearer to 
Doncaster, the Hermit of Hampole resided, 
at the place from which he was so called, 
" where living he was honoured, and dead 
was buried and sainted." Richard Role, 
however, for that was his name, was no 
otherwise sainted than by common opinion 
in those parts. He died in 1349, and is 
the oldest of our known Poets. His writings, 
both in verse and prose, which are of con- 
siderable extent, ought to be published at 
the expense of some national institution. 

In the next generation John Marse, who 
was born in a neighbouring village of that 
name, flourished in the Carmelite Convent 
at Doncaster, and obtained great celebrity in 
his time for writing against — a far greater 
than himself — John Wiekliffe. 

It is believed that Sir Martin Frobisher 
was born at Doncaster, and that his father 
was Mayor of that place. " I note this the 
rather," says Fuller, " because learned Mr. 
Carpenter, in his Geography, recounts him 
among the famous men of Devonshire ; but 
why should Devonshire, which hath a flock 
of Worthies of her own, take a lamb from 
another country." This brave seaman, when 
he left his property to a kinsman who was 



* " And there they live like the old Robin Hood of 
England." As You Like It. 



106 



THE DOCTOll. 



very likely to dissipate it, said, " it was 
gotten at sea, and would never thrive long 
at land." 

Lord Molesworth having purchased the 
estate at Edlington, four miles from Don- 
caster, formerly the property of Sir Edward 
Stanhope, resided there occasionally in the 
old mansion, during the latter part of his 
life. His Account of Denmark is a book 
which may always be read with profit. 
The Danish Ambassador complained of it to 
King William, and hinted that if one of his 
Danish Majesty's subjects had taken such 
liberties with the King of England, his 
master would, upon complaint, have taken 
off the author's head. " That I cannot do," 
replied William ; " but if you please I will 
tell him what you say, and he shall put it 
into the next edition of his book." 

Other remarkable persons who were con- 
nected with Doncaster, and were contem- 
poraries with Dr. Dove, will be noticed in 
due time. Here I shall only mention two 
who have distinguished themselves since his 
day (alas ! ) and since I took my leave of 
a place endeared to me by so many recollec- 
tions. Mr. Bingley, well known for his 
popular works upon Natural History, and 
Mr. Henry Lister Maw, the adventurous 
naval officer who was the first Englishman 
that ever came down the great river Ama- 
zons, are both natives of tbis town. I 
know not whether the Doncaster Maws are 
of Hibernian descent; but the name of 
M'Coghlan is in Ireland beautified and ab- 
breviated into Maw ; the M'Coghlan, or 
head of the family, was called the Maw; and 
a district of King's County was known 
within the memory of persons now living by 
the appellation of the Maw's County. 

For myself, I am behind a veil which is 
not to be withdrawn : nevertheless I may 
Bay, without consideration of myself, that 
in Doncaster both because of the principal 
scene and of the subject of this work 

IIONOS ERIT IIUIC QUOQUE TOMO. 



DfTERCHAPTEK VI. 

CONTINGENT CAUSES. PERSONAL CONSIDERA- 
TIONS INDUCED DY REFLECTING ON THEM. 
THE AUTHOR TREMBLES FOR THE PAST. 

Vereis que no 1 ay lazada desasida 

De nudo y de pendencia sober ana ; 
Ni a poder trastornar la orden del cielo 

Lasfuerxas llegan, ni el saber del suelo. 

Balbuena. 

" There is no action of man in this life," 
says Thomas of Malmesbury, " which is not 
the beginning of so long a chain of conse- 
quences, as that no human providence is 
high enough to give us a prospect to the 
end." The chain of causes, however, is as 
long as the chain of consequences, — perad- 
venture longer ; and when I think of the 
causes which have combined to procreate 
this book, and the consequences which of 
necessity it must produce, I am lost in ad- 
miration. 

How many accidents might for ever have 
impossibilitated the existence of this incom- 
parable work ! If, for instance, I the Un- 
known had been born in any other part of 
the world than in the British dominions ; or 
in any other age than one so near the time 
in which the venerable subject of these me- 
moirs flourished ; or in any other place 
than where these localities could have been 
learned, and all these personalities were re- 
membered ; or if I had not counted it amono- 
... . ° 

my felicities like the philosopher of old, and 

the Polish Jews of this day, (who thank 
God for it in their ritual), to have been 
born a male instead of a female ; or if I had 
been born too poor to obtain the blessings 
of education, or too rich to profit by them : 
or if I had not been born at all. If, indeed, 
in the course of six thousand years which 
have elapsed since the present race of intel- 
lectual inhabitants were placed upon this 
terraqueous globe, any chance had broken 
off one marriage among my innumerable 
married progenitors, or thwarted the court-- 
ship of those, my equally innumerable ances- 
tors who lived before that ceremony was 
instituted, or in countries where it was not 



THE DOCTOR. 



107 



known, — where, or how would my immortal 
part have existed at this time, or in what 
shape would these bodily elements have 
been compounded with which it is invested ? 
A single miscarriage among my millions of 
grandmothers might have cut off the entail 
of my mortal being ! 

Quid non evertit primordia frivola vita: ? 

Nee mirum, vita est integra peve nihil. 
Nunc perit, ah ! tenui pereunlis odore lucernce, 

Elfumum hunc Junius fortior illefugat. 
Totum aquilis Ccesar rapidis circumvolet orbem, 

Collegamque sibi vixferat esse Jovem. 
Quantula res quantos potuisset inepta triumphos, 

Et magnum nasci vel prohibere Deum ! 
Exhceredasset moriente lucernula flammd 

Tot dominis mundum numinibusque ncvis. 
Tu quoque tantilli, juvenis Pellcee, perisses, 

{Quam gratus tern's illefuisset odor ! ) 
• Tu tantum unius qui pauper regulus orbis, 

Et prope privatus vis us es esse tibi. 
Nee tu tantum, idem potuisset tollere casus 

Teque, Jovis Jili, Bucephalumque tuum : 
Dormitorque urbem male dclevisset agaso 

Bucephalam e vestris, Indica Fata, libris.* 

The snuff of a candle, — a fall, — a fright, — 
nay, even a fit of anger ! Such things are 
happening daily, — yea, hourly, upon this 
peopled earth. One such mishap among so 
many millions of cases, millions ten million 
times told, centillions multiplied beyond the 
vocabulary of numeration, and ascending 
to ■^a/.tj.i.aKGaia, — which word having been 
coined by a certain Alexis (perhaps no 
otherwise remembered) and latinised are- 
naginta by Erasmus, is now Anglicised 
sandillions by me; — one such among them 
all ! — I tremble to think of it ! 

Again. How often has it depended upon 
political events ! If the Moors had defeated 
Charles Martel ; if AVilliam instead of 
Harold had fallen in the Battle of Hastings ; 
if bloody Queen Mary had left a child ; or 
if blessed Queen Mary had not married the 
Prince of Orange! In the first case the 
English might now have been Musselmen ; 
in the second they would have continued to 
use the Saxon tongue, and in either of those 
cases the Ego could not have existed ; for if 
Arabian blood were put in, or Xorman 
taken out, the whole chain of succession 
would have been altered. The two latter 

* Cowley, 



cases, perhaps, might not have affected the 
bodily existence of the Ego ; but the first 
might have entailed upon him the curse of 
Popery, and the second, if it had not sub- 
jected him to the same curse, would have 
made him the subject of a despotic govern- 
ment. In neither case could he have been 
capable of excogitating lucubrations, such 
as this high history contains : for either of 
these misfortunes would have emasculated 
his mind, unipsefying and unegofying the 
Ipsissimus Ego. 

Another chance must be mentioned. One 
of my ancestors was, as the phrase is, out in 
a certain rebellion. His heart led him into 
the field and his heels got him out of it. 
Had he been less nimble, — or had he been 
taken and hanged, and hanged he would 
have been if taken, — there would have been 
no Ego at this day, no history of Dr. Daniel 
Dove. The Doctor would have been like 
the heroes who lived before Agamemnon, 
and his immortaliser would never have lived 
at all. 



CHAPTER XL VI. P. I. 

DANIEL DOVE'S ARRIVAL AT DONC ASTER. T1IE 
ORGAN IN SAINT GEORGE^ CHURCH. THE 
PULPIT. MRS. NEALe's BENEFACTION. 

Non ulla Musis pagina gratior 
Quam quce seven's ludicrajungere 
Novit, fatigatamque nugis 
Utilibus recreare mentem. 

Dr. Johnson. 

It was in the Mayoralty of Thomas Phea- 
sant (as has already been said) and in the 
year of our Lord 1739, that Daniel Dove 
the younger, having then entered upon his 
seventeenth year, first entered the town of 
Doncaster, and was there delivered by his 
excellent father to the care of Peter Hop- 
kins. They loved each other so dearly, 
that this, which was the first day of their 
separation, was to both the unhappiest of 
their lives. 

The great frost commenced in the winter 
of that year ; and with the many longing 



108 



THE DOCTOR. 



lingering thoughts which Daniel cast to- 
wards his home, a wish was mingled that he 
could see the frozen waterfall in Weather- 
cote Cave. 

It was a remarkable era in Doncaster also, 
because the Organ was that year erected, at 
the cost of five hundred guineas, raised by- 
voluntary subscription among the parish- 
ioners. Harris and Byfield were the builders, 
and it is still esteemed one of the best in the 
kingdom. When it was opened, the then 
curate, Mr. Fawkes, preached a sermon for 
the occasion, in which, after having rheto- 
rised in praise of sacred music, and touched 
upon the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, 
dulcimer and all kinds of instruments, he 
turned to the organ and apostrophised it 
thus ; — " But O what — O what — what 
shall I call thee by? thou divine Box of 
sounds!" 

That right old worthy Francis Quarles of 
quaint memory, — and the more to be re- 
membered for his quaintness, — knew how 
to improve an organ somewhat better than 
Mr. Fawkes. His poem upon one is the 
first in his Divine Fancies, and whether he 
would have it ranked among Epigrams, 
Meditations, or Observations, perhaps he 
could not himself tell. The Reader may 
class it as he pleases. 

Observe this Organ : mark but how it goes ! 
'Tis not the hand alone of him that blows 
The unseen bellows, nor the hand that plays 
Upon the apparent note-dividing keys, 
That makes these well-composed airs appear 
Before the high tribunal of thine ear. 
They both concur ; each acts his several part ; 
Th' one gives it breath, the other lends it art. 
Man is this Organ ; to whose every action 
Heaven gives a breath, (a breath without coaction,) 
Without which blast we cannot act at all ; 
Without which Breath the Universe must fall 
To the first nothing it was made of— seeing 
In Him we live, we move, we have our being. 
Thus filled with His diviner breath, and back't 
With His first power, we touch the keys and act : 
lie blows the bellows : as we thrive in skill, 
Our actions prove, like music, good or ill. 

The question whether Instrumental music 
may lawfully be introduced into the worship 
of God in the Churches of the New Testa- 
ment, has been considered by Cotton Mather 
and answered to his own satisfaction and 



that of his contemporary countrymen and 
their fellow puritans, in his " Historical 
Remarks upon the discipline practised in 
the Churches of New England." — " The 
Instrumental Music used in the old Church 
of Israel," he says, " was an Institution of 
God ; it was the Commandment of the Lord 
by the Prophets ; and the Instruments are 
called God's Instruments, and Instruments 
of the Lord. Now there is not one word of 
Institution in the New Testament for In- 
strumental Music in the Worship of God. 
And because the holy God rejects all he 
does not command in his worship, he now 
therefore in effect says to us, / will not hear 
the melody of thy Organs. But, on the 
other hand, the rule given doth abundantly 
intimate that no voice is now heard in the 
Church but what is significant, and edifying 
by signification ; which the voice of Instru- 
ments is not." 

Worse logic than this and weaker reason- 
ing no one would wish to meet with in the 
controversial writings of a writer from whose 
opinions he differs most widely. The Re- 
marks form part of that extraordinary and 
highly interesting work the Magnolia Christi 
Americana. Cotton Mather is such an author 
as Fuller would have been if the old English 
Worthy, instead of having been from a child 
trained up in the way he should go, had been 
calvinisticated till the milk of human kind- 
ness with which his heart was always ready 
to overflow had turned sour. 

" Though Instrumental Music," he pro- 
ceeds to say, " were admitted and appointed 
in the worship of God under the Old Testa- 
ment, yet we do not find it practised in the 
Synagogue of the Jews, but only in the 
Temple. It thence appears to have been a 
part of the ceremonial Pedagogy which is 
now abolished; nor can any say it was a 
part of moral worship. And whereas the 
common usage now hath confined Instru- 
mental Music to Cathedrals, it seems therein 
too much to Judaise, — which to do is a part 
of the Anti-Christian Apostacy, — as well as 
to Paganise. — If we admit Instrumental 
Music in the worship of God, how can 
we resist the imposition of all the instru- 



THE DOCTOR. 



109 



ments used among the ancient Jews ? Yea, 
Dancing as well as playing, and several 
other Judaic actions ? " 

During the short but active reign of the 
Puritans in England, they acted upon this 
preposterous opinion, and sold the Church 
organs, without being scrupulous concerning 
the uses to which they might be applied. 
A writer of that age, speaking of the pre- 
valence of drunkenness, as a national vice, 
says, " that nothing may be wanting to the 
height of luxury and impiety of this abo- 
mination, they have translated the organs 
out of the Churches to set them up in 
taverns, chaunting their dithyrambics and 
bestial bacchanalias to the tune of those 
instruments which were wont to assist them 
in the celebration of God's praises, and 
regulate the voices of the worst singers in 
the world, — which are the English in their 
churches at present." 

It cannot be supposed that the Organs 
which were thus disposed of, were instru- 
ments of any great cost or value. An old 
pair of Organs, — (for that was the customary 
mode of expression, meaning a set, — and in 
like manner a pair of cards, for a pack ; ) — 
an old pair of this kind belonging to Lam- 
beth Church was sold in 1565 for 11. 10s. 
Church Organs, therefore, even if they had 
not been at a revolutionary price, would be 
within the purchase of an ordinary vintner. 
" In country parish Churches," says Mr. 
Denne the Antiquary, " even where the 
district was small, there was often a choir of 
singers, for whom forms, desks and books 
were provided ; and they probably most of 
them had benefactors who supplied them 
with a pair of organs that might more pro- 
perly have been termed a box of whistles. 
To the best of my recollection there were in 
the chapels of some of the Colleges in Cam- 
bridge very, very, indifferent instruments. 
That of the chapel belonging to our old 
house was removed before I was admitted." 

The use of the organ has occasioned a 
great commotion, if not a schism, among the 
methodists of late. Yet our holy Herbert 
could call Church music the " sweetest of 
sweets ;" and describe himself when listen- 



ing to it, as disengaged from the body, and 
" rising and falling with its wings." 

Harris, the chief builder of the Doncaster 
Organ, was a contemporary and rival of 
Father Smith, famous among Organists. 
Each built one for the Temple Church, and 
Father Smith's had most votes in its 
favour.* The peculiarity of the Doncaster 
Organ, which was Harris's masterpiece, is, 
its having, in the great organ, two trumpets 
and a clarion, throughout the whole com- 
pass ; and these stops are so excellent, that 
a celebrated musician said every pipe in 
them was worth its weight in silver. 

Our Doctor dated from that year, in his 
own recollections, as the great era of his. life. 
It served also for many of the Doncastrians, 
as a date to which they carried back their 
computations, till the generation which re- 
membered the erecting of the organ was 
extinct. 

This was the age of Church improvement 
in Doncaster, — meaning here by Church, 
the material structure. Just thirty years 
before, the Church had been beautified and 
the ceiling painted, too probably to the 
disfigurement of works of a better architec- 
tural age. In 1721 the old peal of five bells 
was replaced with eight new ones, of new 
metal, heretofore spoken of. In 1723 the 
church floor and church-yard, which had 
both been unlevelled by Death's levelling 
course, were levelled anew, and new rails 
were placed to the altar. Two years later 
the Corporation gave the new Clock, and it 
was fixed to strike on the watch bell, — that 
clock which numbered the hours of Daniel 
Dove's life from the age of seventeen till 
that of seventy. In 1736 the west gallery 
was put up, and in 1741, ten years after the 
organ, a new pulpit, but not in the old 
style ; for pulpits, which are among the finest 
works of art in Brabant and Flanders, had 
degenerated in England, and in other pro- 
testant countries. 

* See Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, vol. 
iii. p. 591. He states that Judge Jeffreys decided in 
favour of Smith's, and that Harris's went to Wolver- 
hampton. I have often heard it there, and he who played 
on it had Music in his soul. If I recollect aright, his name 
was Rudge. 



110 



THE DOCTOR. 



This probably was owing, in our own 
country, as much to the prevalence of puri- 
tanism, as to the general depravation of taste. 
It was for their beauty or their splendour 
that the early Quakers inveighed with such 
vehemence against pulpits, " many of which 
places," saith George Keith in his quaking 
days, "as we see in England and many 
other countries, have a great deal of super- 
fluity, and vain and superfluous labour and 
pains of carving, painting and varnishing 
upon them, together with your cloth and 
velvet cushion in many places ; because of 
which, and not for the height of them above 
the ground, we call them Chief Places. But 
as for a commodious place above the ground 
whereon to stand when one doth speak in 
an assembly, it was never condemned by our 
friends, who also have places whereupon to 
stand, when to minister, as they had under 
the Law." * 

In 1743 a marble Communion Table was 
placed in the Church, and — (passing forward 
more rapidly than the regular march of this 
narration, in order to present these ecclesi- 
astical matters without interruption,) — a 
set of chimes were fixed in 1754 — merry be 
the memory of those by whom this good 
work was effected ! The north and south 
galleries were re-built in 1765 ; and in 1767 
the church was white-washed, a new reading- 
desk put up, the pulpit removed to what 
was deemed a more convenient station, and 
Mrs. Neale gave a velvet embroidered cover 
and cushion for it, — for which her name 
is enrolled among the benefactors of St. 
George's Church. 

That velvet which, when I remember it, 
had lost the bloom of its complexion, will 
hardly have been preserved till now even by 
the dyer's renovating aid : and its em- 
broidery has long since passed through the 
goldsmith's crucible. Sic transit excites a 



* " By his order, the Reading-Pew and Pulpit "—(of tlie 
Church of Lay ton Ecclcsia in the County of Huntingdon) 
- "were a little distant from each other, and both of an 
equal height, for he would often say, They should neither 
have a precedency or priority of 'the other; hut that Prayer 
and Preaching, being equally useful, might agree like 
brt tin i n, and have an equal honour and estimation." 

i uc Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert. 



more melancholy feeling in me when a 
recollection like this arises in my mind, than 
even the "forlorn hicjacet" of a neglected 
tombstone. Indeed such is the softening 
effect of time upon those who have not been 
rendered obdurate and insensible by the 
world and the world's law, that I do not now 
call to mind without some emotion even that 
pulpit, to which I certainly bore no good 
will in early life, when it was my fortune to 
hear from it so many somniferous discourses ; 
and to bear away from it, upon pain of dis- 
pleasure in those whose displeasure to me 
was painful, so many texts, chapter and 
verse, few or none of which had been im- 
proved to my advantage. " Public ser- 
mons" — (hear! hear! for Martin Luther 
speaketh !) — " public sermons do very little 
edify children, who observe and learn but 
little thereby. It is more needful that they 
be taught and well instructed with diligence 
in schools ; and at home that they be orderly 
heard and examined in what they have 
learned. This way profiteth much; it is 
indeed very wearisome, but it is very neces- 
sary." May I not then confess that no turn 
of expression however felicitous — no col- 
location of words however emphatic and 
beautiful — no other sentences whatsoever, 
although rounded, or pointed for effect with 
the most consummate skill, have ever given 
me so much delight, as those dear phrases 
which are employed in winding up a ser- 
mon, when it is brought to its long-wished- 
for close. 

It is not always, nor necessarily thus; 
nor ever would be so if these things were 
ordered as they might and ought to be. 
Hugh Latimer, Bishop Taylor, Robert 
South, John Wesley, Robert Hall, Bishop 
Jebb, Bishop Heber, Christopher Benson, 
your hearers felt no such tedium! when 
you reached that period it was to them like 
the cessation of a strain of music, which 
while it lasted had rendered them insensible 
to the lapse of time. 

"I would not," said Luther, "have 
preachers torment their hearers and detain 
tliem with long and tedious preaching." 



THE DOCTOR. 



Ill 



CHAPTER XLVIL 

DOXCASTRIANA. GUY's DEATH. SEARCH FOR 
HIS TOMBSTONE IN INGEETON CHURCH- 
YARD. 

Go to the dull church-yard, and see 
Those hillocks of mortality, 
Where proudest man is only found 
By a small hillock in the ground. 

Tixall Poetry. 

The first years of Daniel's abode in Don- 
caster were distinguished by many events 
of local memorability. The old Friars 
bridge was taken down, and a new one 
with one large arch built in its stead. 
Turnpikes were erected on the roads to 
Saltsbrook and to Tadcaster; and in 1742 
Lord Sernple's regiment of Highlanders 
marched through the town, being the first 
soldiers without breeches who had ever 
been seen there since breeches were in use. 
In 1746 the Mansion House was begun, 
next door to Peter Hopkins's, and by no 
means to his comfort while the work was 
going on, nor indeed after it was completed, 
its effect upon his chimneys having hereto- 
fore beeri noticed. The building was inter- 
rupted by the rebellion. An army of six 
thousand English and Hessians was then 
encamped upon Wheatley Hills; and a 
Hessian general dying there, was buried in 
St. George's Church ; from whence his 
leaden coffin was stolen by the grave- 
digger. 

Daniel had then completed his twenty- 
second year. Every summer he paid a 
month's visit to his parents ; and those were 
happy days, not the less so to all parties 
because his second home had become almost 
as dear to him as his first. Guy did not 
live to see the progress of his pupil ; he died 
a few months after the lad had been placed 
at Doncaster, and the delight of Daniel's 
first return was overclouded by this loss. It 
was a severe one to the elder Daniel, who 
lost in the Schoolmaster his only intellectual 
companion. 

I have sought in vain for Richard Guy's 
tombstone in Ingleton church-yard.* That 

* " Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years." 

Sik T. Browne's Hydriataphia. 



there is one there can hardly, I think, be 
doubted; for if he left no relations who 
regarded him, nor perhaps effects enough of 
his own to defray this last posthumous and 
not necessary expense ; and if Thomas Gent 
of York, who published the old poem of 
Flodden Field from his transcript, after his 
death, thought he required no other monu- 
ment ; Daniel was not likely to omit this 
last tribute of respect and affection to his 
friend. But the church-yard, which, when 
his mortal remains were deposited there, 
accorded well with its romantic site, on a 
little eminence above the roaring torrent, 
and with the then retired character of the 
village, and with the solemn use to which it 
was consecrated, is now a thickly-peopled 
burial-ground. Since their time, manufac- 
tures have been established in Ingleton, and 
though eventually they proved unsuccessful, 
and were consequently abandoned, yet they 
continued long enough in work largely to 
increase the population of the church-yard. 
Amid so many tombs the stone which 
marked poor Guy's resting-place might 
escape even a more diligent search than 
mine. Nearly a century has elapsed since 
it was set up : in the course of that time its 
inscription not having been re-touched, must 
have become illegible to all but an antiquary's 
poring and practised eyes ; and perhaps to 
them also unless aided by his tracing tact, 
and by the conjectural supply of connecting- 
words, syllables, or letters ; indeed, the 
stone itself has probably become half in- 
terred, as the earth around it has been 
disturbed and raised. Time corrodes our 
epitaphs, and buries our very tombstones. 

Returning pensively from my unsuccessful 
search in the church-yard, to the little inn at 
Ingleton, I found there, upon a sampler," 
worked in 1824 by Elizabeth Brown, aged 9, 
and framed as an ornament for the room 
which I occupied, some lines in as moral a 
strain of verse as any which I had that day 
perused among the tombs. And I tran- 
scribed them for preservation, thinking it 
not improbable that they had been originally 
composed by Richard Guy, for the use of 
his female scholars, and handed down for a 



112 



THE DOCTOR. 



like purpose, from one generation to an- 
other. This may be only a fond imagina- 
tion, and perhaps it might not have occurred 
to me at another time ; but many compo- 
sitions have been ascribed in modern as well 
as ancient times, and indeed daily are so, to 
more celebrated persons, upon less likely 
grounds. These are the verses : 

Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand 
As the first effort of an infant's hand ; 
And as her fingers on the sampler move, 
Engage her tender heart to seek thy love ; 
With thy dear children may she have a part, 
And write thy name thyself upon her heart. 



CHAPTER XL VIII. 

A father's misgivings concerning his 
son's destination, peter hopkins's 
generosity. daniel is sent abroad 
to graduate in medicine. 

Heaven is the magazine wherein He puts 
Both good and evil ; Prayer's the key that shuts 
And opens this great treasure : 'tis a key 
Whose wards are Faith and Hope and Charity. 
Wouldst thou prevtnt a judgment due to sin ? 
Turn but the key, and thou may'st lock it in. 
Or wouldst thou have a blessing fall upon thee V 
Open the door, and it will shower on thee ! 

Quarles. 

The elder Daniel saw in the marked im- 
provement of his son at every yearly visit 
more and more cause to be satisfied with 
himself for having given him such a desti- 
nation, and to thank Providence that the 
youth was placed with a master whose kind- 
ness and religious care of him might truly 
be called fatherly. There was but one con- 
sideration which sometimes interfered with 
that satisfaction, and brought with it a sense 
of uneasiness. The Doves, from time imme- 
morial, had belonged to the soil as fixedly as 
the soil had belonged to them. Generation 
after generation they had moved in the same 
contracted sphere, their wants and wishes 
being circumscribed alike within their own 
few hereditary acres. Pride, under what 
ever form :t may show itself, is of the Devil; 
and though Family Pride may not be its 
most odious manifestation, even that child 



bears a sufficiently ugly likeness of its 
father. But Family Feeling is a very dif- 
ferent thing, and may exist as strongly in 
humble as in high life. Naboth was as 
much attached to the vineyard, the inheri- 
tance of his fathers, as Ahab could be to 
the throne which had been the prize, and 
the reward, or punishment, of his father 
Omri's ambition. 

This feeling sometimes induced a doubt 
in Daniel Avhether affection for his son had 
not made him overlook his duty to his fore- 
fathers ; — whether the fixtures of the land 
are not happier, and less in the way of evil, 
than the moveables : — whether he had done 
right in removing the lad from that station 
of life in which he was born, in which it had 
pleased God to place him ; divorcing him, 
as it were, from his paternal soil, and cut- 
ting off the entail of that sure independence, 
that safe contentment, which his ancestors 
had obtained and preserved for him, and 
transmitted to his care to be in like manner 
by him preserved and handed down. The 
latent poetry which there was in the old 
man's heart made him sometimes feel as if 
the fields and the brook, and the hearth and 
the graves, reproached him for having done 
this ! But then he took shelter in the re- 
flection that he had consulted the boy's true 
welfare, by giving him opportunities of stor- 
ing and enlarging his mind ; that he had 
placed him in the way of intellectual ad- 
vancement, where he might improve the 
talents which were committed to his charge, 
both for his own benefit and for that of 
his fellow-creatures. Certain he was that 
whether he had acted wisely or not, he had 
meant well. He was conscious that his 
determination had not been made without 
much and anxious deliberation, nor without 
much and earnest prayer ; hitherto, he saw, 
that the blessing which he prayed for had 
followed it, and he endeavoured to make his 
heart rest in thankful and pious hope that 
that blessing would be continued. "Wouldst 
thou know," says Quarles, " the lawfulness 
of the action which thou desirest to under- 
take, let thy devotion recommend it to 
divine blessing. If it be lawful tl.ou shalt 



THE DOCTOR. 



113 



perceive thy heart encouraged by thy 
prayer ; if unlawful, thou shalt find thy 
prayer discouraged by thy heart. That 
action is not warrantable which either 
blushes to beg a blessing, or, having suc- 
ceeded, dares not present a thanksgiving." 
Daniel might safely put his conduct to this 
test ; and to this test, in fact, his own 
healthy and uncorrupted sense of religion 
led him, though probably he had never read 
these golden words of Quarles the Em- 
blemist 

It was, therefore, with no ordinary de- 
light that our good Daniel received a letter 
from his son, asking permission to go to 
Leyden, in conformity with his Master's 
wishes, and there prosecute his studies long 
enough to graduate as a Doctor in medi- 
cine. Mr. Hopkins, he said, would gene- 
rously take upon himself the whole expense, 
having adopted him as his successor, and 
almost as a son ; for as such he was treated 
in all respects, both by him and by his mis- 
tress, who was one of the best of women. 
And, indeed, it appeared that Mr. Hopkins 
had long entertained this intention, by the 
care which he had taken to make him keep 
up and improve the knowledge of Latin 
which he had acquired under Mr. Guy. 

The father's consent, as might be sup- 
posed, was thankfully given ; and accord- 
ingly Daniel Dove, in the twenty-third 
year of his age, embarked from Kingston- 
upon-Hull for Rotterdam, well provided by 
the care and kindness of his benevolent 
master with letters of introduction and of 
credit ; and still better provided with those 
religious principles which, though they can- 
not ensure prosperity in this world, ensure 
to us things of infinitely greater moment, — 
good conduct, peace of mind, and the ever- 
lasting reward of the righteous. 



CHAPTER XLIX. 

CONCERNING THE INTEREST WHICH DANIEL 
THE ELDER TOOK IN THE DUTCH WAR, 
AND MORE ESPECIALLY IN THE SIEGE AND 
PROVIDENTIAL DELIVERY OP LEYDEN. 

Glory to Thee in thine omnipotence, 

O Lord who art our shield and our defence, 

And dost dispense, 

As seemeth best to thine unerring will, 

(Which passeth mortal sense) 

The lot of Victory still ; 

Edging sometimes with might the sword unjust ; 

And bowing to the dust 

The rightful cause, that so such seeming ill 

May thine appointed purposes fulfil ; 

Sometimes, as in this late auspicious hour 

For which our hymns we raise, 

Making the wicked feel thy present power : 

Glory to thee and praise, 

Almighty God, by whom our strength was giv«n ! 

Glory to Thee, O Lord of Earth and Heaven 1 

Southey. 

There were two portions of history with 
which the elder Daniel was better acquainted 
than most men, — that of Edward the Third's 
reign, and that of the Wars in the Nether- 
lands down to the year 1608. Upon both 
subjects he was homo unius libri ; such a 
man is proverbially formidable at his own 
weapon ; and the book with which Johnson 
immortalised Osborne the bookseller, by 
knocking him down with it, was not a more 
formidable folio than either of those from 
which Daniel derived this knowledge. 

Now of all the events in the wars of the 
Low Countries, there was none which had 
so strongly affected his imagination as the 
siege of Leyden. The patient fortitude of 
the besieged, and their deliverance, less by 
the exertions of man, (though no human 
exertions were omitted,) than by the special 
mercy of Him whom the elements obey, and 
in whom they had put their trust, were in 
the strong and pious mind of Daniel, things 
of more touching interest than the tragedy 
of Haarlem, or the wonders of military 
science and of courage displayed at the 
siege of Antwerp. Who indeed could forget 
the fierce answer of the Lcydeners when 
they were, for the last time, summoned to 
surrender, that the men of Leyden would 
never surrender while they had one arm left 



114 



THE DOCTOR. 



to eat, and another to fight with ! And the 
not less terrible reply of the Burgemeester 
Pieter Adriaanzoon Vander Werf, to some 
of the townsmen when they represented to 
him the extremity of famine to which they 
were reduced ; " I have sworn to defend 
this city," he made answer, " and by God's 
help I mean to keep that oath ! but if my 
death can help ye men, here is my body ! 
cut it jn pieces, and share it among ye as far 
as it will go." And who without partaking 
in the hopes and fears of the contest, almost 
as if it were still at issue, can peruse the 
details of that amphibious battle (if such an 
expression may be allowed) upon the inun- 
dated country, when, in the extremity of 
their distress, and at a time when the Spa- 
niards said that it was as impossible for the 
Hollanders to save Leyden from their power, 
as it was for them to pluck the stars from 
heaven, " a great south wind, which they 
might truly say came from the grace of 
God," set in with such a spring tide, that in 
the course of eight-and-forty hours, the 
inundation rose half a foot, thus rendering 
the fields just passable for the flat-bottomed 
boats which had been provided for that 
service ! A naval battle, among the trees ; 
where the besieged, though it was fought 
within two miles of their walls, could see 
nothing because of the foliage; and amid 
such a labyrinth of dykes, ditches, rivers 
and fortifications, that when the besiegers 
retired from their palisades and sconces, the 
conquerors were not aware of their own 
success, nor the besieged of their deliver- 
ance ! 

" In this delivery," says the historian, 
" and in every particular of the enterprise, 
doubtless all must be attributed to the mere 
providence of God, neither can man chal- 
any glory therein; for without a 
miracle all the endeavours of the Protestants 
had been as wind. Put God who is always 
good, would not give way to the cruelties 
wh rewith the Spaniards threatened this 
town, with all the insolencies whereof they 
make profession in the taking of towns 
(although they be by composition) without 
any respect of humanity or honesty. And 



there is not any man but will confess with 
me, if he be not some atheist, or epicure, 
(who' maintain that all things come by 
chance,) that this delivery is a work which 
belongs only unto God. For if the Spa- 
niards had battered the town but with four 
cannons only, they had carried it, the people 
being so weakened with famine, as they 
could not endure any longer : besides a 
part of them were ill affected, and very 
many of their best men were dead of the 
plague. And for another testimony that it 
was God only who wrought, the town was 
no sooner delivered, but the wind which was 
south-west, and had driven the water out of 
the sea into the country, turned to north- 
east, and did drive it back again into the 
sea, as if the south-west wind had blown 
those three days only to that effect ; where- 
fore they might well say that both the winds 
and the sea had fought for the town of 
Leyden. And as for the resolution of the 
States of Holland to drown the country, and 
to do that which they and their Prince, 
together with all the commanders, captains 
and soldiers of the army shewed in this sea- 
course, together with the constancy and 
resolution of the besieged to defend them- 
selves, notwithstanding so many miseries 
which they suffered, and so many promises 
and threats which were made unto them, 
all in like sort proceeded from a divine 
instinct." 

In the spirit of thoughtful feeling that 
this passage breathes, was the whole history 
of that tremendous struggle perused by the 
elder JDaniel; and Daniel the son was so 
deeply imbued with the same feeling, that if 
he had lived till the time of the Peninsular 
War, he would have looked upon the condi- 
tion to which Spain was reduced, as a con- 
sequence of its former tyranny, and as an 
awful proof how surely, soon or late, the 
sins of the fathers are visited upon the 
children. 

Oh that all history were regarded in this 
spirit ! " Even such as are in faith most 
strong, of zeal most ardent, should not," 
says one of the best and wisest of Theolo- 
gians, " much mispend their time in com- 



THE DOCTOR. 



115 



paring the degenerate fictions, or historical 
relations of times ancient or modern, with 
the everlasting truth. For though this 
method could not add much increase either 
to their faith or zeal, yet would it doubt- 
less much avail for working placid and mild 
affections. The very penmen of Sacred 
Writ themselves were taught patience, and 
instructed in the ways of God's providence, 
by their experience of such events as the 
course of time is never barren of; not 
always related by canonical authors, nor 
immediately testified by the Spirit ; but 
ofttimes believed upon a moral certainty, or 
such a resolution of circumstances con- 
current into the first cause or disposer of all 
affairs as we might make of modern acci- 
dents, were we otherwise partakers of the 
Spirit, or would we mind heavenly matters 
as much as earthly." 



CHAPTER L. P. I. 

VOYAGE TO ROTTERDAM AND EEYDEN. THE 
AUTHOR CANNOT TARRY TO DESCRIBE 
THAT CITY. WHAT HAPPENED THERE TO 
DANIEL DOVE. 

He took great content, exceeding delight in that his 
voyage. As who doth not that shall attempt the like ? — 
For peregrination charms our senses with such unspeak- 
able and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that 
never travelled, a kind of prisoner, and pity his case that 
from his cradle to his old age he beholds the same still ; 
still, still, the same, the same ! Burton. 

" Why did Dan remain in ships ? " says 
Deborah the Prophetess in that noble song, 
which, if it had been composed in Greek 
instead of Hebrew, would have made Pindar 
hide his diminished head, or taught him a 
loftier strain than even he has reached in 
his eagle flights — " Why did Dan remain 
in ships ?" said the Prophetess. Our Daniel 
during his rough passage from the Humber 
to the Maese, thought that nothing should 
make him do so. Yet when all danger, real 
or imaginary, was over, upon that deep 

Where Proteus' herds and Neptune's ores do keep, 
Where all is ploughed, yet still the pasture's green. 
The ways are found, and yet no paths are seen : — " * 



B. Jonson : Neptune's Triumph. 



when all the discomforts and positive suffer- 
ings of the voyage were at an end ; and 
wnen the ship, — 

Quitting her fairly of the injurious sea^T, 

had entered the smooth waters of that 
stately river, and was gliding 

Into the bosom of her quiet quay f ; 

he felt that the delight of setting foot on 
shore after a sea voyage, and that too the 
shore of a foreign country, for the first time, 
is one of the few pleasures which exceed 
any expectation that can be formed of them. 

He used to speak of his landing, on a fine 
autumnal noon, in the well-wooded and 
well-watered city of Rotterdam, and of his 
journey along what he called the high- 
turnpike canal from thence to Leyden, as 
some of the pleasantest recollections of his 
life. Nothing, he said, was wanting to his 
enjoyment, but that there should have been 
some one to have partaken it with him in an 
equal degree. But the feeling that he was 
alone in a foreign land sate lightly on him, and 
did not continue long, — young as he was, 
with life and hope before him, healthful of 
body and of mind, cheerful as the natural 
consequence of that health corporeal and 
mental, and having always much to notice 
and enough to do — the one being an indis- 
pensable condition of happiness, the other a 
source of pleasure as long as it lasts ; and 
where there is a quick eye and an inquiring 
mind, the longest residence abroad is hardly 
long enough to exhaust it. 

No day in Daniel's life had ever passed 
in such constant and pleasurable excitement 
as that on which he made his passage from 
Rotterdam to Leyden, and took possession 
of the lodgings which Peter Hopkins's cor- 
respondent had engaged for him. His recep- 
tion was such as instantly to make him feel 
that he was placed with worthy people. 
The little apprehensions, rather than anxie- 
ties, which the novelty of his situation occa- 
sioned, the sight of strange faces with which 
he was to be domesticated, and the sound 
of a strange language, to which, harsh and 
uninviting as it seemed, his ear and speech 

t QUARLES. 



116 



THE DOCTOE. 



must learn to accustom themselves, did not 
disquiet his first night's rest. And having 
fallen asleep, notwithstanding the new posi- 
tion to which a Dutch bolster constrained 
him, he was not disturbed by the storks, 

— all night 
Beating the air with their obstreperous beaks, 

(for with Ben Jonson's leave, this may much 
more appropriately be said of them than of 
the ravens), nor by the watchmen's rappers, 
or clap-sticks, which seem to have been in- 
vented in emulous imitation of the stork's 
instrumental performance. 

But you and I, Reader, can afford to make 
no tarriance in Leyden. I cannot remain 
with you here till you could see the Rector 
Magnificus in his magnificence, I cannot 
accompany you to the monument of that 
rash Baron who set the crown of Bohemia 
in evil hour upon the Elector Palatine's 
unlucky head. I cannot take you to the 
graves of Boerhaave and of Scaliger. I can- 
not go with you into that library of which 
Heinsius said, when he was Librarian there, 
" I no sooner set foot in it and fasten the 
door, but I shut out ambition, love, and all 
those vices of which idleness is the mother 
and ignorance the nurse ; and in the very 
lap of Eternity, among so many illustrious 
souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit 
that I then pity the great who know nothing 
of such happiness." — Plerunque in qua si- 
mulac pedem posui, foribus pessulum abdo, 
ambitionem autem, amorem, libidinem, Sfc. ex- 
cludo, quorum parens est ignavia, imperitia 
nutrix ; et in ipso ceternitatis gremio, inter 
lot illustres animas sedem mild sumo, cum 
ingenti quidem animo, ut subinde magnatum 
me miser eat qui felicitatem hanc ignorant! 
I cannot walk with you round the ramparts, 
from which wide-circling and well-shaded 
promenade you might look down upon a 
jarge part of the more than two thousand 
gardens which a century ago surrounded 
this most horticultural city of a horticul- 
tural province, the garden, as it was called, 
of Holland, that is of the land of Gardeners. 
1 cannot even go up the Burgt with you, 
though it be pretended that the Hengist of 
Anglo-Saxon history erected it ; nor can I 



stop at the entrance of that odd place, for 
you to admire (as you could not but admire) 
the Lion of the United Provinces, who 
stands there erect and rampant in menacing 
attitude, grinning horribly a ghastly smile, 
his eyes truculent, his tail in full elevation, 
and in action correspondent to his motto 
Pugno pro Patria, wielding a drawn sword 
in his dreadful right paw. 

Dear Reader, we cannot afford time for 
going to Oegstgeest, though the first Church 
in Holland is said to have been founded there 
by St. Willebord, and its burial-ground is 
the Campo Santo of the Dutch Roman 
Catholics, as Bunhill Fields of the English 
Dissenters. Nor can I accompany thee to 
Noortwyck and describe to thee its fish- 
ponds, its parterres, the arabesque carpet- 
work of its box, and the espalier walls or 
hedges, with the busts which were set in the 
archways, such as they existed when our 
Doctor, in his antedoctorial age, was a stu- 
dent at Leyden, having been kept up till 
that time in their old fashion by the repre- 
sentatives of Janus Dousa. We cannot, 
dear Reader, tarry to visit the gardens in 
that same pleasant village from which the 
neighbouring cities are supplied with medi- 
cinal plants ; where beds of ranunculuses 
afford, when in blossom, a spectacle which 
no exhibition of art could rival in splen- 
dour and in beauty ; and from whence rose 
leaves are exported to Turkey, there to have 
their essential oil extracted for Mahometan 
luxury. 

We must not go to see the sluices of the 
Rhine, which Daniel never saw, because in 
his time the Rhine had no outlet through 
these Downs. We cannot walk upon the 
shore at Katwyck, where it was formerly a 
piece of Dutch courtship for the wooer to 
take his mistress in his arms, carry her into 
the sea till he was more than knee deep, set 
her down upon her feet, and then bearing 
her out again, roll her over and over upon 
the sand-hills by way of drying her. We 
have no time for visiting that scene of the 
Batavian Arcadia. No, reader, I cannot 
tarry to show thee the curiosities of Leyden, 
nor to talk over its memorabilia, nor to visit 



THE DOCTOR. 



117 



the pleasant parts of the surrounding country : 
though Gerard Goris says, that comme la 
Ville de Leide, entouree par les plaisants 
villages de Soeterwoude, Stompvic, Wilsveen, 
Tedingerbroek, Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp et 
Vennep, est la Centre et la Delice de toute 
Hollande, ainsi la Campagne a Ventour de 
cette celebre Ville est comme un autre Eden 
ou Jardin de plaisance, qui avec ses beaux 
attraits tellement transporte V attention du 
spectateur qu'il se trouve contraint, comme 
par un ravissment d' 'esprit, de confesser qdil 
n'a jamais veu pais au monde, ou Vart et la 
nature si bien ont pris leurs mesures pour 
aporter et entremeler tout ce qui pent servir a 
liaise, a la recreation, et au profit. 

No, Reader, we must not linger here, 

Hier, waar in Hollands heerlijkste oorden 

De lieve Lente zoeter lacht, 
Het schroeiend Zud, het grijnzend Noorden 

Zijri 1 gloed en strenge kou verxacht ; 
Waar nijverheid en blij genoegen, 
Waar stilte en vlijt xich samenvoegen.* 

We must return to Doncaster. It would 
not be convenient for me to enter minutely, 
even if my materials were sufficient for that 
purpose, into the course of our student's life, 
from the time when he was entered among 
the Greenies of this famous University ; nor 
to describe the ceremonies which were used 
at his ungreening, by his associates ; nor the 
academical ones with which, at the termina- 
tion of his regular terms, his degree in medi- 
cine was conferred. I can only tell thee 
that, during his residence at Leyden, he 
learned with exemplary diligence whatever 
he was expected to learn there, and by the 
industrious use of good opportunities a great 
deal more. 

But, — he fell in love with a Burgemeester's 
Daughter. 



CHAPTER LT. 

ARMS OF LEYDEN. DANIEL DOVE, M.D. A 
LOVE STORY, STRANGE BUT TRUE. 

Oye el extrafio caso, advierte y siente ; 
Suceso es raro, mas verdad ha sido. 

Balbuena. 

The arms of Leyden are two cross keys, 

* Leyden's Ramp. 



gules in a field argent ; and having been 
entrusted with the power of those keys to 
bind and to loose, — and, moreover, to bleed 
and to blister, to administer at his discretion 
pills, potions, and powders, and employ the 
whole artillery of the pharmacopoeia, — 
Daniel returned to Doncaster. The papal 
keys convey no such general power as the 
keys of Leyden : they give authority over 
the conscience and the soul ; now it is not 
every man that has a conscience, or that 
chooses to keep one ; and as for souls, if 
it were not an article of faith to. believe 
otherwise, — one might conclude that the 
greater part of mankind had none, from the 
utter disregard of them which is manifested 
in the whole course of their dealings with 
each other. But bodily diseases are among 
the afflictions which flesh is heir to ; and we 
are not more surely fruges consumer e nati, 
than we are born to consume physic also, 
greatly to the benefit of that profession in 
which Daniel Dove had now obtained his 
commission. 

But though he was now M.D. in due 
form, and entitled to the insignia of the pro- 
fessional wig, the muff, and the gold-headed 
cane, it was not Mr. Hopkins's intention 
that he should assume his title, and com- 
mence practice as a physician. This would 
have been an unpromising adventure ; 
whereas, on the other hand, the considera- 
tion which a regular education at Leyden, 
then the most flourishing school of medicine, 
would obtain for him in the vicinity, was a 
sure advantage. Hopkins could now pre- 
sent him as a person thoroughly qualified to 
be his successor : and if at any future time 
Dove should think proper to retire from the 
more laborious parts of his calling, and take 
u his rank, it would be in his power to do so. 

But one part of my Readers are, T sus- 
pect, at this time a little impatient to know 
something about the Burgemeester's Daugh- 
ter ; and I, because of the 

allegiance and fast fealty 

Which I do owe unto all womankind *, 

am bound to satisfy their natural and be- 



118 



THE DOCTOR. 



coming curiosity. Not, however, in this 
place ; for though love has its bitters, I never 
will mix it up in the same chapter with 
physic. Daniel's passion for the Burge- 
meester's Daughter must be treated of in a 
chapter by itself, this being a mark of re- 
spect due to the subject, to her beauty, and 
to the dignity of Mynheer, her Wei Edel, 
Groot, Hoogh-Achtbaer father. 

First, however, I must dispose of an 
objection. 

There may be readers who, though they 
can understand why a lady instead of telling 
her love, should 

let concealment like a worm in the bud 

Feed on her damask cheek, 

will think it absurd to believe that any man 
should fix his affections as Daniel did upon 
the Burgemeester's Daughter, on a person 
whom he had no hopes of obtaining, and 
with whom, as will presently appear, he 
never interchanged a word. I cannot help 
their incredulity. But if they will not be- 
lieve me they may perhaps believe the news- 
papers, which, about the year 1810, related 
the following case in point. 

" A short time since a curious circum- 
stance happened. The Rector of St. Martin's 
parish was sent for to pray by a gentleman 
of the name of Wright, who lodged in St. 
James's Street, Pimlico. A few days after- 
wards Mr. Wright's solicitor called on the 
Rector, to inform him that Mr. Wright was 
dead, and had made a codicil to his will 
wherein he had left him 1000/., and Mr. Ab- 
bott, the Speaker of the House of Commons, 
2000/., and all his personal property and 
estates, deer-park and fisheries, &c. to Lady 
Frances Bruce Brudenell, daughter of the 
Earl of Ailesbury. Upon the Rector's going 
to Lord Ailesbury's to inform her Ladyship, 
the house-steward said she was married to 
Sir Henry Wilson of Chelsea Park, but he 
would go to her Ladyship and inform her of 
the matter. Lady Frances said she did not 
know any such person as Mr. Wright, but 
desired the Steward to go to the Rector to 
get the whole particulars, and say she would 
wait on him the next day : she did so, and 
found to her great astonishment that the 



whole was true. She afterwards went to 
St. James's Street, and saw Mr. Wright in 
his coffin ; and then she recollected him, as 
having been a great annoyance to her many 
years ago at the Opera House, where he had 
a box next to hers : he never spoke to her, 
but was continually watching her, look 
wherever she would, till at length she was 
under the necessity of requesting her friends 
to procure another box. The estates are 
from 20 to 30,000/. a-year. Lady Frances 
intends putting all her family into mourning 
out of respect." 

Whether such a bequest ought to have 
been held good in law, and if so, whether it 
ought in conscience to have been accepted, 
are points upon which I should probably 
differ both from the Lord Chancellor, and 
the Lady Legatee. 



CPIAPTER LII. 

SHOWING HOW THE YOUNG STUDENT FELL IN 

LOVE AND HOW HE MADE THE BEST USE 

OF HIS MTSFOBTUNE. 

II creder, dunne vaghe, e cortesia, 
Quando colui che scrive o chefavella, 

Possa essere sospetto di bugia, 
Per dir qualcosa troppo rara e bella. 

Dunque chi ascolta questa isloria mea 
E non la crede frottola o novella 

Ma cosa vera — come ella e difatto, 

Fa che di lui mi chiami soddisfatto. 

E pure che mi diate pienafede, 
De la dubbiezza altrui poco mi cale. 

RlCCIARDETTO. 

Dear Ladies, I can neither tell you the 
name of the Burgemeester's Daughter, nor 
of the Burgemeester himself. If I ever heard 
them they have escaped my recollection. 
The Doctor used to say his love for her 
was in two respects like the small-pox ; for 
he took it by inoculation, and having taken 
it, he was secured from ever having the 
disease in a more dangerous form. 

The case was a very singular one. Had 
it not been so it is probable I should never 
have been made acquainted with it. Most 
men seem to consider their unsuccessful love, 
when it is over, as a folly which they neither 
like to speak of, nor to remember. 



THE DOCTOR. 



119 



Daniel Dove never was introduced to the 
Burgemeester's Daughter, never was in com- 
pany with her, and, as already has been inti- 
mated, never spoke to her. As for any hope 
of ever by any possibility obtaining a return 
of his affection, a devout Roman Catholic 
might upon much better grounds hope that 
Saint Ursula, or any of ner Eleven Thou- 
sand Virgins would come from her place in 
Heaven to reward his devotion with a kiss. 
The gulph between Dives and Lazarus was 
not more insuperable than the distance 
between such an English Greeny at Leyden 
and a Burgemeester's Daughter. 

Here, therefore, dear Ladies, you cannot 
look to read of 

Le speranxe, gli affetti, 
La datafe', le tenerexxe, iprimi 
Scambievoli sospiri, i primi sguardi.* 

Nor will it be possible for me to give you 

— Video, di quel volto 

Hove apprese il suo core 

La prima volta a sospirar d'amore.* 

This I cannot do ; for I never saw her pic- 
ture, nor heard her features described. And 
most likely if I had seen her herself, in her 
youth and beauty, the most accurate descrip- 
tion that words could convey might be just 
as like Fair Rosamond, Helen, Rachael, or 
Eve. Suffice it to say that she was con- 
fessedly the beauty of that city, and of those 
parts. 

But it was not for the fame of her beauty 
that Daniel fell in love with her : so little 
was there of this kind of romance in his 
nature, that report never raised in him the 
slightest desire of seeing her. Her beauty 
was no more than Hecuba's to him, till he 
saw it. But it so happened that having 
once seen it, he saw it frequently, at leisure, 
and always to the best advantage : " and so," 
said he, " I received the disease by inocu- 
lation." 

Thus it was. There was at Leyden an 
English Presbyterian Kirk for the use of the 
English students, and any other persons 
who might choose to frequent it. Daniel 
felt the want there of that Liturgy in the 



* Metasia. 



use of which he had been trained up : and 
finding nothing which could attract him to 
that place of worship except the use of his 
own language, — which, moreover, was not 
used by the preacher in any way to his 
edification, — he listened willingly to the ad- 
vice of the good man with whom he boarded, 
and this was, that, as soon as he had acquired 
a slight knowledge of the Dutch tongue, he 
should, as a means of improving himself in 
it, accompany the family to their parish 
church. Kow this happened to be the very 
church which the Burgemeester and his 
family attended : and if the allotment of 
pews in that church had been laid out by 
Cupid himself, with the fore- purpose of 
catching Daniel as in a pitfall, his position 
there in relation to the Burgemeester's 
Daughter could not have been more exactly 
fixed. 

" God forgive me !" said he ; " for every 
Sunday while she was worshipping her 
Maker, I used to worship her." 

But the folly went no farther than this ; 
it led him into no act of absurdity, for he 
kept it to himself ; and he even turned it 
to some advantage, or rather it shaped for 
itself a useful direction, in this way : having 
frequent and unobserved opportunity of 
observing her lovely face, the countenance 
became fixed so perfectly in his mind, that 
even after the lapse of forty years, he was 
sure, he said, that if he had possessed a 
painter's art, he could have produced her 
likeness. And having her beauty thus im- 
pressed upon his imagination, any other ap- 
peared to him only as a foil to it, during 
that part of his life when he was so circum- 
stanced that it would have been an act of 
imprudence for him to run in love. 

I smile to think how many of my readers, 
when they are reading this chapter aloud in 
a domestic circle, will bring up at the ex- 
pression of running in love; — like a stage- 
coachman, who, driving at the smooth anil 
steady pace of nine miles an hour on a 
macadamised road, comes upon some acci- 
dental obstruction only just in time to check 
the horses. 

Amorosa who flies into love ; and Ama- 



120 



THE DOCTOR. 



tura who flutters as if she were about to do 
the same ; and Amoretta who dances into it, 
(poor creatures, God help them all three !) 
and Amanda, — Heaven bless her! — who 
will be led to it gently and leisurely along 
the path of discretion, they all make a sud- 
den stop at the words. 



CHAPTER LIH. P. I. 

OF THE VARIOUS WAYS OF GETTING IN LOVE. 
A CHAPTER CONTAINING SOME USEFUL 
OBSERVATIONS, AND SOME BEAUTIFUL 
POETRY. 

Let cavillers know, that as the Lord John answered 
the Queen in that Italian Guazzo, an old, a grave discreet 
man is fittest to discourse of love-matters ; because he 
hath likely more experience, observed more, hath a more 
staid judgement, can better discern, resolve, discuss, 
advise, give better cautions and more solid precepts, 
better inform his auditors in such a subject, and, by reason 
of his riper years, sooner divert. Burton. 

Slips of the tongue are sometimes found 
very inconvenient by those persons who, 
owing to some unlucky want of correspond- 
ence between their wits and their utterance, 
say one thing when they mean to say another, 
or bolt out something which the slightest 
degree of forethought would have kept un- 
said. But more serious mischief arises from 
that misuse of words which occurs in all in- 
accurate writers. Many are the men, who 
merely for want of understanding what they 
say, have blundered into heresies and erro- 
neous assertions of every kind, which they 
have afterwards passionately and perti- 
naciously defended, till they have established 
themselves in the profession, if not in the 
belief, of some pernicious doctrine or opinion, 
to their own great injury and that of their 
deluded followers, and of the common- 
wealth. 

There may be an opposite fault ; for in- 
deed upon the agathokakological globe there 
arc opposite qualities always to be found in 
parallel degrees, north and south of the 
'•'[iiator. 

A man may dwell upon words till he be- 
comes at Length a mere precisian in speech. 
He may think of their meaning till he loses 



sight of all meaning, and they appear as 
dark and mysterious to him as chaos and 
outer night. " Death ! Grave ! " exclaims 
Goethe's suicide, " I understand not the 
words ! " and so he who looks for its quin- 
tessence might exclaim of every word in the 
dictionary. 

They who cannot swim should be con- 
tented with wading in the shallows : they 
who can may take to the deep water, no 
matter how deep, so it be clear. But let no 
one dive in the mud. 

I said that Daniel fell in love with the 
Burgemeester's Daughter, and I made use 
of the usual expression because there it was 
the most appropriate : for the thing was 
accidental. He himself could not have been 
more surprised if, missing his way in a fog, 
and supposing himself to be in the Breede- 
straat of Leyden, where there is no canal, 
he had fallen into the water; — nor would 
he have been more completely over head 
and ears at once. 

A man falls in love, just as he falls down 
stairs. It is an accident, — perhaps, and very 
probably a misfortune ; something which he 
neither intended, nor foresaw, nor appre- 
hended. But when he runs in love it is as 
when he runs in debt ; it is done knowingly 
and intentionally ; and very often rashly, 
and foolishly, even if not ridiculously, miser- 
ably, and ruinously. 

Marriages that are made up at watering- 
places are mostly of this running sort ; and 
there may be reason to think that they are 
even less likely to lead to — I will not say 
happiness, but to a very humble degree of 
contentment, — than those which are a plain 
business of bargain and sale ; for into these 
latter a certain degree of prudence enters 
on both sides. But there is a distinction to 
be made here : the man who is married for 
mere worldly motives, without a spark of 
affection on the woman's part, may never- 
theless get, in every worldly sense of the 
word, a good wife ; and while English women 
continue to be what, thank Heaven they are, 
he is likely to do so : but when a woman is 
married for the sake of her fortune, the ease 
is altered, and the chances are five hundred 



THE DOCTOR. 



121 



to one that she marries a villain, or at best a 
scoundrel. 

Falling in love and running in love are 
both, as every body knows, common enough ; 
and yet less so than what I shall call catching 
love. "Where the love itself is imprudent, 
that is to say, where there is some just 
prudential cause or impediment why the 
two parties should not be joined together in 
holy matrimony, there is generally some 
degree of culpable imprudence in catching 
it, because the danger is always to be appre- 
hended, and may in most cases be avoided. 
But sometimes the circumstances may be 
such as leave no room for censure, even 
when there may be most cause for com- 
passion ; and under such circumstances our 
friend, though the remembrance of the 
Burgemeester's daughter was too vivid in 
his imagination for him ever to run in love, 
or at that time deliberately to walk into it, 
as he afterwards did, — under such circum- 
stances, I say, he took a severe affection of 
this kind. The story is a melancholy one, 
and I shall relate it not in this place. 

The rarest, and surely the happiest mar- 
riages, are between those who have grown 
in love. Take the description of such a 
love in its rise and progress, ye thousands 
and tens of thousands who have what is 
called a taste for poetry, — take it in the 
sweet words of one of the sweetest and 
tenderest of English Poets ; and if ye doubt 
upon the strength of my opinion whether 
Daniel deserves such praise, ask Leigh 
Hunt, or the Laureate, or Wordsworth, or 
Charles Lamb. 

Ah ! I remember well (and how can I 

But evermore remember well) when first 

Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was 

The flame we felt ; when as we sat and sighed 

And looked upon each other, and conceived 

Not what we ailed, — yet something we did ail ; 

And yet were well, and yet we were not well, 

And what was our disease we couli not tell. 

Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look : and thus 

In that first garden of our simpleness 

We spent our childhood. But when years began 

To reap the fruit of knowledge, ah how then 

Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow, 

Check my presumption and my forwardness ; 

Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show 

What she would have me, yet not have me know. 

Take also the passage that presently follows 



this ; it alludes to a game which has long been 
obsolete, — but some fair reader I doubt not 
will remember the lines when she dances next. 

And when in sport with other company 
Of nymphs and shepherds we have met abroad, 
How would she steal a look, and watch mine eye 
Which way it went ? And when at Barley-break 
It came unto my turn to rescue her, 
With what an earnest, swift and nimble pace 
Would her affection make her feet to run, 
And further run than to my hand ! her race 
Had no stop but my bosom, where no end. 
And when we were to break again, how late 
And loth her trembling hand would part with mine ; 
And with how slow a pace would she set forth 
To meet the encountering party who contends 
To attain her, scarce affording him her fingers' ends ! * 



CHAPTER LIT. P. I. 

MORE CONCERNING LOVE AND MARRIAGE, 
AND MARRIAGE WITHOUT EOVE. 

Nay, Cupid, pitch thy trammel where thou please, 
Thou canst not fail to catch such fish as these. 

QCARLES. 

Whether chance or choice have most to do 
in the weighty concerns of love and matri- 
mony, is as difficult a question, as whether 
chance or skill have most influence upon a 
game at backgammon. Both enter into the 
constitution of the game ; and choice will 
always have some little to do with love, 
though so many other operating motives 
may be combined with it, that it sometimes 
bears a very insignificant part : but from 
marriage it is too frequently precluded on 
the one side, unwilling consent, and sub- 
mission to painful circumstances supplying 
its place ; and there is one sect of Christians 
(the Moravians), who, where they hold to the 
rigour of their institute, preclude it on both 
sides. They marry by lot ; and if divorces 
ever take place among them, the scandal has 
not been divulged to the profaner world. 

Choice, however, is exercised among all 
other Christians; or where not exercised, it is 
presumed by auction of law or of divinity, call 
it which you will. The husband even insists 
upon it in China where the pig is bought in 
a poke ; for when pigsnie arrives and the 



Hymen's Triumph. 



122 



THE DOCTOR. 



purchaser opens the close sedan chair in 
which she has been conveyed to his house, 
if he does not like her looks at first sight, 
he shuts her up again and sends her back. 

But when a bachelor who has no par- 
ticular attachment, makes up his mind to 
take unto himself a wife, for those reasons 
to which Uncle Toby referred the Widow 
W adman as being to be found in the Book 
of Common Prayer, how then to choose is a 
matter of much more difficulty, than one 
who has never considered it could suppose. 
It would not be paradoxical to assert that in 
the sort of choice which such a person makes, 
chance has a much greater part than either 
affection or judgment. To set about seek- 
ing a wife is like seeking one's fortune, and 
the probability of finding a good one in such 
a quest is less, though poor enough, Heaven 
knows, in both cases. 

The bard has sung, God never form'd a soul 

Without its own peculiar mate, to meet 
Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole 

Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most compleat ! 

But thousand evil things there are tuat hate 
To look on happiness ; these hurt, impede, 

And leagued with time, space, circumstance and fate, 
Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine and pant and 
bleed. 

And as the dove to far Palmyra flying, 
From where her native founts of Antioch beam, 

Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing, 
Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream ; 

So many a soul o'er life's drear desert faring, 
Love's pure congenial spring unfound, unquaff'd, 

Suffers, recoils, then thirsty and despairing 
Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest 
draught.* 

So sings Maria del Occidente, the most 
impassioned and most imaginative of all 
poetesses. 

According to the new revelation of the 
S.iint Simonians, every individual human 
being lias had a fitting mate created, the one 
and only woman for every individual man, 
and the one and only man for every in- 
dividual woman; and unless the persons so 
made, fitted and intended for each other, 
meel and are joined together in matrimonial 
bonds, there can be no perfect marriage for 
either, thai harmonious union for which they 



♦ ZOPHIBL. 



were designed being frustrated for both. 
Read the words of the Chief of the New 
Hierarchy himself, Father Bazard : II riy 
a sur la terre pour chaque homme quhine 
seule femme, et pour chaque femme quun 
seul homme, qui soient destines a former 
dans le mariage V union harmonique du couple. 

— Grace aux lumieres de cette revelation, 
les individus les plus avances peuvent aussi 
des aujourd'hui sentir et former le lien qui 
doit les unir dans le mariage. 

But if Sinner Simon and his disciples, — 
(most assuredly they ought to be unsainted!) 

— were right in this doctrine, happy mar- 
riages would be far more uncommon than 
they are ; the man might with better like- 
lihood of finding it look for a needle in a 
bottle of hay, than seek for his other half in 
this wide world ; and the woman's chance 
would be so immeasurably less, that no 
intelligible form of figures could express her 
fraction of it. 

The man who gets in love because he has 
determined to marry, instead of marrying 
because he is in love, goes about to private 
parties and to public places in search of a 
wife ; and there he is attracted by a woman's 
appearance, and the figure which she makes 
in public, not by her amiable deportment, 
her domestic qualities and her good report. 
Watering-places might with equal propriety 
be called fishing places, because they are 
frequented by female anglers, who are in 
quest of such prey, the elder for their 
daughters, the younger for themselves. But 
it is a dangerous sport, for the fair Piscatrix 
is not more likely to catch a bonito, or a 
dorado, than she is to be caught by a shark. 

Thomas Day, not old Thomas Day of the 
old glee, nor the young Thomas Day either, 

— a father and son whose names are married 
to immortal music, — but the Thomas Day 
who wrote Sandford and Merton, and who 
had a heart which generally led him right, 
and a head which as generally led him 
wrong ; that Thomas Day thought that the 
best way of obtaining a wife to his mind, 
was to breed one up for himself. So he 
selected two little orphan girls from a charity 
school, with the intention of marrying in 



THE DOCTOR. 



123 



due time the one whom he should like best. 
Of course such proper securities as could 
alone justify the managers of the charity in 
consenting to so uncommon a transaction, 
were required and given. The experiment 
succeeded in every thing — except its specific 
object ; for he found at last that love was 
not a thing thus to be bespoken on either 
side ; and his Lucretia and Sabrina, as he 
named them, grew up to be good wives for 
other men. I do not know whether the life 
of Thomas Day has yet found its appropriate 
place in the Wonderful Magazine, or in the 
collection entitled Eccentric Biography, — 
but the Reader may find it livelily related in 
Miss Seward's Life of Darwin. 

The experiment of breeding a wife is not 
likely to be repeated. None but a most 
determined theorist would attempt it ; and 
to carry it into effect would require con- 
siderable means of fortune, not to mention a 
more than ordinary share of patience : after 
which there must needs be a greater dis- 
parity of years than can be approved in 
theory upon any due consideration of human 
nature, and any reasonable estimate of the 
chances of human life. 



CHAPTER LV. P. I. 

THE AUTHOR'S LAST VISIT TO DONCASTER. 

Fuere quondam heec sedfuere ; 
Nunc ubi sint, rogitas ? Id annos 
Scire hos oportet scilicet. bonce 
Musts, Lepores — Ckariles meres I 
gaudia offuscata nullis 
\J-^ m Litibus ! sine nube soles! 

Janus Douza. 

I have more to say, dear Ladies, upon that 
which to you is, and ought to be, the mosP 
interesting of all worldly subjects, matri- 
mony, and the various ways by which it is 
brought about ; but this is not the place for 
saying it. The Doctor is not at this time 
thinking of a wife : his heart can no more 
be taken so long as it retains the lively 
image of the Burgemeester's Daughter, than 
Troy-town while the Palladium was safe. 
Imagine him, therefore, in the year of our 



Lord 1747, and in the twenty-sixth year of 
his age, returned to Doncaster, with the 
Burgemeester's Daughter, seated like the 
Lady in the Lobster, in his inmost breast ; 
with physic in his head and at his fingers' 
ends ; and with an appetite for knowledge 
which had long been feeding voraciously, 
digesting well, and increasing in its growth 
by what it fed on. Imagine him returned 
to Doncaster, and welcomed once more as a 
son by the worthy old Peter Hopkins and 
his good wife, in that comfortable habitation 
which I have heretofore described, and of 
which (as was at the same time stated) you 
may see a faithful representation in Miller's 
History of that good town ; a faithful repre- 
sentation, I say, of what it was in 1 804 ; the 
drawing was by Frederic Nash ; and Edward 
Shirt made a shift to engrave it ; the house 
had then undergone some alterations since 
the days when I frequented it ; and now ! — 

Of all things in this our mortal pilgrimage 
one of the most joyful is the returning home 
after an absence which has been long enough 
to make the heart yearn with hope, and not 
sicken with it, and then to find when you 
arrive there that all is well. But the most 
purely painful of all painful things is to visit 
after a long, long interval of time the place 
which was once our home; — the most purely 
painful, because it is unmixed with fear, 
anxiety, disappointment, or any other emo- 
tion but what belongs to the sense of time 
and change, then pressing upon us with its 
whole unalleviated weight. 

It was my fortune to leave Doncaster 
early in life, and, having passed per varios 
casus, and through as large a proportion of 
good and evil in my humble sphere, as the 
pious ./Eneas, though not exactly per tot dis- 
crimina 'rerum, not to see it 'again till after 
an absence of more than forty years, when 
my way happened to lie through that town. 
I should never have had heart purposely to 
visit it, for that would have been seeking 
sorrow ; but to have made a circuit for the 
sake of avoiding the place would have been 
an act of weakness; and no man who has a 
proper degree of self-respect will do any 
thing of which he might justly feel ashamed. 



124 



THE DOCTOR. 



It was evening, and late in autumn, when 
I entered Doncaster, and alighted at the 
Old Angel Inn. " The Old Angel ! " said I 
to my fellow-traveller ; " you see that even 
Angels on earth grow old ! " 

My companion knew how deeply I had 
been indebted to Dr. Dove, and with what 
affection I cherished his memory. We pre- 
sently sallied forth to look at his former 
habitation. Totally unknown as I now am 
in Doncaster, (where there is probably not 
one living soul who remembers either me, or 
my very name,) I had determined to knock 
at the door, at a suitable hour on the mor- 
row, and ask permission to enter the house 
in which I had passed so many happy and 
memorable hours, long ago. My age and 
appearance, I thought, might justify this 
liberty ; and I intended also to go into the 
garden and see if any of the fruit trees were 
remaining, which my venerable friend had 
planted, and from which I had so often 
plucked and ate. 

When we came there, there was nothing 
by which I could have recognised the spot, 
had it not been for the Mansion House that 
immediately adjoined it. Half of its site 
had been levelled to make room for a street 
or road which had been recently opened. 
Not a vestige remained of the garden behind. 
The remaining part of the house had been 
re-built ; and when I read the name of R. 
Dennison on the door, it was something 
consolatory to see that the door itself was 
not the same which had so often opened to 
admit me. 

Upon returning to the spot on the follow- 
ing morning I perceived that the part which 
had been re-built is employed as some sort 
of official appendage to the Mansion House; 
and on (he naked side-wall now open to the 
new street, or road, I observed most dis- 
tinctly where the old tall chimney had stood, 
and the outline of the old pointed roof. 
1 he e were the only vestigea that remained; 
they could have no possible interest in any 
hi mine, which were likely never to 
behold them again; and indeed it was evi- 
denl that they would soon be effaced as a 
deformity, and the naked Bide-wall smoothed 



over with plaster. But they will not be 
effaced from my memory, for they were the 
last traces of that dwelling which is the 
Kebla of my retrospective day-dreams, the 
Sanctum Sanctorum of my dearest recol- 
lections ; and, like an apparition from the 
dead, once seen, they were never to be for- 
gotten. 



CHAPTER LVI. P.I. 

A TRUCE WITH MELANCHOLY. GENTLEMEN 
SUCH AS THEY WERE IN THE YEAR OF OUR 
LORD 1747. A HINT TO YOUNG LADIES CON- 
CERNING THEIR GREAT- GRANDMOTHERS. 

Fashions that are now called new, 
Have been worn by more than you ; 
Elder times have used the same, 
Though these new ones get the name. 

MlDDLETON. 

Well might Ben Jonson call bell-ringing 
" the poetry of steeples ! " It is a poetry 
which in some heart or other is always sure 
to move an accordant key ; and there is not 
much of the poetry, so called by courtesy 
because it bears the appearance of verse, of 
which this can be said with equal truth. 
Doncaster since I was one of its inhabitants 
had been so greatly changed, — (improved 
I ought to say, for its outward changes had 
really been improvements,) — that there 
was nothing but my own recollections to 
carry me back into the past, till the clock of 
St. George's struck nine, on the evening of 
our arrival, and its chimes began to measure 
out the same time in the same tones which 
I used to hear as regularly as the hours came 
round, forty long years ago. 

Enough of this ! My visit to Doncaster 
was incidentally introduced by the com- 
parison which I could not choose but make 
between such a return, and that of the 
Student from Leyden. We must now re- 
vert to the point from whence I strayed, and 
go farther back than the forty years over 
which the chimes, as if with magic, had 
transported me. We must go back to the 
year 1747, when gentlemen wore sky-blue 
coats, with silver button holes and huge 



THE DOCTOR. 



125 



cuffs extending more than half way from 
the middle of the hand to the elbow, short 
breeches just reaching to the silver garters 
at the knee, and embroidered waistcoats 
with long flaps which came almost as low. 
Were I to describe Daniel Dove in the wig 
which he then wore, and which observed a 
modest mean between the bush of the 
Apothecary and the consequential foretop 
of the Physician with its depending knots, 
fore and aft ; were I to describe him in a 
sober suit of brown or snuff-coloured dittos, 
such as beseemed his profession, but with 
cuffs of the dimensions, waistcoat-flaps of 
the length, and breeches of the brevity be- 
fore mentioned ; Amorosa and Amatura and 
Amoretta would exclaim that love ought 
never to be named in connection with such 
a figure, — Amabilis, sweet girl, in the very 
bloom of innocence and opening youth, 
would declare she never could love such a 
creature, and Amanda herself would smile, 
not contemptuously, nor at her idea of the 
man, but at the nmtability of fashion. Smile 
if you will, young Ladies ! your great-grand- 
mothers wore large hoops, peaked stoma- 
chers, and modesty-bits*; their riding- 
habits and waistcoats were trimmed with 
silver, and they had very gentleman-like 
perukes for riding in, as well as gentleman- 
like cocked hats. Yet, young Ladies, they 
were as gay and giddy in their time as you 
are now ; they were as attractive and as 
lovely ; they were not less ready than you 
are to laugh at the fashions of those who 
had gone before them; they were wooed 
and won by gentlemen in short breeches, 
long flapped waistcoats, large cuffs, and tie- 
wigs ; and the wooing and winning pro- 
ceeded much in, the same manner as it had 
done in the generations before them, as the 
same agreeable part of this world's business 
proceeds among yourselves, and as it will 
proceed when you will be as little thought 
of by your great-grand-daughters as your 



* Probably the same as ,the Modesty-piece. Johnson 
quotes the following from the Guardian. "A narrow 
lace which runs along the upper part of the stays before, 
being a part of the tucker, is called the Modesty-piece." 



great-grand-mothers are at this time by 
you. What care you for your great-grand- 
mothers ! 

The law of entails sufficiently proves that 
our care for our posterity is carried far, 
sometimes indeed beyond what is reasonable 
and just. On the other hand, it is certain 
that the sense of relationship in the ascend- 
ing line produces in general little other 
feeling than that of pride in the haughty 
and high-born. That it should be so to a 
certain degree, is in the order of nature and 
for the general good : but that in our selfish 
state of society this indifference for our 
ancestors is greater than the order of nature 
would of itself produce, may be concluded 
from the very different feeling which pre- 
vailed among some of the ancients, and still 
prevails in other parts of the world. 

He who said that he did not see why he 
should be expected to do any thing for Pos- 
terity, when Posterity had done nothing for 
him, might be deemed to have shown as 
much worthlessness as wit in this saying, if 
it were any thing more than the sportive 
sally of a light-hearted man. Yet one who 
" keeps his heart with all diligence," knowing 
that " out of it are the issues of life," will 
take heed never lightly to entertain a thought 
that seems to make light of a duty, — still 
less will he give it utterance. We owe much 
to Posterity, nothing less than all that we 
have received from our Forefathers. And 
for myself I should be unwilling to believe 
that nothing is due from us to our ancestors. 
If I did not acquire this feeling from the 
person who is the subject of these volumes, 
it was at least confirmed by him. He used 
to say that one of the gratifications which 
he promised himself after death, was that of 
becoming acquainted with all his progenitors, 
in order, degree above degree, up to Noah, 
and from him up to our first parents. " But," 
said he, " though I mean to proceed regularly 
step by step, curiosity will make me in one 
instance trespass upon this proper arrange- 
ment, and I shall take the earliest oppor- 
tunity of paying my respects to Adam and 
Eve." 



126 



TH£ DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER LVIL P.L 

AN ATTEMPT IS MADE TO REMOVE THE EN- 
PLEASANT IMPRESSION PRODUCED UPON 
THE LADIES BY THE DOCTOR'S TIE-WIG 
AND HIS SUIT OF SNUFF-COLOURED DITTOS. 

So full of shapes is fancy 
That it alone is high fantastical. 

Twelfth Night. 

I must not allow the feminine part of my 
readers to suppose that the Doctor, when in 
his prime of life, was not a very likeable 
person in appearance, as well as in every 
tiling else, although he wore what, in the 
middle of the last century, was the costume 
of a respectable country practitioner in 
medicine. Though at Leyden he could only 
look at a Burgemeester's daughter as a cat 
may look at a King, there was not a Mayor 
or Alderman's daughter in Doncaster who 
would have thought herself disparaged if 
he had fixed his eyes upon her, and made 
her a proffer of his hand. 

Yet, as in the opinion of many dress 
" makes the man," and any thing which de- 
parts widely from the standard of dress, 
41 the fellow," I must endeavour to give those 
young Ladies who are influenced more than 
they ought to be, and perhaps more than 
they are aware, by such an opinion, a more 
favourable notion of the Doctor's appear- 
ance, than they are likely to have if they 
bring him before their eyes in the fashion of 
his times. It will not assist this intention 
on my part, if I request you to look at him 
as you would look at a friend who was 
1 in such a costume for a masquerade 
or a fancy ball ; for your friend would ex- 
pecl and wish to be laughed at, having 
assumed the dress for that benevolent pur- 
Well, then, let us take off the afore- 
said sad snuff-colour coat with broad deep 
cuffs ; still the waistcoat with its long flaps, 
and the breeches that barely reach to the knee, 
will provoke jour merriment. We must not 
proceed farther in undressing him ; and if I 
conceal these under a loose morning gown 
of green damask, the insuperable perriwig 
would still remain. 



Let me then present him to your imagina- 
tion, setting forth on horseback in that sort 
of weather which no man encounters volun- 
tarily, but which men of his profession who 
practise in the Country are called upon to 
face at all seasons and all hours. Look at 
him in a great coat of the closest texture 
that the looms of Leeds could furnish, — 
one of those dreadnoughts, the utility of 
which sets fashion at defiance. You will 
not observe his boot-stockings coming high 
above the knees ; the coat covers them ; and 
if it did not, you would be far from de- 
spising them now. His tie-wig is all but 
hidden under a hat, the brim of which is broad 
enough to answer in some degree the use 
of an umbrella. Look at him now, about 
to set off on some case of emergency ; with 
haste in his expressive eyes, and a cast of 
thoughtful anxiety over one of the most 
benignant countenances that Nature ever 
impressed with the characters of good hu- 
mour and good sense ! 

Was he, then, so handsome ? you say. 
Nay, Ladies, I know not whether you would 
have called him so ; for, among the things 
which were too wonderful for him, yea, 
which he knew not, I suspect that Solomon 
might have included a woman's notion of 
handsomeness in man, 



CHAPTER LVIII. P. I. 

CONCERNING THE PORTRAIT OF DOCTOR 
DANIEL DOVE. 

The sure traveller, 
Though he alight sometimes still goeth on. 

Herbert. 

There is no portrait of Dr. Daniel Dove. 
And there Horrebow, the Natural His- 
torian of Iceland, — if Horrebow had been 
his biographer — would have ended this 
chapter.* 



* The author of the Doctor,* &c. ; had evidently in view 
the end of the Laureate's Second Letter in his Vindiciae 
Eccles. Anglic. " And with this I conclude a letter which 
may remind the reader of the Chapter concerning Owls 
in Horrebow 's Natural History of Iceland." 



THE DOCTOR. 



12; 



"Here perchance," — (observe, Eeader, I 
am speaking now in the words of the Lord 
Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon.) — "here per- 
chance a question would be asked— (and 
jet I do marvel to hear a question made of 
so plain a matter,) — what should be the 
cause of this ? If it were asked," — (still 
the Lord Keeper speaketh) " thus I mean 
to answer : That I think no man so blind 
but seeth it, no man so deaf but heareth it, 
nor no man so ignorant but understandeth 
it." " II y a des demandes si sottes quon ne 
les scauroit resoudre par autre moyen que par 
la moquerie et les absurdities ; afin quune 
sottise pousse T autre? * 

But some reader may ask what have I 
answered here, or rather what have I brought 
forward the great authority of the Lord 
Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon and the arch- 
vituperator P. Garasse, to answer for me ? 
Do I take it for granted that the cause 
wherefore there is no portrait of Dr. Daniel 
Dove should be thus apparent ? or the 
reason why, there being no such portrait, 
Horrebow should simply have said so, and 
having so said, end therewith the chapter 
which he had commenced upon the subject. 

O, gentle reader, you who ask this perti- 
nent question, — I entirely agree with you ! 
there is nothing more desirable in compo- 
sition than perspicuity ; and in perspicuity 
precision is implied. Of the Author who 
has attained it in his style, it may indeed 
be said, omn^tulit punctum, so far as relates 
to style ; for all other graces, those only ex- 
cepted which only genius can impart, will 
necessarily follow. Nothing is so desirable, 
and yet it should seem that nothing is so 
difficult. He who thinks least about it when 
he is engaged in composition will be most 
likely to attain it, for no man ever attained 
it by labouring for it. Read all the treatises 
upon composition that ever were composed, 
and you will find nothing which conveys so 
much useful instruction as the account given 
by John Wesley of his own way of writing. 
" I never think of my style," says he ; " but 
just set down the words that come first. 



Only when I transcribe any thing for the 
press, then I think it my duty to see that 
every phrase be clear, pure and proper : con- 
ciseness, which is now as it were natural to 
me, brings quantum sufficit of strength. If 
after all I observe any stiff expression, I 
throw it out neck and shoulders." Let your 
words take their course freely ; they will 
then dispose themselves in their natural 
order, and make your meaning plain : — that 
is, Mr. Author, supposing you have a mean- 
ing ; and that it is not an insidious, and for 
that reason, a covert one. With all the 
head-work that there is in these volumes, 
and all the heart- work too, I have not bitten 
my nails over a single sentence which they 
contain. I do not say that my hand has not 
sometimes been passed across my brow ; nor 
that the fingers of my left hand have not 
played with the hair upon my forehead, — 
like Thalaba's with the grass that grew beside 
Oneiza's tomb. 

No people have pretended to so much 
precision in their language as the Turks. 
They have not only verbs active, passive, 
transitive, and reciprocal, but also verbs co- 
operative, verbs meditative, verbs frequenta- 
tive, verbs negative, and verbs impossible ; 
and, moreover, they have what are called 
verbs of opinion, and verbs of knowledge. 
The latter are used when the speaker means 
it to be understood that he speaks of his own 
sure knowledge, and is absolutely certain of 
what he asserts ; the former when he ad- 
vances it only as what he thinks likely, or 
believes upon the testimony of others. 

Now in the Turkish language the word 
whereon both the meaning and the construc- 
tion of the sentence depend, is placed at 
the end of a sentence, which extends not 
unfrequently to ten, fifteen, or twenty lines. 
What, therefore, they might gain in accu- 
racy by this nice distinction of verbs must 
be more than counterbalanced by the am- 
biguity consequent upon long-windedness. 
And, notwithstanding their conscientious 
moods, they are not more remarkable for 
veracity than their neighbours who, in 
ancient times, made so much use of the inde- 
finite tenses, and were said to be always liars. 



128 



THE DOCTOR. 



We have a sect in our own country who 
profess to use a strict and sincere plainness 
of speech ; they call their dialect the plain 
language, and yet they are notorious for 
making a studied precision in their words 
answer all the purposes of equivocation. 



CHAPTER LIX. P. I. 

SHOWING WHAT THAT QUESTION WAS, WHICH 
WAS ANSWERED BEFORE IT WAS ASKED. 

Chacun a son stile ; le mien, comme vou% voyez, n' est pas 
laconique. Me. de Sevigne'. 

In reporting progress upon the subject of 
the preceding chapter, it appears that the 
question asked concerning the question that 
was answered, was not itself answered in 
that chapter ; so that it still remains to be 
explained what it was that was so obvious 
as to require no other answer than the 
answer that was there given ; whether it 
was the reason why there is no portrait of 
Dr. Daniel Dove ? or the reason why Hor- 
rcbow, if he had been the author of this 
book, would simply have said that there was 
none, and have said nothing more about it ? 
The question which was answered related 
to Horrebow. He would have said nothing 
more about the matter, because he would 
have thought there was nothing more to say ; 
or because he agreed with Britain's old 
rhyming Remembrancer, that although 

More might be said hereof to make a proof, 
Yet more to say were more than is enough. 

But if there be readers who admire a style 
of such barren brevity, I must tell them in 
the words of Estienne Pasquier, that je fais 
grande conscience dalambiquer mon esprit en 
telle espece (Vescrite pour leur complaire. Do 
they take me for a Bottle-Conjurer that I 
am to compress myself into a quart, wine- 
merchants 1 measure, and be corked down ? I 
must have " am pie room and verge enough," 
— a large canvass such as Ilaydon requires, 
and as Rubens required before him. When 
I pour out nectar for my guests it must 
he into 

a bowl 

Large as my capacious soul. 



It is true I might have contented myself 
with merely saying there is no portrait of 
my venerable friend ; and the benevolent 
reader would have been satisfied with the 
information, while at the same time he 
wished there had been one, and perhaps in- 
voluntarily sighed at thinking there was not. 
But I have duties to perform ; first to the 
memory of my most dear philosopher and 
friend ; secondly, to myself ; thirdly, to pos- 
terity, which in this matter I cannot con- 
scientiously prefer either to myself or my 
friend ; fourthly, to the benevolent reader 
who delighteth in this book, and consequently 
loveth me therefore, and whom therefore I 
love, though, notwithstanding here is love 
for love between us, we know not each other 
now, and never shall ! fourthly, I say to 
the benevolent reader, or rather readers, 
utriusque generis ; and, fifthly, to the Public 
for the time being. " England expects every 
man to do his duty ; " and England's ex- 
pectation would not be disappointed if every 
Englishman were to perform his as faithfully 
and fully as I will do mine. Mark me, 
Reader, it is only of my duties to England, 
and to the parties above-mentioned that I 
speak ; other duties I am accountable for 
elsewhere. God forbid that I should ever 
speak of them in this strain, or ever think of 
them otherwise than in humility and fear ! 



CHAPTER LX. P. I. 

SHOWING CAUSE WHY THE QUESTION WHICH 
WAS NOT ASKED OUGHT TO BE ANSWERED. 

Nay in troth I talk but coarsely, 
But I hold it comfortable for the understanding. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

" What, more buffoonery ! " says the Ho- 
nourable Fastidious Feeble-wit, who con- 
descends to act occasionally as Small Critic 
to the Court Journal : — " what, still more 
of this buffoonery ! " 

" Yes, Sir, — vous ne recevrez de moy, sur 
le commencement et milieu de celuy-cy mien 
chapitre que bouffonnerie ; ettoutesfois bouffon- 
nerie qui porte quant a soy une philosophic et 



THE DOCTOR. 



129 



contemplation generate de la vanite de ce 
monde" * 

" More absurdities still ! " says Lord 
Make-motion Ganderman, " more and more 
absurdities ! " 

" Ay, my Lord ! " as the Gracioso says in 
one of Calderon's Plays, 

4 sino digo lo que quiero, 
de que me sirve ser loco ? 

" Ay, my Lord ! " as the old Spaniard 
says in his national poesy, "mas, y mas, y 
mas, y mas" more, and more, and more, and 
more. You may live to learn what vaunted 
maxims of your political philosophy are 
nothing else than absurdities in masquerade ; 
what old and exploded follies there are, 
which with a little vamping and varnishing 
pass for new and wonderful discoveries ; 

What a world of businesses 
Which by interpretation are mere nothings ! f 

This you may live to learn. As for my 
absurdities, they may seem very much be- 
neath your sapience ; but when I say lice 
nugce seria ducunt, (for a trite quotation when 
well-set is as good as one that will be new 
to every body,) let me add, my Lord, that it 
will be well both for you and your country, 
if your practical absurdities do not draw 
after them consequences of a very different 
dye! 

No, my Lord, as well as Ay, my Lord ! 

Never made man of woman born 
Of a bullock's tail, a blowing-horn ; 
Nor can an ass's hide disguise 
A lion, if he ramp and rise.f 

" More fooling," exclaims Dr. Dense : he 
takes off his spectacles, lays them on the 
table beside him, with a look of despair, and 
applies to the snuff-box for consolation. It 
is a capacious box, and the Doctor's servant 
takes care that his master shall never find 
in it a deficiency of the best rappee. " More 
fooling ! " says that worthy Doctor. 

Fooling, say you, my learned Dr. Dense ? 
Chiabrera will tell you 

che non e via 

Una gentilfollia,— 

my erudite and good Doctor ; 

* Pasquier. t Beaumont and Fletcher. % Peelr. 



But do you know what fooling is ? true fooling, — 
The circumstances that belong unto it? 
For every idle knave that shews his teeth, 
Wants, and would live, can juggle, tumble, fiddle, 
Make a dog-face, or can abuse his fellow, 
Is not a fool at first dash.§ 

It is easy to talk of fooling and of folly, 
mais a" en savoir les ordres, les rangs, les 
distinctions ; de connoitre ces differences de- 
licates quil y a de Folie a Folie ; les affinites 
et les alliances qui se trouvent entre la Sagesse 
et cette meme Folie, as Saint Evremond 
says ; to know this is not under every one's 
nightcap; and perhaps, my learned Doctor, 
may not be under your wig, orthodox and 
in full buckle as it is. 

The Doctor is all astonishment, and almost 
begins to doubt whether I am fooling in 
earnest. Ay, Doctor ! you meet in this 
world with false mirth as often as with false 
gravity ; the grinning hypocrite is not a 
more uncommon character than the groan- 
ing one. As much light discourse comes 
from a heavy heart, as from a hollow one ; 
and from a full mind as from an empty 
head. "Levity," says Mr. Danby, " is 
sometimes a refuge from the gloom of 
seriousness. A man may whistle ' for want 
of thought,' or from having too much of it," 

" Poor creature ! " says the Reverend 
Philocalvin Frybabe. " Poor creature ! 
little does he think what an account he 
must one day render for every idle word ! " 

And what account, odious man, if thou 
art a hypocrite, and hardly less odious if 
thou art sincere in thine abominable creed, 
— what account wilt thou render for thine 
extempore prayers and thy set discourses? 
My words, idle as thou mayest deem them, 
will never stupify the intellect, nor harden 
the heart, nor besot the conscience like an 
opiate drug ! 

" Such facetiousness," saith Barrow, " is 
not unreasonable or unlawful which minis- 
tereth harmless divertisement and delight to 
conversation ; harmless, I say, that is, not 
entrenching upon piety, not infringing 
charity or justice, not disturbing peace. For 
Christianity is not so tetrical, so harsh, so 



§ Beaumont and Fleiciieu. 



130 



THE DOCTOR. 



envious as to bar us continually from in- 
nocent, much less from wholesome and 
useful pleasure, such as human life doth 
need or require. And if jocular discourse 
may serve to good purposes of this kind ; if 
it may be apt to raise our drooping spirits, 
to allay our irksome cares, to whet our 
blunted industry, to recreate our minds, 
being tired and cloyed with graver occu- 
pations ; if it may breed alacrity, or maintain 
good-humour among us ; if it may conduce 
to sweeten conversation and endear society, 
then is it not inconvenient, or unprofitable. 
If for those ends we may use other recrea- 
tions, employing on them our ears and 
eyes, our hands and feet, our other instru- 
ments of sense and motion ; why may we 
not as well to them accommodate our 
organs of speech and interior sense ? Why 
should those games which excite our wit 
and fancies be less reasonable than those 
whereby our grosser parts and faculties are 
exercised? yea, why are not those more 
reasonable, since they are performed in a 
manly way, and have in them a smack of 
reason ; seeing also they may be so managed, 
as not only to divert and please, but to 
improve and profit the mind., rousing and 
quickening it, yea, sometimes enlightening 
and instructing it, by good sense conveyed 
in jocular expression." 

But think not that in thus producing the 
auihority of one of the wisest and best of 
men, I offer any apology for my levities to 
your Gravity ships ! they need it not and 
you deserve it not. 

Qitesti — 

Sonfatlipcr dar panto a p,V ignoranti ; 
Ma voi eh' avete gU intellclti sani, 
Mirale la dottrina che s'asconde 
Sotto quette copcrte alte e pro/onde. 

Le cose belle, e prcziose, e care, 
Saporite, soavi <• diticate, 
Scoperte hi man non si debbon portare 
Perc/li '/«' pOTCi non 816710 nnbrattale.* 

Gentlemen, you have made me break the 
word of promise both to the eye and ear. 
I began this chapter with the intention of 
showing to the reader's entire satisfaction, 



why the question which was not asked, ought 
to be answered ; and now another chapter 
must be appropriated to that matter ! Many 
things happen between the cup and the lip, 
and between the beginning of a chapter and 
the conclusion thereof. 



Orlando Innamouato. 



CHAPTER LXI. P. I. 

WHEREIN THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED WHICH 
OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN ASKED. 

Ajutami, tu penna, et calamaio, 

Ch' io ho tra mano una materia asciutta. 

Mattio Franzesi. 

Wherejfore there is no portrait of my ex- 
cellent friend, is a question which ought to 
be answered, because the solution will ex- 
hibit something of what in the words of the 
old drinking song he used to call his " poor 
way of thinking." And it is a question 
which may well be asked, seeing that in the 
circle wherein he moved, there were some 
persons of liberal habits and feelings as well 
as liberal fortune, who enjoyed his pecu- 
liarities, placed the fullest reliance upon his 
professional skill, appreciated most highly 
his moral and intellectual character, and 
were indeed personally attached to him in 
no ordinary degree. 

For another reason also ought this ques- 
tion to be resolved ; a reason which what- 
ever the reader may think, has the more 
weight with me, because it nearly concerns 
myself. "There is indeed," says the Phi- 
losopher of Bemerton, " a near relation 
between seriousness and wisdom, and one 
is a most excellent friend to the other. 
A man of a serious, sedate and considerate 
temper, as he is always in a ready dis- 
position for meditation, (the best improve- 
ment both of knowledge and manners,) so 
he thinks without disturbance, enters not 
upon another notion Jtill he is master of 
the first, and so makes clean work with it : 
— whereas a man of a loose, volatile and 
shattered humour, thinks only by fits and 
starts, now and then in a morning interval, 
when the serious mood comes upon him ; 



THE DOCTOR. 



131 



and even then too, let but the least trifle 
cross his way, and his desultorious fancy 
presently takes the scent, leaves the unfi- 
nished and half-mangled notion, and skips 
away in pursuit of the new game." Reader, 
it must be my care not to come under this 
condemnation ; and therefore I must follow 
to the end the subject which is before me : 
quare autem nobis — dicendum videtur, ne 
temere secuti putemur ; et breviter dicendum., 
ne in hujusmodi rebus diutius, quam ratio 
prcecipiendi postulet commoremur* 

Mr. Copley of Ketherhall was particularly 
desirous of possessing this so-much-by-us- 
now-desiderated likeness, and would have 
invited an Artist from London, if the 
Doctor could have been prevailed upon to 
sit for it ; but to this no persuasions could 
induce him. He never assigned a reason 
for this determination, and indeed -always 
evaded the subject when it was introduced, 
letting it at the same time plainly be per- 
ceived that he was averse to it, and wished 
not to be so pressed as to draw from him 
a direct refusal. But once when the desire 
had been urged with some seriousness, he re- 
plied that he was the last of his race, and if 
he were to be the first who had his portrait 
taken, well might they who looked at it ex- 
claim with Solomon, " Vanity of vanities ! " 

In that thought indeed it was that the 
root of his objection lay. Pauli in domo, 
prceter se nemo supercst, is one of the most 
melancholy reflections to which Paulas 
iEmilius gave utterance in that speech of 
his which is recorded by Livy. The speedy 
extinction of his family in his own person 
was often in the Doctors mind ; and he 
would sometimes touch upon it when, in 
his moods of autumnal feeling, he was con- 
versing with those persons whom he had 
received into his heart of hearts. Unworthy 
as I was, it was my privilege and happiness 
to be one of them ; and at such times his 
deepest feelings could not have been ex- 
pressed more unreservedly, if he had given 
them utterance in poetry or in prayer. 

Blessed as he had been in all other things 



Cicero. 



to the extent of his wishes, it would be 
unreasonable in him, he said, to look upon 
this as a misfortune ; so to repine would 
indicate little sense of gratitude to that 
bountiful Providence which had so emi- 
nently favoured him ; little also of religious 
acquiescence in its will. It was not by any 
sore calamity nor series of afflictions that 
the extinction of his family had been brought 
on; the diminution had been gradual, as 
if to show that their uses upon earth were 
done. His grandfather had only had two 
children; his parents but one, and that 
one was now ultimus suorum. They had 
ever been a family in good repute, walking 
inoffensively towards all men, uprightly 
with their neighbours, and humbly with 
their God ; and perhaps this extinction was 
their reward. For what Solon said of in- 
dividuals, that no one could truly be called 
happy till his life had terminated in a happy 
death, holds equally true of families. 

Perhaps, too, this timely extinction was 
ordained in mercy, to avert consequences 
which might else so probably have arisen 
from his forsaking the station in which he 
was born ; a lowly, but safe station, exposed 
to fewer dangers, trials, or temptations, than 
any other in this age or country, with which 
he was enabled to compare it. The senti- 
ment with which Sanazzaro concludes his 
Arcadia was often in his mind, not as derived 
from that famous author, but self-originated : 
per cosa vera ed indubitata tener ti puoi,~che 
clii pia di nascoso e piu lontano dalla moltitu- 
dine vive, miglior vive ; e colui trd mortali si 
pub con piu veritd chiamar beato, die senza 
invidia delle altrui grandezze, con modesto 
animo della sua fortuna si contenta. His 
father had removed him from that station ; 
he would not say unwisely, for his father 
was a wise and good man, if ever man 
deserved to be so called ; and he could not 
say unhappily ; for assuredly he knew that 
all the blessings which had earnestly been 
prayed for, had attended the determination. 
Through that blessing he had obtained the 
whole benefit which his father desired for 
him, and had escaped evils which perhaps 
had not been fully apprehended. II is in- 



132 



THE DOCTOR. 



tellectual part had received all the improve- 
ment of which it was capable, and his moral 
nature had sustained no injury in the pro- 
cess ; nor had his faith been shaken, but 
stood firm, resting upon a sure foundation. 
But the entail of humble safety had been, as 
it were, cut off; the birth-right — so to 
speak — had been renounced. His children, 
if God had given him children, must have 
mingled in the world, there to shape for 
themselves their lot of good or evil ; and he 
knew enough of the world to know how 
manifold and how insidious are the dangers, 
which, in all its paths, beset us. He never 
could have been to them what his father 
had been to him ; — that was impossible. 
They could have had none of those hallow- 
ing influences both of society and solitude 
to act upon them, which had imbued his 
heart betimes, and impressed upon his 
youthful mind a character that no after 
circumstances could corrupt. They must 
inevitably have been exposed to more 
danger, and could not have been so well 
armed against it. That consideration re- 
conciled him to being childless. God, who 
knew what was best for him, had ordained 
that it should be so ; and he did not, and 
ought not, to regret, that having been the 
most cultivated of his race, and so far the 
happiest, it was decreed that he should be 
the lust. God's will is best. 

°£lg 'icpar ev-^ofxeyog; for with some aspira- 
tion of piety he usually concluded his more 
serious discourse, either giving it utterance, 
or with a silent motion of the lips, which 
the expression of his countenance, as well as 
the tenour of what had gone before, rendered 
intelligible to those who knew him as I did. 



CHAPTER LXIL 

IN \\ IIHll is BELATED THE DISCOVERY OF A 
CERTAIN PORTRAIT AT DONCASTER. 

Call in the Barber ! If the tale be long 

He'll cut It short, I trust. Middleton. 

Hbbjb I mud relate a circumstance which 
occurred during the few hours of my last, 



and by me ever-to-be-remembered visit to 
Doncaster. As we were on the way from 
the Old Angel Inn to the Mansion House, 
adjoining which stood, or to speak more 
accurately had stood, the Kebla to which 
the steps of my pilgrimage were bent, we 
were attracted by a small but picturesque 
group in a shaving-shop, exhibited in 
strong relief by the light of a blazing fire, 
and of some glaring lamps. It was late in 
autumn and on a Saturday evening, at which 
time those persons in humble life, who can- 
not shave themselves, and whose sense of 
religion leads them to think that what may 
be done on the Saturday night ought not 
to be put off till the Sunday morning, set- 
tle their weekly account with their beards. 
There was not story enough in the scene to 
have supplied Wilkie with a subject for his 
admirable genius to work upon, but he 
would certainly have sketched the group if 
he had seen it as we did. Stopping for a 
minute, at civil distance from the door, we 
observed a picture over the fire-place, and 
it seemed so remarkable that we asked per- 
mission to go in and look at it more nearly. 
It was an unfinished portrait, evidently of 
no common person, and by no common 
hand ; and as evidently it had been painted 
many years ago. The head was so nearly 
finished that nothing seemed wanting to 
complete the likeness ; the breast and 
shoulders were faintly sketched in a sort of 
whitewash which gave them the appearance 
of being covered with a cloth. Upon asking 
the master of the shop if he could tell us 
whose portrait it was, Mambrino, who seemed 
to be a good-natured fellow, and was pleased 
at our making the inquiry, replied that it 
had been in his possession many years, 
before he knew himself. A friend of his 
had made him a present of it, because, he 
said, the gentleman looked by his dress as if 
he was just ready to be shaved, and had an 
apron under his chin; and therefore his 
shop was the properest place for it. One 
day, however, the picture attracted the 
notice of a passing stranger, as it had done 
ours, and he recognised it for a portrait of 
Garrick. It certainly was so ; and anyone 



THE DOCTOR. 



133 



who knows Garrick's face may satisfy him- 
self of this when he happens to be in Don- 
caster. Mambrino's shop is not far from 
the Old Angel, and on the same side of the 
street. 

My companion told me that when we 
entered the shop he had begun to hope it 
might prove to be a portrait of my old 
friend : he seemed even to be disappointed 
that we had not fallen upon such a 
discovery, supposing that it would have 
gratified me beyond measure. But upon 
considering in my own mind if this would 
have been the case, two questions presented 
themselves. The first was, whether know- 
ing as I did that the Doctor never sate for 
his portrait, and knowing also confidentially 
the reason why he never could be persuaded 
to do so, or rather the feeling which pos- 
sessed him on that subject, — knowing these 
things, I say, the first question was, whether 
if a stolen likeness had been discovered, I 
ought to have rejoiced in the discovery. For 
as 1 certainly should have endeavoured to 
purchase the picture, I should then have 
had to decide whether or not it was my 
duty to destroy it ; for which, — or, on the 
other hand, for preserving it, — so many 
strong reasons and so many refined ones, 
might have been produced, pro and con, 
that I could not have done either one or 
the other, without distrusting the justice of 
my own determination : if I preserved it, I 
should continually be self- accused for doing 
wrong ; if I destroyed it, self-reproaches 
would pursue me for having done what was 
irretrievable ; so that while I lived I should 
never have been out of my own Court of 
Conscience. And let me tell you, Reader, 
that to be impleaded in that Court is even 
worse than being brought into the Court of 
Chancery. 

Secondly, the more curious question oc- 
curred, whether if there had been a por- 
trait of Dr. Dove, it would have been like 
him. 

" That," says Mr. Every dayman, " is as it 
might happen." 

" Pardon me, Sir ; my question does not 
regard happening. Chance has nothing to 



do with the matter. The thing queried is 
whether it could or could not have been." 

And before I proceed to consider that 
question, I shall take the counsel which 
Catwg the Wise gave to his pupil Taliesin ; 
and which by these presents I recommend 
to every reader who may be disposed to con- 
sider himself for the time being as mine : 

" Think before thou speakest ; 
First, what thou shalt speak; 
Secondly, why thou shouldest speak ; 
Thirdly, to whom thou mayest have 

to speak ; 
Fourthly, about whom (or what) thou 

art to speak ; 
Fifthly, what will come from what 

thou mayest speak; 
Sixthly, what may be the benefit from 

what thou shalt speak ; 
Seventhly, who may be listening to 
what thou shalt speak. 
Put thy word on thy fingers' ends before 
thou speakest it, and turn it these seven 
ways before thou speakest it ; and there will 
never come any harm from what thou shalt 
say ! 

Catwg the Wise delivered this counsel to 
Taliesin, Chief of Bards, in giving him his 
blessing." 



CHAPTER LXIII. 

A DISCUSSION CONCERNING THE QUESTION 
EAST PROPOSED. 

Questo e bene tin de f piii profondi passi 
Che not habbiatno ancora oggi tentato ; 
E non e mica da huoinini bassi. 

Agnolo Firenzuola. 

Good and satisfactory likenesses may, beyond 
all doubt, be taken of Mr. Every dayman him- 
self, and indeed of most persons : and were 
it otherwise, portrait-painting would be a 
worse profession than it is, though too many 
an unfortunate artist has reason bitterly to 
regret that he possessed the talents which 
tempted him to engage in it. There are few 
faces of which even a mediocre painter can- 
not produce what is called a staring likeness, 
and Sir Thomas Lawrence a handsome one ; 



134 



THE DOCTOR. 



Sir Thomas is the painter who pleases every 
body ! 

But there are some few faces with which 
no artist can succeed so as to please himself, 
(if he has a true feeling for his own art,) or 
to content those persons who are best ac- 
quainted with the living countenance. This 
is the case where the character predominates 
over the features, and that character itself is 
one in which many and seemingly opposite 
qualities are compounded. Garrick in Abel 
Drugger, Garrick in Sir John Brute, and 
Garrick in King Lear, presented three faces 
as different as were the parts which he per- 
sonated ; yet the portraits which have been 
published of him in those parts may be 
identified by the same marked features, 
which, flexible as they were rendered by his 
histrionic power, still under all changes re- 
tained their strength and their peculiarity. 
But where the same flexibility exists and 
the features are not so peculiar or prominent, 
the character is then given by what is fleet- 
ing, not by what is fixed ; and it is more 
difficult to hit a likeness of this kind than to 
paint a rainbow. 

Now I cannot but think that the Doctor's 
countenance was of this kind. I can call it 
to mind as vividly as it appears to me in 
dreams ; but I could impart no notion of it 
by description. Words cannot delineate a 
single feature of his face, — such words at 
least as my knowledge enables me to use. 
A sculptor, if he had measured it, might 
have given you technically the relative pro- 
portions of his face in all its parts : a painter 
might describe the facial angle, and how the 
eyes were set, and if they were well-slit, and 
how the lips were formed, and whether the 
chin was in the just mean between rueful 
length and spectatorial brevity ; and whether 
he could have passed over Strasburgh Bridge* 
without hearing any observations made upon 
his nose. My own opinion is that the sen- 
tine] would have had something to say upon 
that subject; and if he had been a Protestant 
Soldier (which, if an Alsacian, he was likely 



He bath a long nose with a bonding ridge ; 

It might be woithy of notice on Strasburg Bridge. 

Roi est run Rhymer's, &c. 



to be) and accustomed to read the Bible, he 
might have been reminded by it of the Tower 
of Lebanon, looking towards Damascus ; for, 
as an Italian Poet says, 

in prospetliva 

Ne mostra un barbacane sforacchiato.* 

I might venture also to apply to the Doctor's 
nose that safe generality by which Alcina's 
is described in the Orlando Furioso. 

Quindi il naso, per mezzo il viso scende, 
Che non Irova Vinvidia ove Vemende. 

But farther than this, which amounts to no 
more than a doubtful opinion and a faint 
adumbration, I can say nothing that would 
assist any reader to form an idea at once 
definite and just of any part of the Doctor's 
face. I cannot even positively say what was 
the colour of his eyes. I only know that 
mirth sparkled in them, scorn flashed from 
them, thought beamed in them, benevolence 
glistened in them ; that they were easily 
moved to smiles, easily to tears. No baro- 
meter ever indicated more faithfully the 
changes of the atmosphere than his counte- 
nance corresponded to the emotions of his 
mind ; but with a mind which might truly 
be said to have been 

so various, that it seemed to be 

Not one, but all mankind's epitome, 

thus various, not in its principles, or passions, 
or pursuits, but in its inquiries, and fancies, 
and speculations, and so alert that nothing- 
seemed to escape its ever watchful and active 
apprehension, — with such a mind the coun- 
tenance that was its faithful index was per- 
petually varying : its likeness, therefore, at 
any one moment could but represent a 
fraction of the character which identified it, 
and which left upon you an indescribable 
and inimitable impression resulting from its 
totality, though, in its totality, it never was 
and never could be seen. 

Have I made myself understood ? 

I mean to say that the ideal face of any 
one to whom we are strongly and tenderly 
attached, — that face which is enshrined in 
our heart of hearts and which comes to us 
in dreams long after it has mouldered in the 

* Mattio Fhanzf.sj. 



THE DOCTOR. 



U5 



grave, — that face is not the exact mechanical 
countenance of the beloved person, not the 
countenance that we ever actually behold, 
but its abstract, its idealisation, or rather, its 
realisation; the spirit of the countenance, 
its essence and its life. And the finer 
the character, and the more various its in- 
tellectual powers, the more must this true 
eidwXov differ from the most faithful likeness 
that a painter or a sculptor can produce. 

Therefore I conclude that if there had 
been a portrait of Dr. Daniel Dove, it could 
not have been like him, for it was as im- 
possible to paint the character which con- 
stituted the identity of his countenance, as 
to paint the flavour of an apple, or the 
fragrance of a rose. 



CHAPTER LXIV. 



DEFENCE OP PORTRAIT-PAINTING. A SYSTEM 
OF MORAL COSMETICS RECOMMENDED TO 
THE LADIES. GWILLIM. SIR T. LAWRENCE. 
GEORGE WITHER. APPLICATION TO THE 
SUBJECT OP THIS WORK. 

Pingilur in tabnlis formes peritura venustas, 
Vivat ut in tabulis, quod per it in facie. 

Owen. 

The reader will mistake me greatly if he 
supposes that in showing why it was im- 
possible there should be~ a good portrait of 
Dr. Daniel Dove, I meant to depreciate the 
art of portrait-painting. I have a very high 
respect for that art, and no person can be 
more sincerely persuaded of its moral uses. 
The great number of portraits in the annual 
exhibitions of our Royal Academy is so far 
from displeasing me that I have always re- 
garded it as a symptom of wholesome feeling 
in the nation, — an unequivocal proof that 
the domestic and social affections are still 
existing among us in their proper strength, 
and cherished as they ought to be. And 
when I have heard at any time observations 
of the would-be-witty kind upon the vanity 
of those who allow their portraits thus to be 
hung up for public view, I have generally 
perceived that the remark implied a much 
greater degree of conceit in the speaker. As 
for allowing the portrait to be exhibited, 



that is no more than an act of justice to 
the artist, who has no other means of making 
his abilities known so well, and of forward- 
ing himself in his profession. If we look 
round the rooms at Somerset House, and ob- 
serve how large a proportion of the portraits 
represent children, the old, and persons in 
middle life, we shall see that very few indeed 
are those which can have been painted, or 
exhibited for the gratification of personal 
vanity. 

Sir Thomas Lawrence ministers largely to 
self- admiration : and yet a few years ripen 
even the most flattering of his portraits into 
moral pictures : 

Perchi, donne mie care, la belta 
Ha r ali al capo, a le spalle ed a' pid : 
E vola si, che non si scorge piu 
Vestigio alcun ne' visi, dovefii.* 

Helen in her old age, looking at herself in 
a mirror, is a subject which old sonnetteers 
were fond of borrowing from the Greek 
Anthology. Young Ladies ! you who have 
sate to Sir Thomas, or any artist of his 
school, I will tell you how your portraits 
may be rendered more useful monitors to 
you in your progress through life than the 
mirror was to Helen, and how you may 
derive more satisfaction from them when 
you are grown old. Without supposing that 
you actually " called up a look" for the 
painter's use, I may be certain that none of 
you during the times of sitting permitted 
any feeling of ill-humour to cast a shade 
over your countenance ; and that if you 
were not conscious of endeavouring to put 
on your best looks for the occasion, the 
painter was desirous of catching them, and 
would catch the best he could. The most 
thoughtless of you need not be told that you 
cannot retain the charms of youthful beauty, 
but you may retain the charm of an amiable 
expression through life : never allow your- 
selves to be seen with a worse than you wore 
for the painter! Whenever you feel ill- 
tempered, remember that you look ugly ; 
and be assured that every emotion of 
fretfulness, of ill-humour, of anger, of irri- 
tability, of impatience, of pride, haughtiness, 

* IxICCIARDETTO. 



136 



THE DOCTOli. 



envy, or malice, any unkind, any uncharit- 
able, any ungenerous feeling, lessens the 
likeness to your picture, and not only deforms 
you while it lasts, but leaves its trace be- 
hind; for the effect of the passions upon the 
face is more rapid and more certain than 
that of time. 

" His counsel," says Gwillim the Pursui- 
vant, " was very behoveful, who advised all 
gentlewomen often to look on glasses, that 
so, if they saw themselves beautiful, they 
might be stirred up to make their minds as 
fair by virtue as their faces were by nature ; 
but if deformed, they might make amends 
for their outward deformity, with their intern 
pulchritude and gracious qualities. And 
those that are proud of their beauty should 
consider that their own hue is as brittle as 
the glass wherein they see it ; and that they 
carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull 
wrapt in skin which one day will be loath- 
some to be looked on." 

The conclusion of this passage accorded 
not with the Doctor's feelings. He thought 
that whatever tended to connect frightful 
and loathsome associations with the solemn 
and wholesome contemplation of mortality, 
ought to be avoided as injudicious and in- 
jurious. So too with regard to age : if it is 
dark and unlovely " the fault," he used to 
say, " is generally our own ; Nature may 
indeed make it an object of compassion, but 
not of dislike, unless we ourselves render it 
so. It is not of necessity that we grow ugly 
as well as old." Donne says 

No spring, nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face : 

he was probably speaking of his wife, for 
Donne was happy in his marriage, as he 
deserved to be. There is a beauty which, 
us the Duchess of Newcastle said of her 
mother's, is " beyond the reach of time ; " 
that beauty depends upon the mind, upon the 
temper, — Young Ladies, upon yourselves ! 

George Wither wrote under the best of 
his portraits, 

What I was, is passed by ; 
W'li.tt I am, away doth fly ; 
What I SHALL BE, none do see; 
Yet in tuat my beauties be. 



He commenced also a Meditation upon 
that portrait in these impressive lines : 

When I behold my Picture and perceive 

How vain it is our Portraitures to leave 

In lines and shadows, (which make shews to day 

Of that which will to-morrow fade away,) 

And think what mean resemblances at best 

Are by mechanic instruments exprest, 

I thought it better much to leave behind me, 

Some draught, in which my living friends might find me, 

The same I am, in that which will remain 

Till all is ruined and repaired again. 

In the same poem he says, 

A Picture, though with most exactness made, 
Is nothing but the shadow of a shade. 
For even our living bodies, (though they seem 
To others more, or more in our esteem,) 
Are but the shadow of that Real Being, 
Which doth extend beyond the fleshly seeing, 
And cannot be discerned, until we rise 
Immortal objects for immortal eyes. 

Like most men, George Wither, as he 
grew more selfish, was tolerably successful in 
deceiving himself as to his own motives and 
state of mind. If ever there was an honest 
enthusiast, he had been one ; afterwards he 
feathered his nest with the spoils of the 
Loyalists and of the Bishops ; and during 
this prosperous part of his turbulent life 
there must have been times when the re- 
membrance of his former self brought with 
it more melancholy and more awful thoughts 
than the sight of his own youthful portrait, 
in its fantastic garb, or of that more sober 
resemblance upon which his meditation was 
composed. 

Such a portraiture of the inner or real 
being as Wither in his better mind wished 
to leave in his works, for those who knew 
and loved him, such a portraiture am I en- 
deavouring to compose of Dr. Dove, wherein 
the world may see what he was, and so be- 
come accruainted with his intellectual linea- 
ments, and with those peculiarities, which, 
forming as it were the idiosyncrasy of his 
moral constitution, contributed in no small 
degree to those ever-varying lights and 
shades of character and feeling in his living 
countenance, which, I believe, would have 
baffled the best painter's art. 

Pot voi sapcte quanta egli e dabbene, 
Com' ha giudizio, ingegno, e discrexione 
Come conosce il vero, il bello, e 7 bene.* 



P>F.nm. 



THE DOCTOR. 



137 



CHAPTER LXY. 

SOCIETY OF A COUNTRY TOWN. SUCH A 
TOWN A MORE FAVOURABLE HABITAT TOR 
SUCH A PERSON AS DR. DOVE THAN LONDON 
WOULD HAVE BEEN. 

Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell ; 

Inn any where ; 

And seeing the snail, which every where doth roam, 

Carrying his own home still, still is at home, 

Follow (for he is easy paced) this snail ; 

Be thine own Palace, or the World's thy jail. 

Donne. 

Such then as Daniel Dove was in the 
twenty-sixth year of his age we are now to 
consider him, settled at Doncaster, and with 
his way of life chosen, for better for worse, 
in all respects ; except, as my female readers 
will remember, that he was neither married, 
nor engaged, nor likely to be so. 

One of the things for which he used to 
thank God was that the world had not been 
all before him where to choose, either as to 
calling or place, but that both had been well 
chosen for him. To choose upon such just 
motives as can leave no rational cause for 
after repentance requires riper judgment 
than ought to be expected at the age when 
the choice is to be made ; it is best for us 
therefore at a time of life when, though per- 
haps we might choose well, it is impossible 
that we could choose wisely, to acquiesce in 
the determination of others, who have know- 
ledge and experience to direct them. Far 
happier are they who always know what 
they are to do, than they who have to 
determine what they will do. 

Bisognafar quel die si d eve fare. 
E non gia tutto quello che si vuole.* 

Thus he was accustomed to think upon this 
subject. 

But was he well placed at Doncaster ? 

It matters not where those men are placed, 
who, as South says, " have souls so dull and 
stupid as to serve for little else but to keep 
their bodies from putrefaction." Ordinary 
people, whether their lot be cast in town or 
country, in the metropolis or in a village, 



will go on in the ordinary way, conforming 
their habits to those of the place. It matters 
nothing more to those who live less in the 
little world about them, than in a world of 
their own, with the whole powers of the head 
and of the heart too (if they have one) in- 
tently fixed upon some favourite pursuit: — 
if they have a heart I say, for it sometimes 
happens that where there is an excellent 
head, the heart is nothing more than a piece 
of hard flesh. In this respect, the highest 
and the meanest intellects are, in a certain 
sense, alike self-sufficient ; that is, they are 
so far independent of adventitious aid, that 
they derive little advantage from society and 
suffer nothing from the want of it. But 
there are others for whose mental improve- 
ment, or at least mental enjoyment, collision, 
and sympathy, and external excitement seem 
almost indispensable. Just as large towns 
are the only places in which first-rate work- 
men in any handicraft business can find em- 
ployment, so men of letters and of science 
generally appear to think that nowhere but 
in a metropolis can they find the oppor- 
tunities which they desire of improvement 
or of display. These persons are wise in 
their generation, but they are not children 
of light. 

Among such persons it may perhaps be 
thought that our friend should be classed ; 
and it cannot be doubted that, in a more 
conspicuous field of action, he might have 
distinguished himself, and obtained a splendid 
fortune. But for distinction he never enter- 
tained the slightest desire, and with the 
goods of fortune which had fallen to his 
share he was perfectly contented. But was 
he favourably situated for his intellectual 
advancement? — which, if such an inquiry 
had come before him concerning any other 
person, is what he would have considered to 
be the question-issimus. I answer without 
the slightest hesitation, that he was. 

In London he might have mounted a 
Physician's wig, have ridden in his carriage, 
have attained the honours of the College, 
and added F.R.S. to his professional initials. 
He might, if Fortune opening her eyes had 
chosen to favour desert, have become Sir 



138 



THE DOCTOR. 



Daniel Dove, Bart., Physician to his Majesty. 
But he would then have been a very different 
person from the Dr. Dove of Doncaster, 
whose memory will be transmitted to pos- 
terity in these volumes, and he would have 
been much less worthy of being remembered. 
The course of such a life would have left him 
no leisure for himself; and metropolitan 
society, in rubbing off the singularities of 
his character, would just in the same degree 
have taken from its strength. 

It is a pretty general opinion that no 
society can be so bad as that of a small 
country town ; and certain it is that such 
towns offer little or no choice. You must 
take what they have and make the best of 
it. But there are not many persons to 
whom circumstances allow much latitude of 
choice anywhere, except in those public 
places, as they are called, where the idle and 
the dissipated, like birds of a feather, flock 
together. In any settled place of residence 
men are circumscribed by station and oppor- 
tunities, and just as much in the capital as 
in a provincial town. No one will be dis- 
posed to regret this, if he observes, where 
men have most power of choosing their 
society, how little benefit is derived from it, 
or, in other words, with how little wisdom it 
is used. 

After all, the common varieties of human 
character will be found distributed in much 
the same proportion everywhere, and in most 
places there will be a sprinkling of the un- 
common ones. Everywhere you may find 
the selfish and the sensual, the carking and 
the careful, the cunning and the credulous, 
the worldling and the reckless. But kind 
hearts are also everywhere to be found, 
right intentions, sober minds, and private 
virtues, — for the sake of which let us hope 
that God may continue to spare this hitherto 
highly-favoured nation, notwithstanding the 
fearful amount of our public and manifold 
offences. 

The society then of Doncaster, in the 

middle of the last century, was like that of 

any other country town which was neither 

I of manufactures, nor of a Bishop's 

i either of which more information of 



a peculiar kind would have been found, — 
more active minds, or more cultivated ones. 
There was enough of those eccentricities for 
which the English above all other people are 
remarkable, those aberrations of intellect 
which just fail to constitute legal insanity, 
and which, according to their degree, excite 
amusement, or eompassion. Nor was the 
town without its full share of talents ; these 
there was little to foster and encourage, but 
happily there was nothing to pervert and 
stimulate them to a premature and mis- 
chievous activity. 

In one respect it more resembled an epi- 
scopal than a trading city. The four kings 
and their respective suits of red and black 
were not upon more frequent service in the 
precincts of a cathedral, than in the good 
town of Doncaster. A stranger who had 
been invited to spend the evening with a 
family there, to which he had been intro- 
duced, was asked by the master of the house 
to take a card as a matter of course ; upon 
his replying that he did not play at cards, 
the company looked at him with astonish- 
ment, and his host exclaimed — " What, Sir ! 
not play at cards ? the Lord help you ! " 

I will not say the Lord helped Daniel 
Dove, because there would be an air of 
irreverence in the expression, the case being 
one in which he, or any one, might help him- 
self. He knew enough of all the games 
which were then in vogue to have played at 
them, if he had so thought good ; and he 
would have been as willing, sometimes, in 
certain moods of mind, to have taken his 
seat at a card- table, in houses where card- 
playing did not form part of the regular 
business of life, as to have listened to a tune 
on the old-fashioned spinnet, or the then 
new-fashioned harpsichord. But that which 
as an occasional pastime he might have 
thought harmless and even wholesome, 
seemed to him something worse than folly 
when it was made a kill-time, — the serious 
occupation for which people were brought 
together, — the only one at which some of 
them ever appeared to give themselves the 
trouble of thinking. And seeing its effects 
upon the temper, and how nearly this habit 



THE DOCTOR. 



139 



was connected with a spirit of gambling, he 
thought that cards had not without reason 
been called the Devil's Books. 

I shall not therefore introduce the reader 
to a Doncaster card-party, by way of show- 
ing him the society of the place. The Mrs. 
Shuffles, Mrs. Cuts, and Miss Dealems, the 
Mr. Tittles and Mrs. Tattles, the Hum- 
drums and the Prateapaces, the Fribbles 
and the Feebles, the Perts and the Prims, 
the Littlewits and the Longtongues, the 
Heavyheads and the Broadbelows, are to be 
found everywhere. 

" It is quite right," says one of the 
Guessers at Truth, " that there should be a 
heavy duty on cards : not only on mora! 
grounds ; not only because they act on a 
social party like a torpedo, silencing the 
merry voice and numbing the play of the 
features ; not only to still the hunger of the 
public purse, which, reversing the qualities 
of Fortunatus's, is always empty, however 
much you may put into it ; but also because 
every pack of cards is a malicious libel on 
courts, and on the world, seeing that the 
trumpery with number one at the head, is 
the best part of them ; and that it gives 
kings and queens no other companions than 
knaves." 



CHAPTER LXVI. 

MR. COPLEY OF NETHERHALL. SOCIETY AT 
HIS PIOUS E. DRUMMOND. BURGH. GRAY. 
MASON. MILLER THE ORGANIST AND HIS- 
TORIAN OF DONCASTER. HERSCHEL. 

All worldly joys go less 
To the one joy of doing kindnesses. 

Herbert. 

There was one house in Doncaster in 
which cards were never introduced ; this 
house was Netherhall, the seat of Mr. 
Copley ; and there Dr. Dove had the ad- 
vantage of such society as was at that 
time very rarely, and is still not often, to be 
enjoyed anywhere. 

The Copleys are one of the most ancient 



families in Doncaster : Robert Grosseteste, 
one of the most eminent of our English 
churchmen before the Reformation, was a 
branch from their stock. Robert Copley, 
who in the middle of the last century re- 
presented the family, was brought up at 
Westminster School, and while there took, 
what is very unusual for boys at West- 
minster or any other school to take, lessons 
in music. Dr. Crofts was his master, and 
made him, as has been said by a very com- 
petent judge, a very good performer in 
thorough-bass on the harpsichord. He 
attempted painting also, but not with equal 
success ; the age of painting in this country 
had not then arrived. 

Mr. Copley's income never exceeded 
twelve hundred a-year ; but this which is 
still a liberal income, was then a large one, 
in the hands of a wise and prudent man. 
Netherhall was the resort of intellectual 
men, in whose company he delighted ; and 
the poor were fed daily from his table. 
Drummond, afterwards Archbishop of York, 
was his frequent guest ; so was Mason ; so 
was Mason's friend Dr. Burgh ; and Gray 
has sometimes been entertained there. 
One of the " strong names " of the King 
of Dahomey means, when interpreted, 
" wherever I rub, I leave my scent." In 
a better sense than belongs to this meta- 
phorical boast of the power and the dis- 
position to be terrible, it may be said of 
such men as Gray and Mason that wherever 
they have resided, or have been entertained 
as abiding guests, an odour of their memory 
remains. Who passes by the house at 
Streatham that was once Mrs. Thrale's with- 
out thinking of Dr. Johnson ? 

During many years Mr. Copley enter- 
tained himself and his friends with a weekly 
concert at Netherhall, he himself, Sir Brian 
Cooke and some of his family, and Dr. Miller 
the organist, and afterwards Historian of 
Doncaster, being performers. Miller, who 
was himself a remarkable person, had the 
fortune to introduce a more remarkable one 
to these concerts ; it is an interesting anec- 
dote in the history of that person, of Miller, 
and of Doncaster. 



140 



THE DOCTOR. 



About the year 1760 as Miller was dining 
at Pontefract with the officers of the Durham 
militia, one of them, knowing his love of 
music, told him they had a young German 
in their band as a performer on the hautboy, 
who had only been a few months in Eng- 
land, and yet spoke English almost as well 
as a native, and who was also an excellent 
performer on the violin ; the officer added, 
that if Miller would come into another room 
this German should entertain him with a 
solo. The invitation was gladly accepted, 
and Miller heard a solo of Giardini's exe- 
cuted in a manner that surprised him. He 
afterwards took an opportunity of having 
some private conversation with the young 
musician, and asked him whether he had 
engaged himself for any long period to the 
Durham militia. The answer was, "only 
from month to month." " Leave them 
then," said the organist, " and come and 
live with me. I am a single man, and think 
we shall be happy together ; and doubtless 
your merit will soon entitle you to a more 
eligible situation." The offer was accepted 
as frankly as it was made : and the reader 
may imagine with what satisfaction Dr. 
Miller must have remembered this act of 
generous feeling, when he hears that this 
young German was Herschel the Astro- 
nomer. 

" My humble mansion," says Miller, 
" consisted at that time but of two rooms. 
However, poor as I was, my cottage con- 
tained a small library of well-chosen books ; 
and it must appear singular that a foreigner 
who had been so short a time in England 
should understand even the peculiarities of 
the language so well, as to fix upon Swift 
for his favourite author." He took an early 
opportunity of introducing his new friend 
at Mr. Copley's concerts ; the first violin 
was resigned to him : and never, says the 
organist, had I heard the concertos of Corelli, 
Geminiani and Avison, or the overtures of 
Handel, performed more chastely, or more 
according to the original intention of the 
composers than by Mr. Herschel. I soon 
lost my companion : his fame was presently 
Spread abroad: lie had the offer of pupils, 



and was solicited to lead the public concerts 
both at Wakefield and Halifax. A new 
organ for the parish church of Halifax was 
built about this time, and Herschel was one 
of the seven candidates for the organist's 
place. They drew lots how they were to 
perform in succession. Herschel drew the 
third, the second fell to Mr., afterwards Dr., 
Wainwright of Manchester, whose finger 
was so rapid that old Snetzler, the organ- 
builder, ran about the church, exclaiming, 
Te Tevel, te Tevel ! he run over te keys like 
one cat; he will not give my piphes room 
for to shpeak. " During Mr. Wainwright's 
performance," says Miller, " I was standing 
in the middle aisle with Herschel ; what 
chance have you, said I, to follow this man ? " 
He replied, " I don't know ; I am sure 
fingers will not do." On which he ascended 
the organ loft, and produced from the organ 
so uncommon a fulness, — such a volume of 
slow solemn harmony, that I could by no 
means account for the effect. After this short 
extempore effusion, he finished with the old 
hundredth-psalm-tune, which he played 
better than his opponent. Ay, ay, cried old 
Snetzler, tish is very goot, very goot indeet ; 
I vil luf tish man, for he gives my piphes room 
for to shpeak. Having afterwards asked 
Mr. Herschel by what means, in the begin- 
ning of his performance, he produced so un- 
common an effect, he replied, " I told you 
fingers would not do ! " and producing two 
pieces of lead from his waistcoat pocket, 
" one of these," said he, " I placed on the 
lowest key of the organ, and the other upon 
the octave above ; thus by accommodating 
the harmony, I produced the effect of four 
hands instead of two." 



CHAPTER LXVII. 

A MYTHOLOGICAL, STORY MORALISED. 

II faut mettre les fables en presse pour en tirer quelque 
sue de verite. Garasse. 

It is related of the great mythological 
personage Baly, that Veeshnoo, when he 
dispossessed him of his impious power, 



THE DOCTOR. 



141 



allowed him, in mitigation of bis lot, to make 
his choice, whether he would go to the Swer- 
ga, and take five ignorant persons with him 
who were to be his everlasting companions 
there, or to Padalon and have five Pundits 
in his company. Baly preferred the good 
company with the bad quarters. 

That that which is called good company 
has led many a man to a place which it is 
not considered decorous to mention before 
"ears polite," is a common, and, therefore, 
the more an awful truth. The Swerga and 
Padalon are the Hindoo Heaven and Hell ; 
and if the Hindoo fable were not obviously 
intended to extol the merits of their Pundits, 
or learned men, as the missionary Ward 
explains the title, it might with much seem- 
ing likelihood bear this moral interpretation, 
that Baly retained the pride of knowledge 
even when convinced by the deprivation of 
his power that the pride of power was vanity, 
and in consequence drew upon himself a 
farther punishment by his choice. 

For although Baly, because of the righte- 
ousness with which he had used his power, 
was so far favoured by the Divinity whom he 
had offended, that he was not condemned 
to undergo any of those torments of which 
there was as rich an assortment and as 
choice a variety in Padalon, as ever monkish 
imagination revelled in devising, it was at 
the best a dreadful place of abode : and so 
it would appear if Turner were to paint a 
picture of its Diamond City from Southey's 
description. I say Turner, because, though 
the subject might seem more adapted to 
Martin's cast of mind, Turner's colouring 
would well represent the fiery streams and 
the sulphureous atmosphere; and that colour- 
ing being transferred from earthly landscapes 
to its proper place, his rich genius would 
have full scope for its appropriate display. 
Baly, no doubt, as a state prisoner who was 
to be treated with the highest consideration 
as well as with the utmost indulgence, would 
have all the accommodations that Yamen 
could afford him. There he and the Pundits 
might 

reason high 

Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 



Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, 
And find no end, ia wandering mazes lost. 

They might argue there of good and evil, 

Of happiness and final misery, 

Passion and apathy, and glory and shame ; 

and such discourses possibly 

— with a pleasing sorcery might charm 
Pain for awhile and anguish, and excite 
Fallacious hope, or arm the obdured breast 
With stubborn patience as with triple steel. 

But it would only be for awhile that they 
could be thus beguiled by it, for it is 

Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy ! 

it would be only for awhile, and they were 
there for a time which in prospect must 
appear all but endless. The Pundits would 
not thank him for bringing them there ; 
Baly himself must continually wish he were 
breathing the heavenly air of the Swerga 
in the company of ignorant but happy asso- 
ciates, and he would regret his unwise choice 
even more bitterly than he remembered the 
glorious city wherein he had reigned in his 
magnificence. 

He made a great mistake. If he had gone 
with the ignorant to Heaven he would have 
seen them happy there, and partaken their 
happiness, though they might not have been 
able to derive any gratification from his 
wisdom ; — which said wisdom, peradventure, 
he himself when he was there might have 
discovered to be but foolishness. It is only 
in the company of the good that real enjoy- 
ment is to be found ; any other society is 
hollow and heartless. You may be excited 
by the play of wit, by the collision of ambi- 
tious spirits, and by the brilliant exhibition 
of self-confident power ; but the satisfaction 
ends with the scene. Far unlike this is the 
quiet confiding intercourse of sincere minds 
and friendly hearts, knowing, and loving, and 
esteeming each other ; and such intercourse 
our philosopher enjoyed in Doncaster. 

Edward Miller, the Organist, was a per- 
son very much after Daniel Dove's own 
heart. He was a warm-hearted, simple- 
hearted, right-hearted man : an enthusiast 
in his profession, yet not undervaluing, much 
less despising, other pursuits. The one Doc- 



142 



THE DOCTOR. 



tor knew as little of music as the other did 
of medicine ; but Dr. Dove listened to Mil- 
ler's performance with great pleasure, and 
Dr. Miller, when he was indisposed, took 
Dove's physic with perfect faith. 

This musician was brother to William 
Miller, the bookseller, well known in the 
early part of the present century as a pub- 
lisher of splendid works, to whose flourish- 
ing business in Albemarle Street the more 
flourishing John Murray succeeded. In the 
worldly sense of the word the musician was 
far less fortunate than the bibliopole, a doc- 
torate in his own science being the height 
of the honours to which he attained, and 
the place of organist at Doncaster the height 
of the preferment. A higher station was 
once presented to his hopes. The Marquis 
of Rockingham applied in his behalf for the 
place of Master of his Majesty's band of 
musicians, then vacated by the death of Dr. 
Boyce ; and the Duke of Manchester, who 
was at that time Lord Chamberlain, would 
have given it him if the King had not par- 
ticularly desired him to bestow it on Mr. 
Stanley, the celebrated blind performer on 
the organ. Dr. Miller was more gratified 
by this proof of the Marquis's good-will to- 
wards him than disappointed at its failure. 
Had the application succeeded, he would not 
have written the History of Doncaster ; nor 
would he have borne a part in a well-intended 
and judicious attempt at reforming our 
church psalmody, in which part of our church 
service reformation is greatly needed.* This 
meritorious attempt was made when George 
I lay Drummond, whose father had been 
Archbishop of York, was Vicar of Doncas- 
ter, having been presented to that vicarage 
in 1785, on the demise of Mr. Hatfield. 

At that time the Parish Clerk used there, 
as in all other parish churches, to choose what 
psalm should be sung " to the praise and 
glory of God," and what portions of it ; and 
considering himself as a much more impor- 
tant person in this department of his office 



* " It is sad to hear what whining, toting, yelling, or 
ICreeching there is in many country congregations, as if 
the people w<-re affrighted or distracted." — Thomas 
\huii '.i Monument, p. :$. 



than the organist, the only communication 
upon the subject which he held with Dr. 
Miller was to let him know what tune he 
must play, and how often he was to repeat 
it. " Strange absurdity ! " says Miller. 
" How could the organist, placed in this de- 
grading situation, properly perform his part 
of the church service ? Not knowing the 
words, it was impossible for him to accom- 
modate his music to the various sentiments 
contained in different stanzas, consequently 
his must be a mere random performance, 
and frequently producing improper effects." 
This, however, is what only a musician would 
feel; but it happened one Sunday that the 
clerk gave out some verses which were either 
ridiculously inapplicable to the day, or bore 
some accidental and ludicrous application, 
so that many of the congregation did not 
refrain from laughter. Mr. Drummond upon 
this, for he was zealously attentive to all 
the duties of his calling, said to Miller, 
" that in order to prevent any such occur- 
rence in future he would make a selection 
of the best verses in each psalm, from the 
authorised version of Tate and Brady, and 
arrange them for every Sunday and festival 
throughout the year, provided he, the organ- 
ist, who was perfectly qualified for such a 
task, would adapt them to proper music." 
To such a man as Miller this was the great- 
est gratification that could have been 
afforded ; and it proved also to be the great- 
est service that was ever rendered to him 
in the course of his life ; for, through Mr. 
Drummond's interest, the King and the 
Bishop patronised the work, and nearly five 
thousand copies were subscribed for, the list 
of subscribers being, it is believed, longer 
than had ever been obtained for any musical 
publication in this kingdom. 

Strange to say, nothing of this kind had 
been attempted before ; for the use of 
psalmody in our churches was originally no 
part of the service ; but having, as it were, 
crept in, and been at first rather suffered 
than encouraged, and afterwards allowed 
and permitted only, not enjoined, no provi- 
sion seems ever to have been made for its 
proper or even decent performance. And 



THE DOCTOE. 



143 



when an arrangement like this of Mr. Druin- 
mond's had been prepared, and Dr. Miller, 
with sound judgement, had adapted it, 
where that could be done, to the most popu- 
lar of the old and venerable melodies which 
had been so long in possession, it may seem 
more strange that it should not have been 
brought into general use. This I say might 
be thought strange, if any instance of that 
supine and sinful negligence which permits 
the continuance of old and acknowledged 
defects in the church establishment, and 
church service, could be thought so. 

Mr. Drummond had probably been led to 
think upon this subject by Mason's conver- 
sation, and by his Essays, historical and 
critical, on English Church Music. Mason 
who had a poet's ear and eye was ambitious 
of becoming both a musician and a painter. 
According to Miller he succeeded better in 
his musical than in his pictorial attempts, 
for he performed decently on the harp- 
sichord ; but in painting he never arrived 
even at a degree of mediocrity, and in music 
it was not possible to teach him the prin- 
ciples of composition, Miller and others 
having at his own desire attempted in vain 
to instruct him. Nevertheless, such a man, 
however superficial his knowledge of the 
art, could not but feel and reason justly 
upon its use and abuse in our Church 
Service ; and he was for restricting the 
organist much in the same way that Drum- 
mond and Miller were for restraining the 
clerk. For after observing that what is 
called the voluntary requires an innate in- 
ventive faculty, which is certainly not the 
lot of many ; and that the happy few who 
possess it will not at all times be able to 
restrain it within the bounds which reason 
and, in this case, religion would prescribe, 
he said, " it was to be wished therefore that 
in our established church extempore playing 
were as much discountenanced as extempore 
praying ; and that the organist were as 
closely obliged in this solo and separate part 
of his office to keep to set forms, as the 
officiating minister; or as he himself is when 
accompanying the choir in an anthem, or a 
parochial congregation in a psalm." He 



would have indulged him, however, with a 
considerable quantity of these set forms, and 
have allowed him, if he approached in some 
degree to Rousseau's high character of a 
Preluder, " to descant on certain single 
grave texts which Tartini, Geminiani, Co- 
relli or Handel would abundantly furnish, 
and which may be found at least of equal 
elegance and propriety in the Largo and 
Adagio movements of Haydn or Pleyel." 

"Whatever Miller may have thought of 
•this proposal, there was a passage in Mason's 
Essay in favour of voluntaries which was in 
perfect accord with Dr. Dove's notions. 
" Prompt and as it were casual strains," says 
the Poet, " which do not fix the attention of 
the hearer, provided they are the produce 
of an original fancy, which scorns to debase 
itself by imitating common and trivial melo- 
dies, are of all others the best adapted to 
induce mental serenity. We in some sort 
listen to such music as we do to the pleasing 
murmur of a neighbouring brook, the whisper 
of the passing breeze, or the distant war- 
bling s of the lark and nightingale ; and if 
agreeable natural voices have the power of 
soothing the contemplative mind, without 
interrupting its contemplations, simple 
musical effusions must assuredly have that 
power in a superior degree. All that is to 
be attended to by the organist is to preserve 
such pleasing simplicity; and this musical 
measures will ever have, if they are neither 
strongly accented, nor too regularly rhyth- 
mical. But when this is the case, they cease 
to soothe us, because they begin to affect us. 
Add to this that an air replete with short 
cadences and similar passages is apt to fix 
itself too strongly on the memory ; whereas 
a merely melodious or harmonical movement 
glides, as it were, through the ear, awakens 
a transient pleasing sensation, but leaves 
behind it no lasting impression. Its effect 
ceases, when its impulse on the auditory 
nerve ceases; — an impulse strong enough 
to dispel from the mind all eating care (to 
use our great Poet's own expression), but in 
no sort to rouse or ruffle any of its faculties, 
save those only which attend truly devotional 
duty." 



144 



THE DOCTOK. 



This passage agreed with some of the 
Doctor's peculiar notions. He felt the 
power of devotional music both in such 
preparatory strains as Mason has here de- 
scribed, and in the more exciting emotions 
of congregational psalmody. And being 
thus sensible of the religious uses which 
may be drawn from music, he was the more 
easily led to entertain certain speculations 
concerning its application in the treatment 
of diseases, as will be related hereafter. 



CHAPTER LXVIII. 

ECCENTRIC PERSONS, WHY APPARENTLY MORE 
COMMON IN ENGLAND THAN IN OTHER 
COUNTRIES. HARRY BINGLEY. 

Blest are those 
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled, 
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please. 

Hamlet. 

There is a reason why eccentricity of cha- 
racter seems to be much more frequent in 
England than in other countries. — 

Here some reflective reader, methinks, 
interrupts me with — " seems, good Author." 

"Ay, and it is !" 

Have patience, good reader, and hear me 
to the end ! There is a reason why it seems 
so ; and the reason is, because all such 
eccentricities are recorded here in news- 
papers and magazines, so that none of them 
are lost ; and the most remarkable are 
brought forward from time to time, in 
popular compilations. A collection of what 
is called Eccentric Biography is to form a 
portion of Mr. Murray's Family Library. 

But eccentric characters probably are 
more frequent among us than among most 
other nations ; and for this there are two 
causes. The first is to be found in that 
spirit of independence upon which the Eng- 
lish pride themselves, and which produces 
;i sort of Drawcansir-like bravery in men 
who are eccentrically inclined. It becomes 
a perverse sort of pleasure in them to act 
preposterously, for the sake of showing that 



they have a right to do as they please, and 
the courage to exercise that right, let the 
rest of the world think what it will of their 
conduct. 

The other reason is that mad-houses very 
insufficiently supply the place of convents, 
and very ill also. It might almost be ques- 
tioned whether convents do not well nigh 
make amends to humanity for their manifold 
mischiefs and abominations, by the relief 
which they afford $s asylums for insanity, 
in so many of its forms and gradations. They 
afford a cure also in many of its stages, and 
precisely upon the same principle on which 
the treatment in mad-houses is founded : 
but oh ! how differently is that principle 
applied ! That passive obedience to another's 
will which in the one case is exacted by 
authority acting through fear, and oftentimes 
enforced by no scrupulous or tender means, 
is in the other required as a religious duty, 
— an act of virtue, — a voluntary and ac- 
cepted sacrifice, — a good work which will 
be carried to the patient's account in the 
world to come. They who enter a convent 
are to have no will of their own there ; they 
renounce it solemnly upon their admission ; 
and when this abnegation is sincerely made, 
the chief mental cause of insanity is removed. 
For assuredly in most cases madness is more 
frequently a disease of the will than of the 
intellect. When Diabolus appeared before 
the town of Mansoul, and made his oration 
to the citizens at Ear- Gate, Lord Will-be- 
will was one of the first that was for con- 
senting to his words, and letting him into 
the town. 

We have no such asylums in which mad- 
ness and fatuity receive every possible 
alleviation, while they are at the same time 
subjected to the continual restraint which 
their condition requires. They are wanted 
also for repentant sinners, who when they 
are awakened to a sense of their folly, and 
their guilt, and their danger, would fain find 
a place of religious retirement, wherein they 
might pass the remainder of their days in 
preparing for death. Lord Goring, the most 
profligate man of his age, who by his pro- 
fligacy, as much as by his frequent miscon- I 



THE DOCTOR. 



145 



duct, rendered irreparable injury to the 
cause which he intended to serve, retired to 
Spain after the ruin of that cause, and there 
ended his days as a Dominican Friar. If 
there be any record of him in the Chro- 
nicles of the Order, the account ought to 
be curious at least, if not edifying. But it 
is rather (for his own sake) to be hoped 
than supposed that he did not hate and 
despise the follies and the frauds of the fra- 
ternity into which he had entered more 
heartily than the pomps and vanities of the 
world which he had left. 

On the other hand wherever convents are 
among the institutions of the land, not to 
speak of those poor creatures who are thrust 
into them against their will, or with only a 
mockery of freedom in the choice, — it must 
often happen that persons enter them in 
some fit of disappointment, or resentment, 
or grief, and find themselves, when the first 
bitterness of passion is past, imprisoned for 
life by their own rash, but irremediable act 
and deed. The woman, who, when untoward 
circumstances have prevented her from mar- 
rying the man she loves, marries one for 
whom she has no affection, is more likely 
(poor as her chance is) to find contentment 
and perhaps happiness, than if for the same 
cause she had thrown herself into a nunnery. 
Yet this latter is the course to which, if 
she were a Eoman Catholic, her thoughts 
would perhaps preferably at first have turned, 
and to which they would probably be di- 
rected by her confessor. 

Men who are weary of the ways of the 
world, or disgusted with them, have more 
licence, as well as more resources than 
women. If they do not enter upon some 
dangerous path of duty, or commence 
wanderers, they may choose for themselves 
an eccentric path, in which, if their habits 
are not such as expose them to insult, or if 
their means are sufficient to secure them 
against it, they are not likely to be molested, 
— provided they have- no relations whose 
interest it may be to apply for a statute of 
lunacy against them. 

A gentleman of this description well known 
in London towards the close of George the 



Second's reign by the name of Harry Bing- 
ley, came in the days of Dr. Dove to reside 
upon his estate in the parish of Bolton-upon- 
Derne near Doncaster. He had figured as 
an orator and politician in coffee-houses at 
the west end of the town, and enjoyed the 
sort of notoriety which it was then his am- 
bition to obtain ; but discovering with the 
Preacher that this was vanity and vexation 
of spirit, when it was either too late for him 
to enter upon domestic life, or his habits 
had unfitted him for it, he retired to his 
estate, which with the house upon it he had 
let to a farmer ; in that house he occupied 
two rooms, and there indulged his humour 
as he had done in London, though it had 
now taken a very different direction. 

" Cousin-german to Idleness," says Bur- 
ton, is " nimia solitudo, too much solitariness. 
Divers are cast upon this rock for want of 
means ; or out of a strong apprehension of 
some infirmity, disgrace, or through bash- 
fulness, rudeness, simplicity, they cannot 
apply themselves to others' company. Nul- 
lum solum infelici gratius solitudine, ubi nullus 
sit qui miseriam exprobret. This enforced 
solitariness takes place and produceth his 
effect soonest in such as have spent their 
time, jovially peradventure, in all honest 
recreations, in good company, in some great 
family, or populous city ; and are upon a 
sudden confined to a desert country cottage 
far off, restrained of their liberty and barred 
from their ordinary associates. Solitariness 
is very irksome to such, most tedious, and 
a sudden cause of great inconvenience." 

The change in Bingley's life was as great 
and sudden as that which the Anatomist of 
Melancholy has here described ; but it led 
to no bodily disease nor to any tangible 
malady. His property was worth about 
fourteen hundred a-year. He kept no ser- 
vant, and no company ; and he lived upon 
water-gruel and celery, except at harvest 
time, when he regaled himself with sparrow 
pies, made of the young birds just Hedged, 
for which he paid the poor inhabitants who 
caught them two pence a-head. Probably 
he supposed that it was rendering the neigh- 
bourhood a service thus to rid it of what he 



148 



THE DOCTOR. 



considered both a nuisance and a delicacy. 
This was his only luxury ; and his only 
business was to collect about a dozen boys 
and girls on Sundays, and hear them say 
their Catechism, and read a chapter in the 
New Testament, for which they received re- 
muneration in the intelligible form of two 
pence each, but at the feasts and statutes, 
" most sweet guerdon, better than remune- 
ration," in the shape of sixpence. He stood 
godfather for several poor people's children, 
they were baptized by his surname ; when 
they were of proper age he used to put 
them out as apprentices, and in his will he 
left each of them an hundred guineas to be 
paid when they reached the age of twenty- 
five if they were married, but not till they 
married ; and if they reached the age of fifty 
without marrying, the legacy was then for- 
feited. There were two children for whom 
he stood godfather, but whose parents did 
not choose that they should be named after 
him; he never took any notice of these chil- 
dren, nor did he bequeath them any thing ; 
but to one of the others he left the greater 
part of his property. 

This man used every week day to lock 
himself in the church and pace the aisles for 
two hours, from ten till twelve o'clock. An 
author, who, in his own peculiar and ad- 
mirable way, is one of the most affecting 
writers of any age or country, has described 
with characteristic feeling the different effects 
produced upon certain minds by entering 
an empty or a crowded church. " In the 
latter," he says, " it is chance but some pre- 
sent human frailty, — an act of inattention 
on the part of some of the auditory, — or 
a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on 
that of the preacher, — puts us by our best 
thoughts, disharmonising the place and the 
occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty 
of holiness ? — go alone on some week day, 
borrowing the keys of good master Sexton ; 
traverse the cool aisles of some country 
church ; think of the piety that has kneeled 
there, — the congregations old and young 
that have found consolation there, — the 
meek pastor, — the docile parishioners, — 
'.villi do disturbing emotions, no cross con- 



flicting comparisons, drink in the tranquil- 
lity of the place, till thou thyself become as 
fixed and motionless as the marble effigies 
that kneel and weep around thee ! " * 

Harry Bingley died in lodgings at Rother- 
ham, whither he had removed when he felt 
himself ill, that he might save expense by 
being nearer a physician. According to his 
own direction his body was brought back 
from thence to the village, and interred in 
the churchyard ; and he strictly enjoined 
that no breast-plate, handles, or any orna- 
ments whatever should be affixed to his 
coffin, nor any gravestone placed to mark 
the spot where his remains were deposited. 

Would or would not this godfather general 
have been happier in a convent or a her- 
mitage, than he was in thus following his own 
humour ? It was Dr. Dove's opinion that 
upon the whole he would; not that a con- 
ventual, and still less an eremital way of life 
would have been more rational, but because 
there would have been a worthier motive for 
choosing it ; and if not a more reasonable 
hope, at least a firmer persuasion that it was 
the sure way to salvation. 

That Harry Bingley's mind had taken a 
religious turn appeared by his choosing the 
church for his daily place of promenade. 
Meditation must have been as much his 
object as exercise, and of a kind which the 
place invited. It appeared also by the sort 
of Sunday-schooling which he gave the chil- 
dren, long before Sunday Schools, — whether 
for good or evil, — were instituted, or as the 
phrase is, invented by Robert Raikes of 
eccentric memory. (Patrons and Patronesses 
of Sunday Schools, be not offended if a doubt 
concerning their utility be here implied! 
The Doctor entertained such a doubt ; and 
the why and the wherefore shall in due time 
be fairly stated.) But Bingley certainly 
came under the description of a humourist, 
rather than of a devotee or religious enthu- 
siast ; in fact, he bore that character. And 
the Doctor's knowledge of human nature 
led him to conclude that solitary humourists 
are far from being happy. You see them, 



* The Last Essays of Elia. 



THE DOCTOR. 



147 



as you see the blind, at their happiest times, 
when they have something to divert their 
thoughts. But in the humourist's course of 
life, there is a sort of defiance of the world 
and the world's law ; indeed, any man who 
departs widely from its usages avows this ; 
and it is, as it ought to be, an uneasy and 
uncomfortable feeling, wherever it is not 
sustained by a high state of excitement ; and 
that state, if it be lasting, becomes madness. 
Such persons when left to themselves and 
to their own reflections, as they necessarily 
are for the greater part of their time, must 
often stand not only self- arraigned for folly, 
but self- condemned for it. 



CHAPTER LXIX. 

A MUSICAL RECEUSE AND HIS SISTER. 

" Some proverb maker, I forget who, says, God hath 
given to some men wisdom and understanding, and to 
others the art of playing on the fiddle." 

Professor Park's Dogmas of the Constitution. 

The Doctor always spoke of Bingley as a 
melancholy example of strength of charac- 
ter misapplied. But he used to say that 
strength of character was far from implying 
strength of mind ; and that strength of mind 
itself was no more a proof of sanity of mind, 
than strength of body was of bodily health. 
Both may coexist with mortal maladies, and 
both, when existing in any remarkable de- 
gree, may oftentimes be the cause of them. 

Alas for man ! 
Exuberant health diseases him, frail worm ! 
And the slight bias of untoward chance 
Makes his best virtues from the even line, 
With fatal declination, swerve aside. * 

There was another person within his cir- 
cuit who had taken umbrage at the world, 
and withdrawn from it to enjoy, or rather 
solace himself according to his own humour 
in retirement ; not in solitude, for he had a 
sister, who with true sisterly affection ac- 
commodated herself to his inclinations, and 
partook of his taste. This gentleman, whose 
name was Jonathan Staniforth, had taken 



* Roderick. 



out a patent for a ploughing machine, and 
had been deprived, unjustly as he deemed, 
of the profits which he had expected from it, 
by a lawsuit. Upon this real disappoint- 
ment, aggravated by the sense, whether 
well or ill founded of injustice, he retired to 
his mansion in the village of Firbeck, about 
ten miles south of Doncaster, and there dis- 
carding all thoughts of mechanics, which 
had been his favourite pursuit, he devoted 
himself to the practice of music ; — devoted 
is not too strong an expression. He had 
passed the middle of his life before the 
Doctor knew him ; and it was not till some 
twenty years later that Miller became ac- 
quainted with them. 

" I was introduced," says the Organist, 
" into a room where was sitting a thin old 
Gentleman, upwards of seventy years of age, 
playing on the violin. He had a long time 
lived sequestered from the world, and dedi- 
cated not less than eight hours a-day to the 
practice of music. His shrunk shanks were 
twisted in a peculiar form, by the constant 
posture in which he sate ; and so indifferent 
was he about the goodness of his instrument, 
that, to my astonishment, he always played 
on a common Dutch fiddle, the original price 
of which could not be more than half a 
guinea ; the strings were bad, and the whole 
instrument dirty and covered with resin. 
With this humble companion he used to 
work hard every morning on the old solos of 
Vivaldi, Tessarini, Corelli, and other ancient 
composers. The evening was reserved for 
mere amusement, in accompanying an an- 
cient sister, who sung most of the favourite 
songs from Handel's old Italian Operas, 
which he composed soon after his arrival in 
England. These Operas she had heard on 
their first representation in London; con- 
sequently her performance was to me an 
uncommon treat. I had an opportunity of 
comparing the different manner of singing 
in the beginning of the century, to that 
which I had been accustomed to hear. And 
indeed the style was so different, that, 
musically considered, it might truly be 
called a different language. None of the 
present embellishments or graces in music 



148 



THE DOCTOR. 



were used, — no appoggiatwa, — no un- 
adorned sustaining, or swelling long notes ; 
they were warbled by a continual tremulous 
accent from beginning to end ; and when she 
arrived at the period of an air, the brother's 
violin became mute, and she, raising her 
eyes to the top of the room, and stretching 
out her throat, executed her extempore 
cadence in a succession of notes perfectly 
original, and concluded with a long shake 
something like the bleating of a lamb." 

Miller's feelings during this visit were so 
wholly professional, that in describing this 
brother and sister forty years afterwards, he 
appears not to have been sensible in how 
affecting a situation they were placed. 
Crabbe would have treated these characters 
finely had they fallen in his way. And so 
Chancey Hare Townsend could treat them, 
who has imitated Crabbe with such singular 
skill, and who has moreover music in his 
soul and could give the picture the soft 
touches which it requires. 

I must not omit to say that Mr. Stani- 
forth and his sister were benevolent, hos- 
pitable, sensible, worthy persons. Thinkest 
thou, reader, that they gave no proof of 
good sense in thus passing their lives ? 
Look round the circle of thine acquaintance, 
and ask thyself how many of those whose 
time is at their own disposal, dispose of it 
more wisely, — that is to say, more benefi- 
cially to others, or more satisfactorily to 
themselves ? The sister fulfilled her proper 
duties in her proper place, and the brother 
in contributing to her comfort performed 
his; to each other they were, as their cir- 
cumstances required them to be, all in all ; 
they were kind to their poor neighbours, and 
they were perfectly inoffensive towards the 
rest of the world. — They who are wise unto 
salvation, know feelingly, when they have 
done best, that their best works are worth 
nothing; but they who are conscious that 
they have lived inoffensively may have in 
that consciousness a reasonable ground of 
comfort. 

The Apostle enjoins us to " eschew evil 
and do good." To do good is not in every 
one's power; and many who think they are 



doing it, may be grievously deceived for 
lack of judgment, and be doing evil the 
while instead, with the best intentions, but 
with sad consequences to others, and even- 
tual sorrow for themselves. But it is in 
every one's power to eschew evil, so far as 
never to do wilful harm ; and if we were all 
careful never unnecessarily to distress or 
disquiet those who are committed to our 
charge, or who must be affected by our con- 
duct, — if we made it a point of conscience 
never to disturb the peace, or diminish the 
happiness of others, — the mass of moral evil 
by which we are surrounded would speedily 
be diminished, and with it no inconsiderable 
portion of those physical ones would be 
removed, which are the natural consequence 
and righteous punishment of our misdeeds. 



CHAPTEK LXX. 

SHOWING THAT ANY HONEST OCCUPATION IS 
BETTER THAN NONE, BUT THAT OCCUPA- 
TIONS WHICH ARE DEEMED HONOURABLE 
ARE NOT ALWAYS HONEST. 

J'ai peine d concevoir pourquoi le plupari des hommes 
ont une si forte envt'e d'etre hcureux, et une si grande 
incapacity pour le devenir. 

Voyages de Milord Ceton. 

" Happy," said Dr. Dove, " is the man who, 
having his whole time thrown upon his hands, 
makes no worse use of it than to practise 
eight hours a-day upon a bad fiddle." It 
was a sure evidence, he insisted, that Mr. 
Staniforth's frame of mind was harmonious ; 
the mental organ was in perfect repair, 
though the strings of the material instru- 
ment jarred ; and he enjoyed the scientific 
delight which Handel's composition gave 
him abstractedly, in its purity and essence. 

" There can now," says an American 
preacher *, " be no doubt of this truth be- 
cause there have been so many proofs of it ; 
that the man who retires completely from 
business, who is resolved to do nothing but 
enjoy himself, never attains the end at which 

* Freeman's Eighteen Sermons. 



THE DOCTOR. 



149 



he aims. If it is not mixed with other in- 
gredients, no cup is so insipid, and at the 
same time so unheal thful, as the cup of plea- 
sure. When the whole enjoyment of the 
day is to eat, and drink, and sleep, and talk, 
and visit, life becomes a burden too heavy 
to be supported by a feeble old man, and he 
soon sinks into the arms of spleen, or falls 
into the jaws of death." 

Alas ! it is neither so easy a thing, nor so 
agreeable a one as men commonly expect, to 
dispose of leisure when they retire from the 
business of the world. Their old occupations 
cling to them, even when they hope that 
they have emancipated themselves. 

Go to any sea-port town and you will see 
that the Sea-captain who has retired upon 
his well-earned savings, sets up a weather- 
cock in full view from his windows, and 
watches the variations of the wind as duly 
as when he was at sea, though no longer 
with the same anxiety. 

Every one knows the story of the Tallow 
Chandler, who, having amassed a fortune, 
disposed of his business, and taken a house 
in the country, not far from London, that 
he might enjoy himself, after a few months 
trial of a holiday life, requested permission 
of his successor to come into town, and 
assist him on melting days. I have heard 
of one who kept a retail spirit-shop, and 
having in like manner retired from trade, 
used to employ himself by having one pun- 
cheon filled with water, and measuring it off 
by pints into another. I have heard also of a 
butcher in a small country town, who some 
little time after he had left off business, in- 
formed his old customers that he meant to kill 
a lamb once a week, just for his amusement. 

There is no way of life to which the gene- 
rality of men cannot conform themselves ; 
and it seems as if the more repugnance they 
may at first have had to overcome, the better 
at last they like the occupation. They grow 
insensible to the loudest and most discordant 
sounds, or remain only so far sensible of 
them, that the cessation will awaken them 
from sleep. The most offensive smells be- 
come pleasurable to them in time, even those 
which are produced by the most offensive 



substances. The temperature of a glass- 
house is not only tolerable but agreeable to 
those who have their fiery occupation there. 
Wisely and mercifully was this power of 
adaptation implanted in us for our good; 
but in our imperfect and diseased society 
it is grievously perverted. We make the 
greater part of the evil circumstances in 
which we are placed ; and then we fit our- 
selves for those circumstances by a process 
of systematic degradation, the effect of 
which most people see in the classes below 
them, though they may not be conscious 
that it is operating in a different manner, 
but with equal force, upon themselves. 

For there is but too much cause to con- 
clude that our moral sense is more easily 
blunted than our physical sensations. Roman 
Ladies delighted in seeing the gladiators 
bleed and die in the public theatre. Spanish 
Ladies at this day clap their hands in ex- 
ultation at spectacles which make English 
Soldiers sicken and turn away. The most 
upright Lawyer acquires a sort of Swiss 
conscience for professional use ; he is soon 
taught that considerations of right and wrong 
have nothing to do with his brief, and that 
his business is to do the best he can for his 
client, however bad the case. If this went 
no farther than to save a criminal from 
punishment, it might be defensible on the 
ground of humanity and of charitable hope. 
But to plead with the whole force of an 
artful mind in furtherance of a vexatious 
and malicious suit, — and to resist a rightful 
claim with all the devices of legal subtlety, 
and all the technicalities of legal craft, — I 
know not how he who considers this to be 
his duty towards his client, can reconcile it 
with his duty towards his neighbour; or how 
he thinks it will appear in the account he 
must one day render to the Lord for the 
talents which have been committed to his 
charge. 

There are persons indeed who have so far 
outgrown their catechism as to believe that 
their only duty is to themselves : and who 
in the march of intellect have arrived at the 
convenient conclusion that there is no ac- 
count to be rendered after death. But they 



150 



THE DOCTOR. 



would resent any imputation upon their 
honour or their courage as an offence not to 
be forgiven ; and it is difficult therefore to 
understand how even such persons can un- 
dertake to plead the cause of a scoundrel in 
cases of seduction, — how they can think 
that the acceptance of a dirty fee is to justify 
thein for cross-examining an injured and 
unhappy woman with the cruel wantonness 
of unmanly insult, bruising the broken reed, 
and treating her as if she were as totally 
devoid of shame, as they themselves of 
decency and of humanity. That men should 
act thus and be perfectly unconscious the 
while that they are acting a cowardly and 
rascally part, — and that society should not 
punish them for it by looking upon them as 
men who have lost their caste, would be 
surprising if we did not too plainly see to 
what a degree the moral sense, not only of 
individuals, but of a whole community, may 
be corrupted. 

Physiologists have observed that men and 
dogs are the only creatures whose nature 
can accommodate itself to every climate, 
from the burning sands of the desert to the 
shores and islands of the frozen ocean. And 
it is not in their physical nature alone that 
this power of accommodation is found. Dogs 
who beyond all reasonable question have a 
sense of duty, and fidelity, and affection, 
towards their human associates, — a sense 
altogether distinct from fear and selfishness, 
— who will rush upon any danger at their 
master's bidding, and die broken-hearted 
beside his body, or upon his grave, — dogs, 
I say, who have this capacity of virtue, have 
nevertheless been trained to act with rob- 
bers against the traveller, and to hunt down 
human beings and devour them. But de- 
pravity sinks deeper than this in man ; for 
the dog when thus deteriorated acts against 
no law, natural or revealed, no moral sense ; 
he has no power of comparing good and evil 
and choosing between them, but may be 
trained to either, and in either is performing 
his intelligible duty of obedience. 



CHAPTER LXXI. 

TRANSITION IN OUR NARRATIVE PREPARA- 
TORY TO A CHANGE IN THE DOCTOR'S 
LIFE. A SAD STORT SUPPRESSED. THE 
AUTHOR PROTESTS AGAINST PLAYING WITH 
THE FEELINGS OF HIS READERS. ALL ARE 
NOT MERRY THAT SEEM MIRTHFUL. THE 
SCAFFOLD A STAGE. DON RODRIGO CAL- 
DERON. THISTLEWOOD. THE WORLD A 
MASQUERADE, BUT THE DOCTOR ALWAYS 
IN HIS OWN CHARACTER. 

This breaks no rule of order. 

If order were infringed then should I flee 

From my chief purpose and my mark should miss. 

Order is Nature's beauty, and the way 

To Order is by rules that Art hath found. 

Gwillim. 

The question " Who was the Doctor ? " has 
now, methinks, been answered, though not 
fully, yet sufficiently for the present stage 
of our memorials, while he is still a bachelor, 
a single man, an imperfect individual, half 
only of the whole being which by the laws 
of nature, and of Christian polity, it was 
designed that man should become. 

The next question therefore that presents 
itself for consideration relates to that other, 
and as he sometimes called it better half, 
which upon the union of the two moieties 
made him a whole man. — Who was Mrs. 
Dove? 

The reader has been informed how my 
friend in his early manhood, when about-to- 
be-a-Doctor, fell in love. Upon that part 
of his history I have related all that he com- 
municated, which was all that could by me 
be known, and probably all there was to 
know. From that time he never fell in love 
again ; nor did he ever run into it ; but as 
was formerly intimated, he once caught the 
affection. The history of this attachment I 
heard from others ; he had suffered too 
deeply ever to speak of it himself; and 
having maturely considered the matter I 
have determined not to relate the circum- 
stances. Suffice it to say that he might at 
the same time have caught from the same 
person an insidious and mortal disease, if his 



THE DOCTOB. 



151 



constitution had been as susceptible of the 
one contagion, as his heart was of the other. 
The tale is too painful to be told. There 
are authors enough in the world who delight 
in drawing tears ; there will always be young 
readers enough who are not unwilling to 
shed them ; and perhaps it may be whole- 
some for the young and happy upon whose 
tears there is no other call. 

Not that the author is to be admired, or 
even excused, who draws too largely upon 
our lachrymal glands. The pathetic is a 
string which may be touched by an unskilful 
hand, and which has often been played upon 
by an unfeeling one. 

For my own part, I wish neither to make 
my readers laugh nor weep. It is enough for 
me, if I may sometimes bring a gleam of 
sunshine upon thy brow, Pensoso; and a 
watery one over thy sight, Buonallegro ; a 
smile upon Penserosa's lips, a dimple in 
Amanda's cheek, and some quiet tears, 
Sophronia, into those mild eyes, which have 
shed so many scalding ones ! When my 
subject leads me to distressful scenes, it will, 
as Southey says, not be 

— ray purpose e'er to entertain 
The heart with useless grief ; but, as I may, 
Blend in my calm and meditative strain 
Consolatory thoughts, the balm for real pain.* 

The maxim that an author who desires to 
make us weep must be affected himself by 
what he writes, is too trite to be repeated in 
its original language. Both authors and 
actors, however, can produce this effect 
without eliciting a spark of feeling from their 
own hearts ; and what perhaps may be 
deemed more remarkable, they can with the 
same success excite merriment in others, 
without partaking of it in the slightest 
degree themselves. IsTo man ever made his 
contemporaries laugh more heartily than 
Scarron, whose bodily sufferings were such 
that he wished for himself 

— a toute heure 
Ou la mort, ou sante meilleure: 

And who describes himself in his epistle to 
Sarazin, as 



* Tale of Paraguay. 



Un Pauvret 
Tres-maigret ; 
Au col tors. 
Dont le corps 
Tout tortu, 
Tout bossu, 
Suranni, 
Dtcharne, 
Est reduit 
Jour et nuit 
A souffrir 
Sans guerir 
Des tourmens 
Vehimens. 

It may be said perhaps that Scarron's 
disposition was eminently cheerful, and that 
by indulging in buffoonery he produced in 
himself a pleasurable excitement, not unlike 
that which others seek from strong liquors, 
or from opium ; and therefore that his ex- 
ample tends to invalidate the assertion in 
support of which it was adduced. This is a 
plausible objection ; and I am far from un- 
dervaluing the philosophy of Pantagruelism, 
and from denying that its effects may, and 
are likely to be as salutary as any that were 
ever produced by the proud doctrines of the 
Porch. But I question Scarron's right to 
the appellation of a Pantagruelist ; his 
humour had neither the height nor the 
depth of that philosophy. 

There is a well-known anecdote of a phy- 
sician, who being called in to an unknown 
patient, found him suffering under the 
deepest depression of mind, without any 
discoverable disease, or other assignable 
cause. The physician advised him to seek 
for cheerful objects, and recommended him 
especially to go to the theatre and see a 
famous actor then in the meridian of his 
powers, whose comic talents were unrivalled. 
Alas ! the comedian who kept crowded 
theatres in a roar was this poor hypochon- 
driac himself! 

The state of mind in which such men play 
their part, whether as authors or actors, was 
confessed in a letter written from Yarmouth 
Gaol to the Doctor's friend Miller, by a 
then well-known performer in this line, 
George Alexander Stevens. He wrote to 
describe his distress in prison, and to request 
that Miller would endeavour to make a 
small collection for him, some ni^ht at a 



152 



THE DOCTOR. 



concert ; and he told his sad tale sportively. 
But breaking off that strain he said ; " You 
may think I can have no sense, that while I 
am thus wretched I should offer at ridicule ! 
But, Sir, people constituted like me, with a 
disproportionate levity of spirits, are always 
most merry when they are most miserable ; 
and quicken like the eyes of the consump- 
tive, which are always brightest the nearer 
a patient approaches to dissolution." 

It is one thing to jest, it is another to be 
mirthful. Sir Thomas More jested as he 
ascended the scaffold. In cases of violent 
death, and especially upon an unjust sen- 
tence, this is not surprising; because the 
sufferer has not been weakened by a wasting 
malady, and is in a state of high mental 
excitement and exertion. But even when 
dissolution comes in the course of nature, 
there are instances of men who have died 
with a jest upon their lips. Garci Sanchez 
de Badajoz when he was at the point of 
death desired that he might be dressed in 
the habit of St. Francis ; this was accordingly 
done, and over the Franciscan frock they 
put on his habit of Santiago, for he was a 
knight of that order. It was a point of 
devotion with him to wear the one dress, a 
point of honour to wear the other; but 
looking at himself in this double attire, he 
said to those who surrounded his death -bed, 
" The Lord will say to me presently, my 
friend Garci Sanchez, you come very well 
wrapt up! (muy arropado) and I shall 
reply, Lord, it is no wonder, for it was 
winter when I set off." 

The author who relates this anecdote 
remarks that o morrer com graga he muy to 
bom, e com gracas he muyto mao : the obser- 
vation is good but untranslateable, because 
it plays upon the word which means grace 
as well as wit. The anecdote itself is an 
example of the ruling humour " strong in 
death;" perhaps also of that pride or vanity, 
call it which we will, which so often, when 
mind and body have not yielded to natural 
decay, or been broken down by suffering, 
clings to the last in those whom it has 
strongly possessed. Don Rodrigo Calderon, 
whose fall and exemplary contrition served 



as a favourite topic for the poets of his day, 
wore a Franciscan habit at his execution, as 
an outward and visible sign of penitence 
and humiliation ; as he ascended the scaffold, 
he lifted the skirts of the habit with such an 
air that his attendant confessor thought it 
necessary to reprove him for such an instance 
of ill-timed regard to his appearance. Don 
Rodrigo excused himself by saying that he 
had all his life carried himself gracefully ! 

The author by whom this is related calls 
it an instance of illustrious hypocrisy. In 
my judgment the Father Confessor who 
gave occasion for it deserves a censure far 
more than the penitent sufferer. The move- 
ment beyond all doubt was purely habitual, 
as much so as the act of lifting his feet to 
ascend the steps of the scaffold ; but the 
undeserved reproof made him feel how 
curiously whatever he did was remarked; 
and that consciousness reminded him that 
he had a part to support, when his whole 
thoughts would otherwise have been far 
differently directed. 

A personage in one of Webster's Plays 
says, 

I knew a man that was to lose his head 

Feed with an excellent good appetite 

To strengthen his heart scarce half an hour before, 

And if he did, it only was to speak. 

Probably the dramatist alluded to some well 
known fact which was at that time of recent 
occurrence. When the desperate and atro- 
cious traitor Thistlewood was on the scaffold, 
his demeanour was that of a man who was 
resolved boldly to meet the fate he had de- 
served ; in the few words which were ex- 
changed between him and his fellow criminals 
he observed, that the grand question whether 
or not the soul was immortal would soon be 
solved for them. No expression of hope 
escaped him, no breathing of repentance ; 
no spark of grace appeared. Yet (it is a 
fact, which whether it be more consolatory 
or awful, ought to be known,) on the night 
after the sentence, and preceding his execu- 
tion, while he supposed that the person who 
was appointed to watch him in his cell, was 
asleep, this miserable man was seen by that 
person repeatedly to rise upon his knees, and 
heard repeatedly calling upon Christ his 



THE DOCTOR. 



153 



Saviour to have mercy upon him, and to 
forgive him his sins ! 

All men and women are verily, as Shaks- 
peare has said of them, merely players, — 
when we see them upon the stage of the 
world ; that is, when they are seen any 
where except in the freedom and undressed 
intimacy of private life. There is a wide 
difference indeed in the performers, as there 
is at a masquerade between those who 
assume a character, and those who wear 
dominoes ; some play off the agreeable, or 
the disagreeable for the sake of attracting 
notice ; others retire as it were into them- 
selves ; but you can judge as little of the one 
as of the other. It is even possible to be 
acquainted with a man long and familiarly, 
and as we may suppose intimately, and yet 
not to know him thoroughly or well. There 
may be parts of his character with which we 
have never come in contact, — recesses 
which have never been opened to us, — 
springs upon which we have never touched. 
Many there are who can keep their vices 
secret ; would that all bad men had sense 
and shame enough to do so, or were com- 
pelled to it by the fear of public opinion ! 
Shame of a very different nature, — a moral 
shamefacedness, — which, if not itself an 
instinctive virtue, is near akin to one, makes 
those who are endowed with the best and 
highest feelings, conceal them from all com- 
mon eyes ; and for our performance of 
religious duties, — our manifestations of 
piety, — we have been warned that what of 
this kind is done to be seen of men, will not 
be rewarded openly before men and angels 
at the last. 

If I knew my venerable friend better than 
I ever knew any other man, it was because 
he was in many respects unlike other men, 
and in few points more unlike them than in 
this, that he always appeared what he was, 
— neither better nor worse. With a dis- 
cursive intellect and a fantastic imagination, 
he retained his simplicity of heart. He had 
kept that heart unspotted from the world ; 
his father's blessing was upon him, and he 
prized it beyond all that the world could 
have bestowed. Crowe says of us, 



Our better mind 
Is as a Sunday's garment, then put on 
When we have nought to do ; but at our work 
We wear a worse for thrift ! 

It was not so with him ; his better mind was 
not as a garment to be put on and off at 
pleasure ; it was like its plumage to a bird, 
its beauty and its fragrance to a flower, 
except that it was not liable to be ruffled, 
nor to fade, nor to exhale and pass away. 
His mind was like a peacock always in full 
attire ; it was only at times indeed, (to pur- 
sue the similitude,) that he expanded and 
displayed it ; but its richness and variety 
never could be concealed from those who 
had eyes to see them. 

— His sweetest mind 
'Twvxt mildness tempered and low courtesy, 

Could leave as soon to be, as not be kind. 
Churlish despite ne'er looked from his calm eye, 

Much less commanded in his gentle heart ; 
To baser men fair looks he would impart ; 

Nor could he cloak ill thoughts in complimental art.* 

What he was in boyhood has been seen, and 
something also of his manlier years ; but as 
yet little of the ripe fruits of his intellectual 
autumn have been set before the readers. 
N"o such banquet was promised them as that 
with which they are to be regaled. "The 
booksellers," says Somner the antiquary, in 
an unpublished letter to Dugdale, " affect a 
great deal of title as advantageous for the 
sale; but judicious men dislike it, as savour- 
ing of too much ostentation, and suspecting 
the wine is not good where so much bush is 
hung out." Somebody, I forget who, wrote 
a book upon the titles of books, regarding 
the title as a most important part of the com- 
position. The bookseller's fashion of which 
Somner speaks has long been obsolete ; mine 
is a brief title promising little, but intending 
much. It specifies only the Doctor ; but 
his gravities and his levities, his opinions of 
men and things, his speculations moral and 
political, physical and spiritual, his phi- 
losophy and his religion, each blending with 
each, and all with all, these are comprised in 
the &c. of my title-page, — these and his 
Pantagruelism to boot. When I meditate 
upon these I may exclaim with the poet: — 

* Phineas Fletcher. 



154 



THE DOCTOR. 



Mnemosyne hath kiss'd the kingly Jove, 
And entertained a feast within my brain.* 

These I shall produce for the entertainment 
of the idle reader, and for the recreation 
of the busy one ; for the amusement of the 
young, and the contentment of the old ; for 
the pleasure of the wise, and the approba- 
tion of the good ; and these when produced 
will be the monument of Daniel Dove. 
Of such a man it may indeed be said that 
he 

Is his own marble ; and his merit can 
Cut him to any figure, and express 
More art than Death's Cathedral palaces, 
Where royal ashes keep their court ! t 

Some of my contemporaries may remember 
a story once current at Cambridge, of a 
luckless undergraduate, who being examined 
for his degree, and failing in every subject 
upon which he was tried, complained that 
he had not been questioned upon the things 
which he knew. Upon which the examining 
master, moved less to compassion by the 
impenetrable dulness of the man than to 
anger by his unreasonable complaint, tore 
off about an inch of paper, and pushing it 
towards him, desired him to write upon that 
all he knew ! 

And yet bulky books are composed, or 
compiled by men who know as little as this 
poor empty individual. Tracts, and treatises, 
and tomes, may be, and are written by 
persons, to whom the smallest square sheet 
of delicate note paper, rose-coloured, or 
green, or blue, with its embossed border, 
manufactured expressly for ladies' fingers 
and crow-quills, would afford ample room, 
and verge enough, for expounding the sum 
total of their knowledge upon the subject 
whereon they undertake to enlighten the 
public. 

Were it possible for me to pour out all 
that I have taken in from him, of whose 
accumulated stores I, alas ! am now the sole 
living depository, I know not to what extent 
the precious reminiscences might run. 



Rohkiit Green. 



t MlDDLKTON. 



Per sua gratia singulare 
Par ch' io habbi net capo una seguenza, 
Unafontana, unfiume, un lago, un mare, 

Id est un pantanaccio cTeloquenza.% 

Sidronius Hosschius has supplied me with 
a simile for this stream of recollections. 

JEstuat et cursu nunquam cessante laborat 

Eridanus,fessis irrequietus aquis; 
Spumeus it,fervensque, undamque supervenit unda; 

Hcec Mam, sed et hanc non minus ista premit. 
Volvitur, et volvit par iter, motuque perennz 

Truditur a fluctu posteriore prior. 

As I shall proceed 

Excipiet curam nova cura, laborque laborem, 
Nee minus exhausto quod superabit erit. 

But for stores which in this way have been 
received, the best compacted memory is like 
a sieve ; more of necessity slips through 
than stops upon the way ; and well is it, if 
that which is of most value be what remains 
behind. I have pledged myself, therefore, 
to no more than I can perform ; and this the 
reader shall have within reasonable limits, 
and in due time, provided the performance 
be not prevented by any of the evils in- 
cident to human life. 

At present, my business is to answer the 
question "Who was Mrs. Dove ?•" 



CHAPTER LXXIL 

IN WHICH THE FOURTH OF THE QUESTIONS 
PROPOSED IN CHAPTER II. P. I. IS BEGUN 
TO BE ANSWERED ; SOME OBSERVATIONS 
UPON ANCESTRY ARE INTRODUCED, AND 
THE READER IS INFORMED WHY THE AU- 
THOR DOES NOT WEAR A CAP AND BELLS. 

Boast not the titles of your ancestors, 

Brave youths ! they're their possessions, none of yours. 

When your own virtues equall'd have their names, 

'Twill be but fair to lean upon their fames, 

For they are strong supporters ; but till then 

The greatest are but growing gentlemen. 

Ben Jonson. 

Who was Mrs. Dove ? 

A woman of the oldest family in this or 
any other kingdom, for she was beyond all 
doubt a legitimate descendant of Adam. 



% Matteo Franzesi, 



THE DOCTOR. 



155 



Her husband perhaps might have rather 
said that she was a daughter of Eve. But 
he would have said it with a smile of play- 
fulness, not of scorn. 

To trace her descent somewhat lower, 
and bring it nearer to the stock of the 
Courtenays, the Howards, the Manriques, 
the Bourbons and Thundertentronks, she 
was a descendant of Noah, and of his eldest 
son Japhet. She was allied to Ham, how- 
ever, in another way, besides this remote 
niece-ship. 

As how I pray you, Sir ? 

Her maiden name was Bacon. 

Grave Sir, be not disconcerted. I hope 
you have no antipathy to such things : or at 
least that they do not act upon you, as the 
notes of a bagpipe are said to act upon cer- 
tain persons whose unfortunate idiosyncrasy 
exposes them to very unpleasant effects from 
the sound. 

Mr. Critickin, — for as there is a diminu- 
tive for cat, so should there be for critic, — 
I defy you ! Before I can be afraid of your 
claws, you must leave off biting your nails. 

I have something better to say to the 
Reader, who follows wherever I lead up 
and down, high and low, to the hill and to 
the valley, contented with his guide, and 
enjoying the prospect which I show him in 
all its parts, in the detail and in the whole, 
in the foreground and home scene, as well as 
in the Pisgah view. I will tell him before 
the chapter is finished, why I do not wear a 
cap and bells. 

To you, my Lady, who may imagine that 
Miss Bacon was not of a good family, (Lord 
Verulam's line, as you very properly remark, 
being extinct,) I beg leave to observe that 
she was certainly a cousin of your own ; 
somewhere within the tenth and twentieth 
degrees, if not nearer. And this I proceed 
to prove. 

Every person has two immediate parents, 
four ancestors in the second degree, eight in 
the third, and so the pedigree ascends, 
doubling at every step, till in the twentieth 
generation, he has no fewer than one mil- 
lion, thirty thousand, eight hundred and 
ninety-six 



Great, great, great, 
great, great, great, 
great, great, great, 
great, great, great, 
great, great, great, 
great, great, great, 
grandfathers and grandmothers. Therefore, 
my Lady, I conceive it to be absolutely cer- 
tain, that under the Plantagenets, if not in 
the time of the Tudors, some of your 
ancestors must have been equally ancestors 
of Miss Deborah Bacon. 

"At the conquest," says Sir Richard 
Phillips, " the ancestry of every one of the 
English people was the whole population of 
England; while on the other hand, every 
one having children at that time, was the 
direct progenitor of the whole of the living 
race." 

The reflecting reader sees at once that it 
must be so. Plato ait, Neminem regem non 
ex servis esse oriendum, neminem non servum 
ex regions. Omnia ista longa varietas mis- 
cuit, et sursum deorsum fortuna versavit 
Quis ergo generosus ? ad virtutem bene a 
natura compositus. Hoc unum est intuendum : 
alioqui, si ad Vetera revocas, nemo non inde 
est, ante quod nihil est* And the erudite 
Ihre in the Proemium to his invaluable 
Glossary, says, ut aliquoto cognationis gradu, 
sed per monumentorum defectum hodie in- 
explicable, omnes homines inter se connexi 
sunt. 

Now then to the gentle reader. The 
reason why I do not wear a cap and bells is 
this. 

There are male caps of five kinds which 
are worn at present in this kingdom ; to wit, 
the military cap, the collegiate cap, the 
jockey cap, the travelling cap, and the night 
cap. Observe, reader, I said kinds, that is 
to say in scientific language genera, — for 
the species and varieties are numerous, 
especially in the former genus. 

I am not a soldier ; and having long been 
weaned from Alma Mater, of course have 
left off my college cap. The gentlemen of 
the hunt would object to my going 



Seneca. 



156 



THE DOCTOR. 



out with the bells on : it would be likely to 
frighten their horses ; and were I to attempt 
it, it might involve me in unpleasant dis- 
putes, which might possibly lead to more 
unpleasant consequences. To my travelling 
cap the bells would be an inconvenient 
appendage ; nor would they be a whit more 
comfortable upon my night-cap. Besides, 
my wife might object to them. 

It follows that if I would wear a cap and 
bells, I must have a cap made on purpose. 
But this would be rendering myself sin- 
gular ; and of all things a wise man will 
most avoid any ostentatious appearance of 
singularity. 

Now I am certainly not singular in play- 
ing the fool without one. 

And indeed if I possessed such a cap, it 
would not be proper to wear it in this part 
of my history. 



CHAPTER LXXIII. 

RASH MARRIAGES. AN EARLY WIDOWHOOD. 
AFFLICTION RENDERED A BLESSING TO THE 
SUFFERERS ; AND TWO ORPHANS LEFT, 
THOUGH NOT DESTITUTE, YET FRIENDLESS. 

Love built a stately house ; where Fortune came, 
And spinning fancies, she was heard to say 

That her fine cobwebs did support the frame ; 

Whereas they were supported by the same. 
But Wisdom quickly swept them all away. 

Herbert. 

Mrs. Dove was the only child of a clergy- 
man who held a small vicarage in the West 
Riding. Leonard Bacon, her father, had 
been left an orphan in early youth; He 
had some wealthy relations by whose con- 
tributions he was placed at an endowed 
grammar-school in the country, and having 
through their influence gained a scholar- 
ship to which his own deserts might have 
entitled him, they continued to assist him — 
sparingly enough indeed — at the University, 
till he succeeded to a fellowship. Leonard 
was made of Nature's finest clay, and Nature 
had tempered it with the choicest dews of 
heaven. 



He had a female cousin about three years 
younger than himself, and in like manner 
an orphan, equally destitute, but far more 
forlorn. Man hath a fleece about him which 
enables him to bear the buffetings of the 
storm ; — but woman when young, and lovely, 
and poor, is as a shorn lamb for which the 
wind has not been tempered. 

Leonard's father and Margaret's had been 
bosom friends. They were subalterns in the 
same regiment, and being for a long time 
stationed at Salisbury, had become intimate 
at the house of Mr. Trewbody, a gentleman 
of one of the oldest families in Wiltshire. 
Mr. Trewbody had three daughters. Meli- 
cent, the eldest, was a celebrated beauty, 
and the knowledge of this had not tended 
to improve a detestable temper. The two 
youngest, Deborah and Margaret, were 
lively, good-natured, thoughtless, and at- 
tractive. They danced with the two Lieu- 
tenants, played to them on the spinnet, sung 
with them and laughed with them, — till this 
mirthful intercourse became serious, and 
knowing that it would be impossible to ob- 
tain their father's consent, they married the 
men of their hearts without it. Palmer and 
Bacon were both without fortune, and with- 
out any other means of subsistence than 
their commissions. For four years they were 
as happy as love could make them ; at the 
end of that time Palmer was seized with an 
infectious fever. Deborah was then far ad- 
vanced in pregnancy, and no solicitations 
could induce Bacon to keep from his friend's 
bed-side. The disease proved fatal; it com- 
municated to Bacon and his wife ; the former 
only survived his friend ten days, and he 
and Deborah were then laid in the same 
grave. They left an only boy of three years 
old, and in less than a month the widow 
Palmer was delivered of a daughter. 

In the first impulse of anger at the flight 
of his daughters, and the degradation of his 
family, (for Bacon was the son of a trades- 
man, and Palmer was nobody knew who,) 
Mr. Trewbody had made his will, and left 
the whole sum, which he had designed for 
his three daughters, to the eldest. Whether 
the situation of Margaret and the two or- 



THE DOCTOR. 



157 



phans might have touched him is, perhaps, 
doubtful, — for the family were either light- 
hearted or hard-hearted, and his heart was 
of the hard sort ; but he died suddenly a few 
months before his sons-in-law. The only 
son, Trewman Trewbody, Esq., a Wiltshire 
fox-hunter, like his father, succeeded to the 
estate ; and as he and his eldest sister hated 
each other cordially, Miss Melicent left the 
manor-house, and established herself in the 
Close at Salisbury, where she lived in that 
style which a portion of 6000/. enabled her 
in those days to support. 

The circumstance which might appear so 
greatly to have aggravated Mrs. Palmer's 
distress, if such distress be capable of aggra- 
vation, prevented her perhaps from eventu- 
ally sinking under it. If the birth of her 
child was no alleviation of her sorrow, it 
brought with it new feelings, new duties, 
new cause for exertion, and new strength 
for it. She wrote to Melicent and to her 
brother, simply stating her own destitute 
situation, and that of the orphan Leonard; 
she believed that their pride would not 
suffer them either to let her starve or go 
to the parish for support, and in this she 
was not disappointed. An answer was re- 
turned by Miss Trewbody, informing her 
that she had nobody to thank but herself 
for her misfortunes ; but, that notwithstand- 
ing the disgrace which she had brought 
upon the family, she might expect an annual 
allowance of ten pounds from the writer, 
and a like sum from her brother ; upon this 
she must retire into some obscure part of 
the country, and pray God to forgive her 
for the offence she had committed in marry- 
ing beneath her birth and against her father's 
consent. 

Mrs. Palmer had also written to the friends 
of Lieutenant Bacon, — her own husband 
had none who could assist her. She ex- 
pressed her willingness and her anxiety to 
have the care of her sister's orphan, but 
represented her forlorn state. They behaved 
more liberally than her own kin had done, 
and promised five pounds a-year as long as 
the boy should require it. With this and 
her pension she took a cottage in a retired 



village. Grief had acted upon her heart 
like the rod of Moses upon the rock in the 
desert ; it had opened it, and the well-spring 
of piety had gushed forth. Affliction made 
her religious, and religion brought with it 
consolation, and comfort, and joy. Leonard 
became as dear to her as Margaret. The 
sense of duty educed a pleasure from every 
privation to which she subjected herself for 
the sake of economy ; and in endeavouring 
to fulfil her duties in that state of life to 
which it had pleased God to call her, she 
was happier than she had ever been in her 
father's house, and not less so than in her 
marriage state. Her happiness indeed was 
different in kind, but it was higher in degree. 
For the sake of these dear children she was 
contented to live, and even prayed for life ; 
while, if it had respected herself only, Death 
had become to her rather an object of de- 
sire than of dread. In this manner she lived 
seven years after the loss of her husband, 
and was then carried off by an acute disease, 
to the irreparable loss of the orphans who 
were thus orphaned indeed. 



CHAPTER LXXIV. 

A LADY DESCRIBED WHOSE SINGLE LIFE WAS 
NO BLESSEDNESS EITHER TO HERSELF OR 
OTHERS. A VERACIOUS EPITAPH AND AN 
APPROPRIATE MONUMENT. 

Beauty ! my Lord, — 'tis the worst part of woman ! 

A weak poor thing, assaulted every hour 

By creeping minutes of defacing time ; 

A superficies which each breath of care 

Blasts off ; and every humorous stream of grief 

Which flows from forth these fountains of our eyes, 

Washeth away, as rain doth winter's snow. 

Goff. 

Miss Trewbody behaved with perfect pro- 
priety upon the news of her sister's death. 
She closed her front windows for two days ; 
received no visitors for a week ; was much 
indisposed, but resigned to the will of Pro- 
vidence, in reply to messages of condolence ; 
put her servants in mourning, and sent for 
Margaret that she might do her duty to her 
sister's child by breeding her up under her 



158 



THE DOCTOK. 



own eye. Poor Margaret was transferred 
from the stone floor of her mother's cottage 
to the Turkey carpet of her aunt's parlour. 
She was too young to comprehend at once 
the whole evil of the exchange ; but she 
learned to feel and understand it during 
years of bitter dependence, unalleviated by 
any hope, except that of one day seeing 
Leonard, the only creature on earth whom 
she remembered with affection. 

Seven years elapsed, and during all those 
years Leonard was left to pass his holidays, 
summer and winter, at the grammar-school 
where he had been placed at Mrs. Palmer's 
death : for although the master regularly 
transmitted with his half-yearly bill the most 
favourable accounts of his disposition and 
general conduct, as well as of his progress 
in learning, no wish to see the boy had ever 
arisen in the hearts of his nearest relations ; 
and no feeling of kindness, or sense of decent 
humanity, had ever induced either the fox- 
hunter Trewman or Melicent his sister, to 
invite him for Midsummer or Christmas. 
At length in the seventh year a letter an- 
nounced that his school- education had been 
completed, and that he was elected to a 

scholarship at College, Oxford, which 

scholarship would entitle him to a fellowship 
in due course of time : in the intervening 
years some little assistance from his liberal 
benefactors would be required ; and the libe- 
rality of those kind friends would be well 
bestowed upon a youth who bade so fair to 
do honour to himself, and to reflect no dis- 
grace upon his honourable connections. The 
head of the family promised his part, with 
an ungracious expression of satisfaction at 
thinking that " thank God, there would soon 
be an end of these demands upon him." 
Miss Trewbody signified her assent in the 
same amiable and religious spirit. However 
much her sister had disgraced her family, 
she replied, "please God it should never be 
said that she refused to do her duty." 

The whole sum which these wealthy re- 
Lations contributed was not very heavy, — 
an annual ten pounds each : but they con- 
trive 1 to make their nephew feel the weight 
"I' every separate portion. The Squire's 



half came always with a brief note desiring 
that the receipt of the enclosed sum might 
be acknowledged without delay, — not a word 
of kindness or courtesy accompanied it : 
and Miss Trewbody never failed to admi- 
nister with her remittance a few edifying 
remarks upon the folly of his mother in 
marrying beneath herself; and the improper 
conduct of his father in connecting himself 
with a woman of family, against the consent 
of her relations, the consequence of which 
was that he had left a child dependant upon 
those relations for support. Leonard re- 
ceived these pleasant preparations of charity 
only at distant intervals, when he regularly 
expected them, with his half-yearly allow- 
ance. But Margaret meantime was dieted 
upon the food of bitterness, without one 
circumstance to relieve the misery of her 
situation. 

At the time, of which I am now speaking, 
Miss Trewbody was a maiden lady of forty- 
seven, in the highest state of preservation. 
The whole business of her life had been to 
take care of a fine person, and in this she 
had succeeded admirably. Her library con- 
sisted of two books ; Nelson's Festivals and 
Fasts was one, the other was " the Queen's 
Cabinet unlocked ; " and there was not a 
cosmetic in the latter which she had not 
faithfully prepared. Thus by means, as she 
believed, of distilled waters of various kinds, 
May-dew and butter-milk, her skin retained 
its beautiful texture still, and much of its 
smoothness ; and she knew at times how to 
give it the appearance of that brilliancy 
which it had lost. But that was a profound 
secret. Miss Trewbody, remembering the 
example of Jezebel, always felt conscious 
that she was committing a sin when she took 
the rouge-box in her hand, and generally 
ejaculated in a low voice, the Lord forgive 
me ! when she laid it down : but looking in 
the glass at the same time, she indulged a 
hope that the nature of the temptation might 
be considered as an excuse for the trans- 
gression. Her other great business was to 
observe with the utmost precision all the 
punctilios of her situation in life ; and the 
time which was not devoted to one or other 



THE DOCTOK. 



159 



of these worthy occupations, was employed 
in scolding her servants, and tormenting her 
niece. This employment, for it was so 
habitual that it deserved that name, agreed 
excellently with her constitution. She was 
troubled with no acrid humours, no fits of 
bile, no diseases of the spleen, no vapours 
or hysterics. The morbid matter was all 
collected in her temper, and found a regular 
vent at her tongue. This kept the lungs in 
vigorous health ; nay, it even seemed to sup- 
ply the place of wholesome exercise, and to 
stimulate the system like a perpetual blister, 
with this peculiar advantage, that instead of 
an inconvenience it was a pleasure to her- 
self, and all the annoyance was to her de- 
pendents. 

Miss Trewbody lies buried in the Cathe- 
dral at Salisbury, where a monument was 
erected to her memory worthy of remem- 
brance itself for its appropriate inscription 
and accompaniments. The epitaph recorded 
her as a woman eminently pious, virtuous, 
and charitable, who lived universally re- 
spected, and died sincerely lamented by all 
who had the happiness of knowing her. This 
inscription was upon a marble shield sup- 
ported by two Cupids, who bent their heads 
over the edge, with marble tears larger than 
grey pease, and something of the same 
colour, upon their cheeks. These were the 
only tears which her death occasioned, and 
the only Cupids with whom she had ever 
any concern. 



CHAPTER LXXV. 

A SCENE WHICH WILE PUT SOME OF THOSE 
READERS WHO HAVE BEEN MOST IM- 
PATIENT WITH THE AUTHOR, IN THE BEST 
HUMOUR WITH HIM. 

There is no argument of more antiquity and elegancy 
than is the matter of Love ; for it seems to be as old as 
the world, and to bear date from the first time that man 
and woman was : therefore in this, as in the finest metal, 
the freshest wits have in all ages shown their best work- 
manship. Robert Wilmot. 

When Leonard had resided three years at 
Oxford, one of his college-friends invited 
him to pass the long vacation at his father's 



house, which happened to be within an easy 
ride of Salisbury. One morning, therefore, 
he rode to that city, rung at Miss Trewbody's 
door, and having sent in his name, was ad- 
mitted into the parlour, where there was no 
one to receive him, while Miss Trewbody 
adjusted her head-dress at the toilette, be- 
fore she made her appearance. Her feelings 
while she was thus employed were not of 
the pleasantest kind toward this unexpected 
guest ; and she was prepared to accost him 
with a reproof for his extravagance in un- 
dertaking so long a journey, and with some 
mortifying questions concerning the busi- 
ness which brought him there. But this 
amiable intention was put to flight, when 
Leonard, as soon as she entered the room, 
informed her that having accepted an invi- 
tation into that neighbourhood, from his 
friend and fellow-collegian, the son of Sir 
Lambert Bowles, he had taken the earliest 
opportunity of coming to pay his respects to 
her, and acknowledging his obligations, as 
bound alike by duty and inclination. The 
name of Sir Lambert Bowles acted upon 
Miss Trewbody like a charm : and its molli- 
fying effect was not a little aided by the 
tone of her nephew's address, and the sight 
of a fine youth in the first bloom of man- 
hood, whose appearance and manners were 
such that she could not be surprised at the 
introduction he had obtained into one of 
the first families in the county. The scowl, 
therefore, which she brought into the room 
upon her brow, passed instantly away, and 
was succeeded by so gracious an aspect, that 
Leonard, if he had not divined the cause, 
might have mistaken this gleam of sunshine 
for fair weather. 

A cause which Miss Trewbody could not 
possibly suspect had rendered her nephew's 
address thus conciliatory. Had he expected 
to see no other person in that house, the 
visit would have been performed as an irk- 
some obligation, and his manner would have 
appeared as cold and formal as the reception 
which he anticipated. But Leonard had not 
forgotten the playmate and companion with 
whom the happy years of his childhood had 
been passed. Young as he was at their 



160 



THE DOCTOR. 



separation, his character had taken its stamp 
during those peaceful years, and the impres- 
sion which it then received was indelible. 
Hitherto hope had never been to him so 
delightful as memory. His thoughts wan- 
dered back into the past more frequently 
than they took flight into the future ; and 
the favourite form which his imagination 
called up was that of the sweet child, who in 
winter partook his bench in the chimney 
corner, and in summer sate with him in the 
porch, and strung the fallen blossoms of 
jessamine upon stalks of grass. The snow- 
drop and the crocus reminded him of their 
little garden, the primrose of their sunny 
orchard-bank, and the blue bells and the 
cowslip of the fields, wherein they were al- 
lowed to run wild, and gather them in the 
merry month of May. Such as she then 
was he saw her frequently in sleep, with her 
blue eyes, and rosy cheeks, and flaxen curls : 
and in his day-dreams he sometimes pictured 
her to himself such as he supposed she now 
might be, and dressed up the image with all 
the magic of ideal beauty. His heart, there- 
fore, was at his lips when he inquired for 
his cousin. It was not without something 
like fear, and an apprehension of disappoint- 
ment, that he awaited her appearance ; and 
he was secretly condemning himself for the 
romantic folly which he had encouraged, 
when the door opened, and a creature came 
in, — less radiant, indeed, but more winning 
than his fancy had created, for the loveli- 
ness of earth and reality was about her. 

" Margaret," said Miss Trewbody, " do 
you remember your cousin Leonard ?-" 

Before she could answer, Leonard had 
taken her hand. " 'Tis a long while, Margaret, 
since we parted ! — ten years ! — But I have 
not forgotten the parting, — nor the blessed 
days of our childhood." 

She stood trembling like an aspen leaf, 
and looked wistfully in his face for a moment, 
then hung down her head, without power to 
utter ;i word in reply. But he felt her tears 
fall fast upon his hand, and felt also that she 
rel i in i."<l its pressure. 

Leonard hud some difficulty to command 
bimself, so as to bear a part in conversation 



with his aunt, and keep his eyes and his 
thoughts from wandering. He accepted, 
however, her invitation to stay and dine with 
her with undissembled satisfaction, and the 
pleasure was not a little heightened when 
she left the room to give some necessary 
orders in consequence. Margaret still sate 
trembling and in silence. He took her 
hand, pressed it to his lips, and said in a low 
earnest voice, " dear dear Margaret ! " She 
raised her eyes, and fixing them upon him 
with one of those looks the perfect remem- 
brance of which can never be effaced from 
the heart to which they have been addressed, 
replied in a lower but not less earnest tone, 
" dear Leonard ! " and from that moment 
their lot was sealed for time and for eternity. 



CHAPTER LXXVI. 

A STORY CONCERNING CUPID WHICH NOT ONE 
READER IN TEN THOUSAND HAS EVER 
HEARD BEFORE ; A DEFENCE OF LOVE 
WHICH WILE BE VERY SATISFACTORY TO 
THE LADIES. 

They do lie, 
Lie grossly who say Love is blind, — by him 
And Heaven they lie ! he has a sight can pierce 
Thro' ivory, as clear as it were horn, 
And reach his object. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

The Stoics who called our good affections 
eupathies, did not manage those affections 
as well as they understood them. They kept 
them under too severe a discipline, and 
erroneously believed that the best way to 
strengthen the heart was by hardening it. 
The Monks carried this error to its utmost 
extent, falling indeed into the impious ab- 
surdity that our eupathies are sinful in them- 
selves. The Monks have been called the 
Stoics of Christianity ; but the philosophy 
of the Cloister can no more bear comparison 
with that of the Porch, than Stoicism itself 
with Christianity pure and undefiled. Van 
Helmont compares even the Franciscans 
with the Stoics ; paucis mutatis, he says, 
videbam Capucinum esse Stoicum Chris- 
tianum. He might have found a closer 



THE DOCTOR. 



161 



parallel for them in the Cynics both for their 
filth and their extravagance. And here I 
will relate a Rabbinical tradition. 

On a time the chiefs of the Synagogue, 
being mighty in prayer, obtained of the 
Lord that the Evil Spirit who had seduced 
the Jews to commit idolatry, and had brought 
other nations against them to overthrow 
their city and destroy the Temple, should 
be delivered into their hands for punish- 
ment ; when by advice of Zechariah the 
prophet they put him in a leaden vessel, and 
secured him there with a weight of lead 
upon his face. By this sort of peine forte et 
dure, they laid him so effectually that he has 
never appeared since. Pursuing then their 
supplications while the ear of Heaven was 
open, they entreated that another Evil Spirit, 
by whom the people had continually been 
led astray, might in like manner be put into 
their power. This prayer also was granted ; 
and the Demon with whom Poets, Lovers, 
and Ladies are familiar, by his heathen 
name of Cupid, was delivered up to them. 

folle per lui 

Tutlo il mondo si fa. Perinea Amove, 
E saggio ognun sard.* 

The prophet Zechariah warned them not to 
be too hasty in putting him to death, for 
fear of the consequences ; 

You shall see 

A fine confusion in the country ; mark it ! 

But the prophet's counsel was as vain as the 
wise courtier's in Beaumont and Fletcher's 
tragedy, who remonstrated against the de- 
cree for demolishing Cupid's altars. They 
disregarded his advice ; because they were 
determined upon destroying the enemy now 
that they had him in their power ; and they 
bound their prisoner fast in chains, while 
they deliberated by what death he should 
die. These deliberations lasted three days ; 
on the third day it happened that a new-laid 
egg was wanted for a sick person, and be- 
hold ! no such thing was to be found through- 
out the kingdom of Israel, for since this 
Evil Spirit was in durance, not an egg had 

* Metastasis 



been laid; and it appeared upon inquiry, 
that the whole course of kind was suspended. 
The chiefs of the Synagogue perceived then 
that not without reason Zechariah had 
warned them ; they saw that if they put their 
prisoner to death the world must come to an 
end ; and therefore they contented them- 
selves with putting out his eyes, that he 
might not see to do so much mischief, and let 
him go. 

Thus it was that Cupid became blind, — a 
fact unknown to the Greek and Roman Poets 
and to all the rhymesters who have succeeded 
them. 

The Rabbis are coarse fablers. Take away 
love, and not physical nature only, but the 
heart of the moral world would be palsied : 

This is the salt unto Humanity 
And keeps it sweet.* 

Senza di lui 
Che diverrian le sfere, 
II mar, la terra ? Alia sua chiaraface 
Si coloran le stelle ; ordine e lume 
Ei lor 7>tinistra j egli manticne in pace 
GIV ele?nente discordi '; unisce insieme 
Gli opposti eccessi ; e con eterno giro, 
Che sembra caso, ed e saper profondo, 
Forma, scompone, e riproduce il mondo.\ 

It is with this passion as with the Amreeta 
in Southey's Hindoo tale, the most original 
of his poems ; its effects are beneficial or 
malignant according to the subject on which 
it acts. In this respect Love may also be 
likened to the Sun, under whose influence 
one plant elaborates nutriment for man, and 
another poison ; and which, while it draws 
up pestilence from the marsh and jungle, and 
sets the simoom in motion over the desert, 
diffuses light, life, and happiness over the 
healthy and cultivated regions of the earth. 

It acts terribly upon Poets. Poor crea- 
tures, nothing in the whole details of the 
Ten Persecutions, or the history of the 
Spanish Inquisition, is more shocking than 
what they have suffered from Love, accord- 
ing to the statements which they have given 
of their own sufferings. They have endured 
scorching, frying, roasting, burning, some- 
times by a slow fire, sometimes by a quick 
one ; and melting, ■ — and this too from a fire, 



Beaumont and Fletcher. 



f Metastasis 



162 



THE DOCTOR. 



^\ hich, while it thus affects the heart and 
liver, raises not a blister upon the skin ; re- 
sembling in this respect that penal fire which 
certain theological writers describe as being 
more intense because it is invisible, — exist- 
ing not in form, but in essence, and acting 
therefore upon spirit as material and visible 
fire acts upon the body. Sometimes they 
have undergone from the same cause all the 
horrors of freezing and petrifaction. Very 
frequently the brain is affected ; and one 
peculiar symptom of the insanity arising 
from this cause, is that the patients are sen- 
sible of it, and appear to boast of their mis- 
fortune. 

Hear how it operated upon Lord Brooke, 
who is called the most thoughtful of poets, 
by the most bookful of Laureates. The said 
Lord Brooke in his love, and in his thought- 
fulness, confesseth thus ; 

I sigh ; I sorrow ; I do play the fool! 

Hear how the grave — the learned Pasquier 
describes its terrible effects upon himself 

Jaje sens en mes os uneflamme nouvelle 

Qui me mine, qui m'ard, qui brusle ma mb'uelle. 

Hear its worse moral consequences, which 
Euphues avowed in his wicked days ! " He 
that cannot dissemble in love is not worthy 
to live. I am of this mind, that both might 
and malice, deceit and treachery, all perjury 
and impiety, may lawfully be committed in 
love, which is lawless." 

Hear too how Ben Jonson makes the Lady 
Frampul express her feelings ! 

My fires and fears are met : I burn and freeze ; 
My liver's one great coal, my heart shrunk up 
With all the fibres ; and the mass of blood 
Within me is a standing lake of fire, 
Curl'd with the cold wind of my gelid sighs, 
That drive a drift of sleet through all my body 
And shoot a February through my veins. 

And hear how Artemidorus, not the oneiro- 
logist, but the great philosopher at the 
Court of the Emperor Sferamond, describes 
the appearances which he had observed in 
dissecting some of those unfortunate per- 
sons, who had died of love : — Quant a mon 
regard, says he, fen ay veu /aire anatomie 
de quetques una qui estoient morts de cette 
muladie, qui avoient leurs entrailles toutes re- 



tirees, leur pauvre coeur tout brusle, leur foye 
toute enfume, leurs poulmons tout rostis, les 
ventricules de leurs cerveaux tous endom- 
magez ; etje croy que leur pauvre ame etoit 
cuite et arse a petite feu, pour la vehemence et 
excessif chaleur et ardeur inextinguible qu'ils 
enduroient lors que lafievre d 'amour les avoit 
surprins* 

But the most awful description of its 
dangerous operation upon persons of his 
own class is given by the Prince of the 
French Poets, not undeservedly so called in 
his own times. Describing the effect of love 
upon himself when he is in the presence of 
his mistress, Ronsard says, 

Tant s'enfaul queje sot's alors maistre de moy, 
Queje nVrois les Dieux, et trahirois mon Roy, 
Je vendrois mon pay,je meurtrirois mon pere ; 
Telle rage me tient aprts que fay tastg 
A longs traits amour eux de la poison amere 
Qui sort de ces beaux yeux dontje suis enchant^. 

Mercy on us ! neither Petrarch, nor poor 
Abel Shuiflebottom himself, was so far gone 
8S this ! 

In a diseased heart it loses its nature, and 
combining with the morbid affection which 
it finds, produces a new disease. 

When it gets into an empty heart, it 
works there like quicksilver in an apple 
dumpling, while the astonished cook, ignorant 
of the roguery which has been played her, 
thinks that there is not Death, but the Devil 
in the pot. 

In a full heart, which is tantamount to 
saying a virtuous one, (for in every other, 
conscience keeps a void place for itself, and 
the hollow is always felt,) it is sedative, 
sanative, and preservative : a drop of the 
true elixir, no mithridate so effectual against 
the infection of vice. 

How then did this passion act upon Leo- 
nard and Margaret? In a manner which 
you will not find described in any of Mr. 
Thomas Moore's poems ; and which Lord 
Byron is as incapable of understanding, or 
even believing in another, as he is of feeling 
it in himself. 



* Amadis de Gauxe. Ltv. 23. 



THE DOCTOR. 



163 



CHAPTER LXXVII. 

MORE CONCERNING LOVE AND THE DREAM 
OF LIFE. 

Happy the bonds that hold ye ; 
Sure they be sweeter far than liberty. 
There is no blessedness but in such bondage ; 
Happy that happy chain ; such links are heavenly. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

I will not describe the subsequent inter- 
views between Leonard and his cousin, short 
and broken but precious as they were ; nor 
that parting one in which hands were plighted, 
with the sure and certain knowledge that 
hearts had been interchanged. Remembrance 
will enable some of my readers to portray 
the scene, and then perhaps a sigh may be 
heaved for the days that are gone : Hope 
will picture it to others, — and with them 
the sigh will be for the days that are to come. 
There was not that indefinite deferment 
of hope in this case at which the heart sick- 
ens. Leonard had been bred up in poverty 
from his childhood ; a parsimonious allow- 
ance, grudgingly bestowed, had contributed 
to keep him frugal at College, by calling 
forth a pardonable if not a commendable 
sense of pride in aid of a worthier principle. 
He knew that he could rely upon him- 
self for frugality, industry, and a cheerful 
as well as a contented mind. He had seen 
the miserable state of bondage in which 
Margaret existed with her Aunt, and his 
resolution was made to deliver her from that 
bondage as soon as he could obtain the 
smallest benefice on which it was possible 
for them to subsist. They agreed to live 
rigorously within their means, however poor, 
and put their trust in Providence. They 
could not be deceived in each other, for 
they had grown up together; and they 
knew that they were not deceived in them- 
selves. Their love had the freshness of 
youth, but prudence and forethought were 
not wanting; the resolution which they 
had taken brought with it peace of mind, 
and no misgiving was felt in either heart 
when they prayed for a blessing upon their 
purpose. In reality it had already brought 
a blessing with it ; and this they felt ; for 



love, when it deserves that name, produces 
in us what may be called a regeneration of 
its own, — a second birth, — dimly, but yet 
in some degree, resembling that which is 
effected by Divine Love when its redeeming 
work is accomplished in the soul. 

Leonard returned to Oxford happier than 
all this world's wealth or this world's hon- 
ours could have made him. He had now a 
definite and attainable hope, — an object in 
life which gave to life itself a value. For 
Margaret, the world no longer seemed to 
her like the same earth which she had 
till then inhabited. Hitherto she had felt 
herself a forlorn and solitary creature, with- 
out a friend; and the sweet sounds and 
pleasant objects of nature had imparted 
as little cheerfulness to her as to the debtor 
who sees green fields in sunshine from his 
prison, and hears the lark singing at liberty. 
Her heart was open now to all the exhilar- 
ating and all the softening influences of birds, 
fields, flowers, vernal suns, and melodious 
streams. She was subject to the same daily 
and hourly exercise of meekness, patience, 
and humility ; but the trial was no longer 
painful ; with love in her heart, and hope and 
sunshine in her prospect, she found even a 
pleasure in contrasting her present condition 
with that which was in store for her. 

In these our days every young lady holds 
the pen of a ready writer, and words flow 
from it as fast as it can indent its zigzag 
lines, according to the reformed system of 
writing,— which said system improves hand- 
writings by making them all alike and all 
illegible. At that time women wrote better 
and spelt worse : but letter writing was not 
one of their accomplishments. It had not 
yet become one of the general pleasures and 
luxuries of life, — perhaps the greatest grati- 
fication which the progress of civilisation 
has given us. There was then no mail 
coach to waft a sigh across the country at 
the rate of eight miles an hour. Letters 
came slowly and with long intervals be- 
tween ; but when they came, the happiness 
which they imparted to Leonard and Mar- 
garet lasted during the interval, however 
long. To Leonard it was as an exhilarant and 



164 



THE DOCTOR. 



a cordial which rejoiced and strengthened 
him. He trod the earth with a lighter and 
more elated movement on the day when he 
received a letter from Margaret, as if he felt 
himself invested with an importance which 
he had never possessed till the happiness of 
another human being was inseparably asso- 
ciated with his own ; 

So proud a thing it was for him to wear 

Love's golden chain, 
With which it is best freedom to be bound.* 

Happy, indeed, if there be happiness on 
earth, as that same sweet poet says, is he, 

Who love enjoys, and placed hath his mind 
Where fairest virtues fairest beauties grace, 

Then in himself such store of worth doth find 
That he deserves to find so good a place.* 

This was Leonard's case ; and when he 
kissed the paper, which her hand had 
pressed, it was with a consciousness of the 
strength and sincerity of his affection, which 
at once rejoiced and fortified his heart. To 
Margaret his letters were like summer dew 
upon the herb that thirsts for such refresh- 
ment. Whenever they arrived, a head- ache 
became the cause or pretext for retiring 
earlier than usual to her chamber, that she 
might weep and dream over the precious 
lines : — 

True gentle love is like the summer dew, 

Which falls around when all is still and hush ; 
And falls unseen until its bright drops strew 

With odours, herb and flower, and bank and bush. 
O love ! — when womanhood is in the flush, 

And man's a young and an unspotted thing, 
His first-brpathed word, and her half-conscious blush, 

Are fair as light in heaven, or flowers in spring.f 



INTERCIIAPTER VII. 

OBSOLETE ANTICIPATIONS ; BEING A LEAF 
OUT OF AN OLD ALMANAC, WHICH, LIKE 
OTHER OLD ALMANACS, THOUGH OUT OF 
DATE IS NOT OUT OF USE. 

If 
You play before me, I shall often look on you, 
1 give you that warning beforehand. 
Take it not ill, my masters, I shall laugh at you, 
And truly when I am least offended with you ; 
It is my humour, Middleton. 

W ii in St. Thomas Aquinas was asked in 
wlui manner a man might best become 



* Dbummond. 



t Allan Cunningham. 



learned, he answered, "by reading one book ;" 
" meaning," says Bishop Taylor, " that an 
understanding entertained with several ob- 
jects is intent upon neither, and profits not." 
Lord Holland's poet, the prolific Lope de 
Vega, tells us to the same purport : 

Que es estudiante notable 
El que lo es de un libro solo. 
Que quando no estavan llenos 
De tantos libros agenos, 
Como van dexandB atras, 
Sabian los hombres mas 
Porque estudiavan en menos. 

The homo unius libri is indeed proverbially 
formidable to all conversational figurantes. 
Like your sharp-shooter, he knows his piece 
perfectly, and is sure of his shot. I would, 
therefore, modestly insinuate to the reader 
what infinite advantages would be possessed 
by that fortunate person who shall be the 
homo hujus libri. 

According to the Lawyers the King's 
eldest son is for certain purposes of full age 
as soon as he is born, ■ — great being the mys- 
teries of Law ! I will not assume that in 
like manner hie liber is at once to acquire 
maturity of fame ; for fame, like the oak, is 
not the product of a single generation ; and 
a new book in its reputation is but as an 
acorn, the full growth of which can be known 
only by posterity. The Doctor will not 
make so great a sensation upon its first ap- 
pearance as Mr. Southey's Wat Tyler, or 
the first two Cantos of Don Juan ; still less 
will it be talked of so universally as the 
murder of Mr. Weire. Talked of, however, 
it will be widely, largely, loudly and length- 
ily talked of: lauded and vituperated, vilified 
and extolled, heartily abused, and no less 
heartily admired. 

Thus much is quite certain, that before it 
has been published a week, eight persons 
will be named as having written it; and 
these eight positive lies will be affirmed each 
as positive truths on positive knowledge. 

Within the month Mr. Woodbee will write 
to one Marquis, one Earl, two Bishops, and 
two Reviewers-Major, assuring them that 
he is not the Author. Mr. Sligo will cau- 
tiously avoid making any such declaration, 
and will take occasion significantly to remark 



THE DOCTOR. 



165 



upon the exceeding impropriety of saying 
to any person that a work which has been 
published anonymously is supposed to be 
his. He will observe also, that it is alto- 
gether unwarrantable to ask any one, under 
such circumstances, whether the report be 
true. Mr. Blueman's opinion of the book 
will be asked by four-and-twenty female 
correspondents, all of the order of the 
stocking. 

Professor Wilson will give it his hearty 
praise. Sir Walter Scott will deny that he 
has any hand in it. Mr. Coleridge will smile 
if he is asked the question. If it be pro- 
posed to Sir Humphry Davy he will smile 
too, and perhaps blush also. The Laureate 
will observe a careless silence ; Mr. Words- 
worth a dignified one. And Professor Por- 
son, if he were not gone where his Greek 
is of no use to him, would accept credit for 
it, though he would not claim it. 

The Opium-Eater, while he peruses it, 
will doubt whether there is a book in his 
hand, or whether he be not in a dream of 
intellectual delight. 

" My little more than nothing " Jeffrey 
the second — (for of the small Jeffreys, 
Jeffrey Hudson must always be the first) — 
will look less when he pops upon his own 
name in its pages. Sir Jeffrey Dunstan is 
Jeffrey the third : he must have been placed 
second in right of seniority, had it not been 
for the profound respect witkwhich I regard 
the University of Glasgow. The Rector of 
Glasgow takes precedence of the Mayor of 
Garratt. 

And what will the Reviewers do ? I speak 
not of those who come to their office, (for 
such there are, though few,) like Judges to 
the bench, stored with all competent know- 
ledge and in an equitable mind ; prejudging 
nothing, however much they may foreknow ; 
and who give their sentence without regard 
to persons, upon the merits of the case ; 
but the aspirants and wranglers at the bar, 
the dribblers and the spit-fires, (there are 
of both sorts;) — the puppies who bite for 
the pleasure which they feel in exercising 
their teeth, and the dogs whose gratification 
consists in their knowledge of the pain and 



injury that they inflict; — the creepers of 
literature, who suck their food, like the ivy, 
from what tbey strangulate and kill ; they 
who have a party to serve, or an opponent 
to run down ; what opinion will they pro- 
nounce in their utter ignorance of the author? 
They cannot play without a bias in their 
bowls ! — Ay, there's the rub ! 

Ha ha, ha ha ! this World doth pass 

Most merrily, I'll be sworn, 
For many an honest Indian Ass 

Goes for a Unicorn. 
Farra diddle dyno, 
This is idle fyno ! 
Tygh hygh, tygh hygh ! O sweet delight ! 

He tickles this age that can 
Call Tullia's ape a marmasite, 

And Leda's goose a swan.* 

Then the discussion that this book will 
excite among blue stockings, and blue beards ! 
The stir ! the buzz ! the bustle ! The talk 
at tea tables in the country, and conversazione 
in town, — in Mr. Murray's room, at Mr. 
Longman's dinners, in Mr. Hatchard's shop, 
— at the Royal Institution, — at the Alfred, 
at the Admiralty, at Holland House ! Have 
you seen it ? — Do you understand it ? Are 
you not disgusted with it ? — Are you not 
provoked at it ? — Are you not delighted 
with it ? Whose is it ? Whose can it be ? 

Is it Walter Scott's ? — There is no Scotch 
in the book ; and that hand is never to be 
mistaken in its masterly strokes. Is it Lord 
Byron's ? — Lord Byron's ! Why the Au- 
thor fears God, honours the King, and loves 
his country and his kind. Is it by Little 
Moore ? — If it were, we should have senti- 
mental lewdness, Irish patriotism, which is 
something very like British treason, and a 
plentiful spicing of personal insults to the 
Prince Regent. Is it the Laureate ? — He 
lies buried under his own historical quartos! 
There is neither his mannerism, nor his 
moralism, nor his methodism. Is it Words- 
worth ? — What, — an Elephant cutting ca- 
pers on the slack wire ! Is it Coleridge ? — 
The method indeed of the book might lead 
to such a suspicion, — but then it is intelli- 
gible throughout. Mr. A ? — there 

is Latin in it. Mr. B ? — there is 



British Bidliographer. 



166 



THE DOCTOR. 



Greek in it. Mr. C ? — it is written 

in good English. Mr. Hazlitt ? It contains 
no panegyric upon Bonaparte ; no imitations 
of Charles Lamb ; no plagiarisms from Mr. 
Coleridge's conversation ; no abuse of that 
gentleman, Mr. Southey and Mr. Words- 
worth, — and no repetitions of himself. Cer- 
tainly, therefore, it is not Mr. Hazlitt's. 
Is it Charles Lamb ? 

Baa ! Baa ! good Sheep, have you any wool ? 
Yes marry, that I have, three bags full. 

Good Sheep I write here, in emendation 
of the nursery song ; because nobody ought 
to call this Lamb a black one. 

Comes it from the Admiralty ? There 
indeed wit enough might be found and 
acuteness enough, and enough of sagacity, 
and enough of knowledge both of books and 
men ; but when 

The Raven croaked as she sate at her meal 
And the Old Woman knew what he said, *— 

the Old Woman knew also by the tone who 
said it. 

Does it contain the knowledge, learning, 
wit, sprightliness, and good sense, which that 
distinguished patron of letters my Lord 
Puttiface Papinhead has so successfully con- 
cealed from the public and from all his most 
intimate acquaintance during his whole life? 

Is it Theodore Hook with the learned 
assistance of his brother the Archdeacon? — 
A good guess that of the Hook : have an 
eye to it ! 

" I guess it is our Washington Irving," 
says the New Englander. The Virginian 
replies, "I reckon it may be;" and they 
agree that none of the Old Country Authors 
are worthy to be compared with him. 

1- it Smith? 

Which of the Smiths? for they are a 
numerous people. To say nothing of Black 
Smiths, White Smiths, Gold Smiths, and 
Silver Smiths, there is Sydney, who is Joke- 
Smith to the Edinburgh Review; and 
William, who is Motion Smith to the Dis- 
senters Orthodox and Heterodox, in Par- 
liament) having been elected to represent 



B01 i :n v. 



them, — to wit, the aforesaid Dissenters — 
by the citizens of Norwich. And there is 
Cher Bobus who works for nobody ; and 
there is Horace and his brother James, who 
work in Colburn's forge at the sign of the 
Camel. You probably meant these brothers; 
they are clever fellows, with wit and humour 
as fluent as their ink ; and to their praise be 
it spoken with no gall in it. But their wares 
are of a very different quality. 

Is it the Author of Thinks I to myself? — 
" Think you so," says I to myself I. Or the 
Author of the Miseries of Human Life ? 
George Colman? Wrangham, — unfrocked 
and in his lighter moods ? Yorick of Dublin ? 
Dr. Clarke? Dr. Busby ? The Author of My 
Pocket Book ? DTsraeli ? Or that pheno- 
menon of eloquence, the celebrated Irish 
Barrister, Counsellor Phillips ? Or may it not 
be the joint composition of Sir Charles and 
Lady Morgan ? he compounding the specu- 
lative, scientific, and erudite ingredients ; 
she intermingling the lighter parts, and in- 
fusing her own grace, airiness, vivacity, and 
spirit through the whole. A well- aimed 
guess : for they would throw out opinions 
differing from their own, as ships in time of 
war hoist false colours ; and thus they would 
enjoy the baffled curiosity of those wide 
circles of literature and fashion in which 
they move with such enviable distinction 
both at home and abroad. 

Is it Mr. Mathurin ? Is it Hans Busk? — 

Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny bonny bride, 
Busk ye, my winsome marrow ! 

Is it he who wrote of a World without 
Souls, and made the Velvet Cushion relate 
its adventures ? 

Is it Rogers? — The wit and the feeling 
of the book may fairly lead to such an 
ascription, if there be sarcasm enough to 
support it. So may the Pleasures of Me- 
mory which the Author has evidently en- 
joyed during the composition. 

Is it Mr. Utinam? He would have written 
it, — if he could. — Is it Hookham Frere? 
He could have written it, — if he would. — 
Has Matthias taken up a new Pursuit in 
Literature? Or has William Bankes been 
trying the experiment whether he can im- 



THE DOCTOR. 



167 



part as much amusement and instruction by 
writing, as in conversation ? 

Or is it some new genius " breaking out 
at once like the Irish Rebellion a hundred 
thousand strong '? " ISTot one of the Planets, 
nor fixed stars of our Literary System, but 
a Comet as brilliant as it is eccentric in its 
course. 

Away the dogs go, whining here, snuffing 
there, nosing in this place, pricking their 
ears in that, and now full-mouthed upon a 
false scent, — and now again all at fault. 

Oh the delight of walking invisible among 
mankind ! 

•• Whoever he be," says Father O'Faggot, 
"he is an audacious heretic." " A school- 
master, by his learning," says Dr. Fullbot- 
tom Wigsby. The Bishop would take him 
for a Divine, if there were not sometimes a 
degree of levity in the book, which, though 
always innocent, is not altogether consistent 
with the gown. Sir Fingerfee Dolittle dis- 
covers evident marks of the medical pro- 
fesffl ::. - He has manifestly been a traveller," 
says the General, " and lived in the World." 
The man of letters says it would not sur- 
prise him if it were the work of a learned 
Jew. Mr. Dullman sees nothing in the book 
to excite the smallest curiosity; he really 
does not understand it, and doubts whether 
the Author himself knew what he would be 
at. Mr. M c Dry declares, with a harsh 
Scotch accent, " It's just parfit nonsense." 



mTERCHAPTEE VIII. 

A LEAF OUT OF THE NEW ALMANAC. THE 
AUTHOR THINKS CONSIDERATELY OF HIS 
COMMENTATORS : RUMINATES J RELATES AX 
ANECDOTE OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE : 
QUOTES SOME PYRAMIDAL STAXZAS, WHICH 
ARE NOT THE WORSE FOR THEIR ARCHI- 
TECTURE, AND DELIVERS AX OPIXIOX CON- 
CERNING BURNS. 

To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the 
body ; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the 
Soul. Earth thou art, to earth thou shalt return. 

Fcller. 

The Commentators in the next millennium, 
and even in the next century, will, I foresee, 



have no little difhculty, in settling the 
chronology of this opus. I do not mean the 
time of its conception, the very day and 
hour of that happy event having been re- 
corded in the seventh chapter, A. I. : nor 
the time of its birth, that, as has been re- 
gistered in the weekly Literary Journals, 
having been in the second week of January, 
1834. But at what intervening times certain 
of its Chapters and Interchapters were 
composed. 

A similar difficulty has been found with 
the Psalms, the Odes of Horace, Shake- 
speare's Plays, and other writings sacred or 
profane, of such celebrity as to make the 
critical inquiry an object of reasonable cu- 
riosity, or of real moment. 

They, however, who peruse the present 
volume while it is yet a new book, will at 
once have perceived that between the com- 
position of the preceding Chapter and their 
perusal thereof, an interval as long as one 
of IsTourjahad's judicial visitations of sleep 
must have elapsed. For many of the great 
performers who figured upon the theatre of 
public life when the anticipations in that 
Chapter were expressed, have made their 
exits ; and others who are not there men- 
tioned, have since that time made their 
entrances. 

The children of that day have reached 
their stage of adolescence ; the youth are 
now in mid life ; the middle-aged have 
grown old, and the old have passed away. 
I say nothing of the political changes that 
have intervened. Who can bestow a thought 
upon the pantonume of politics, when his 
mind is fixed upon the tragedy of human 
life? 

Robert Landor (a true poet like his great 
brother, if ever there was one) says finely in 
his Impious Banquet, 

There is a pause near death when men grow bold 
Toward all things else : 

Before that awful pause, whenever the 
thought is brought home to us, we feel our- 
selves near enough to grow indifferent to 
them, and to perceive the vanity of all 
earthly pursuits, those only excepted which 
have the good of our fellow creatures for 



168 



THE DOCTOR. 



their object, and tend to our own spiritual 
improvement. 

But this is entering upon a strain too 
serious for this place ; though any reflection 
upon the lapse of time and the changes that 
steal on us in its silent course leads naturally 
to such thoughts. 

Omnia paulatim consumit longior cetas, 
Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. 
Ipse mihi collatus enim non Me videbor ; 
From alia est, moresquc alii, nova mentis imago, 
Voxque aliud mutata sonat.* 

Sir Thomas Lawrence was told one day 
that he had made a portrait, which he was 
then finishing, ten years too young. " Well," 
he replied, " I have ; and I see no reason 
why it should not be made so." There was 
this reason : ten years, if they bring with 
them only their ordinary portion of evil and 
of good, cannot pass over any one's head 
without leaving .their moral as well as phy- 
sical traces, especially if they have been 
years of active and intellectual life. The 
painter, therefore, who dips his brush in 
Medea's kettle, neither represents the coun- 
tenance as it is, nor as it has been. 

" And what does that signify ? " Sir 
Thomas might ask in rejoinder. — What in- 
deed! Little to any one at present, and 
nothing when the very few who are con- 
cerned in it shall have passed away, — ex- 
cept to the artist. The merits of his picture 
as a work of art are all that will then be 
considered ; its fidelity as a likeness will be 
taken for granted, or be thought of as little 
consequence as in reality it then is. 

Yet if Titian or Vandyke had painted 
upon such a principle, their portraits would 
not have been esteemed as they now are. 
We should not have felt the certainty which 
we now feel, that in looking at the pictures 
of the Emperor Charles V. and of Cortes ; 
of King Charles the Martyr, and of Strafford, 
we see the veritable likeness and true cha- 
racter of those ever-memorable personages. 

Think of the changes that any ten years 
in the course of human life produce in body 
and in mind, and in the face, which is in a 
certain degree the index of both. From 

* Petkahcii. 



thirty to forty is the decade during which 
the least outward and visible alteration 
takes place ; and yet how perceptible is it 
even during that stage in every countenance 
that is composed of good flesh and blood ! 
For I do not speak of those which look as if 
they had been hewn out of granite, cut out 
of a block, cast in bronze, or moulded either 
in wax, tallow, or paste. 

Ten years ! 

Quarles in those Hieroglyphics of the Life 
of Man, which he presents to the Reader as an 
Egyptian dish dressed in the English fashion, 
symbolises it by the similitude of a taper 
divided into eight equal lengths, which are 
to burn for ten years each, — if the candle 
be not either wasted, or blown out by the 
wind, or snuffed out by an unskilful hand, 
or douted (to use a good old word) with 
an extinguisher, before it is burned down to 
the socket. The poem which accompanies 
the first print of the series begins thus, in 
pyramidal stanzas ; such they were designed 
to be, but their form resembles that of an 
Aztecan or Mexican Cu, rather than of an 
Egyptian pyramid. 

1. 

Behold 

How short a span 

Was long enough of old 

To measure out the life of man ! 

In those well-temper'd days, his time was then 

Surveyed, cast up, and found but threescore years and ten. 

2. 

Alas 

And what is that ! 

They come and slide and pass 

Before my pen can tell thee what. 

The posts of life are swift, which having run 

Their seven short stages o'er, their short-liv'd task is done. 

" I had an old grand-uncle," says Burns, 
" with whom my mother lived awhile in her 
girlish years. The good man was long blind 
ere he died, during which time his highest 
enjoyment was to sit down and cry, while 
my mother would sing the simple old song 
of the Life and Age of Man." 

It is certain that this old song was in 
Burns's mind when he composed to the 
same cadence those well-known stanzas of 
which the burthen is that " man was made 
to mourn." But the old blind man's tears 
were tears of piety, not of regret ; it was his 



THE DOCTOR. 



169 



greatest enjoyment thus to glisten and to 
weep ; and his heart the while was not so much 
in the past, as his hopes were in the future. 
They were patient hopes ; he knew in Whom 
he believed, and was awaiting his deliverance 
in God's good time. Sunt homines qui cum 
patientid moriuntur ; sunt autem quidam per- 
fecti qui cum patientid vivunt* Burns may 
perhaps have been conscious in his better 
hours (and he had many such), that he had 
inherited the feeling (if not the sober piety) 
which is so touchingly exemplified in this 
family anecdote ; — that it was the main in- 
gredient in the athanasia of his own incom- 
parable effusions ; and that without it he 
never could have been the moral, and 
therefore never the truly great poet that he 
eminently is. 



IOTERCHAPTER IX. 

AN ILLUSTRATION FOR THE ASSISTANCE OF 
THE COMMENTATORS DRAWN FROM THE 
HISTORY OF THE KORAN. REMARKS WHICH 
ARE NOT INTENDED FOR MUSSELMEN, AND 
WHICH THE MISSIONARIES IN THE MEDI- 
TERRANEAN ARE ADVISED NOT TO TRANS- 
LATE. 

You will excuse me if I do not strictly confine myself 
to narration, but now and then intersperse such reflections 
as may offer while I am writing. John Newton. 

But the most illustrious exemplification of 
the difficulty which the Doctorean or Dovean 
commentators will experience in settling the 
chronology of these chapters, is to be found 
in the history of the Koran. 

Mahommedan Doctors are agreed that 
the first part or parcel of their sacred book 
which was revealed to the prophet, consisted 
of what now stands as the first five verses 
of the ninety-sixth chapter ; and that the 
chapter which ought to be the last of the 
whole hundred and fourteen, because it was 
the last which Mahommed delivered, is 
placed as the ninth in order. 

The manner in which the book was origi- 



nally produced, and afterwards put together, 
explains how this happened. 

Whenever the Impostor found it conve- 
nient to issue a portion, one of his disciples 
wrote it, from his dictation, either upon 
palm-leaves or parchment, and these were 
put promiscuously into a chest. After his 
death Abubeker collected them into a volume, 
but with so little regard to any principle of 
order or connection, that the only rule which 
he is supposed to have followed was that of 
placing the longest chapters first. 

Upon this M. Savary remarks, ce boule- 
versement dans un ouvrage qui est un recueil 
de preceptes donnes dans differens temps et 
dont les premiers sont souvent abroges par les 
suivans, y a jette la plus grand confusion. On 
ne doit done y chercher ni ordre ni suit. And 
yet one of the chapters opens with the asser- 
tion that " a judicious order reigns in this 
book,"— according to Savary's version, which 
here follows those commentators who prefer 
this' among the five interpretations which the 
words may bear. 

Abubeker no doubt was of opinion that it 
was impossible to put the book together in 
any way that could detract from its value 
and its use. If he were, as there is every 
reason to think, a true believer, he would 
infer that the same divine power which re- 
vealed it piece-meal would preside over the 
arrangement, and that the earthly copy 
would thus miraculously be made a faith- 
ful transcript of the eternal and uncreated 
original. 

If, on the other hand, he had been as 
audacious a knave as his son-in-law, the 
false prophet himself, he would have come 
with equal certainty to the same conclusion 
by a different process : for he would have 
known that if the separate portions, when 
they were taken out of the chest, had been 
shuffied and dealt like a pack of cards, they 
would have been just as well assorted as it 
was possible to assort them. 

A north-country dame in days* of old 
economy, when the tailor worked for women 
as well as men, delivered one of her nether 
garments to a professor of the sartorial art 
with these directions : 



170 



THE DOCTOR. 



" Here Talleor, tak this petcut ; thoo mun 
bin' me't, and thoo mun tap-bin' me't ; thoo 
mun turn me't rangsid afoor, tapsid bottom, 
insid oot : thoo can do't, thoo mun do't, and 
thoo mun do't speedly." — Neither Bonaparte 
nor Wellington ever gave their orders on the 
field of battle with more precision, or more 
emphatic and authoritative conciseness. 

Less contrivance was required for editing 
the Koran, than for renovating this petti- 
coat : the Commander of the Faithful had 
only to stitch it together and bin' me't. 

The fable is no doubt later than Abubek- 
er's time that the first transcript of this book 
from its eternal and uncreated original in 
the very essence of the Deity, is on the Pre- 
served Table, fast by the throne of God ; on 
which Table all the divine decrees^of things 
past, passing, and to come, are recorded. 
The size of the Table may be estimated by 
that of the Pen wherewith these things were 
written on it. The Great Pen was one of 
the first three created things ; it is in length 
five hundred years' journey, and in breadth, 
eighty ; and I suppose the rate of an Angel's 
travelling is intended, which considerably 
exceeds that of a rail-road, a race-horse, or 
a carrier-pigeon. A copy of the Koran, 
transcribed upon some celestial material from 
this original on the Preserved Table, bound 
in silk, and ornamented with gold and set 
with precious stones from Paradise, was 
shown to the Prophet by the Angel Gabriel, 
once a year, for his consolation, and twice 
during the last year of his life. 

Far later is the legend transmitted by the 
Spanish Moor, Mahomet Ilabadan, that Oth- 
man arranged the fragments and copied 
them in the Prophet's life-time; and that 
when this transcript was completed, Gabriel 
presented the Prophet with another copy of 
the whole, written by his own arch-angelic 
hand in heaven, whereby the greatest honour 
and most perfect satisfaction that could be 
given to man were imparted, and the most 
conclusive proof afforded of the fidelity with 
which Othman had executed his holy task. 
For when his copy was collated with the 
Angel's it was found to be so exact, "that 
not the Least tittle was variated or omitted, 



but it seemect as if the same hand and pen 
had written them both," the only difference 
being in the size of the letters, and con- 
sequently of the two books, and in their 
legibility. 

Gabriel's copy was contained in sixteen 
leaves, the size of a Damascus coin, not 
larger than an English shilling ; and the 
strokes of the letters were so much finer 
than any human hair or any visible thread, 
that they are compared to the hairs of a ser- 
pent, which are so fine that no microscope 
has ever yet discovered them. They were 
plainly legible to all who were pure and 
undefiled ; but no unclean person could dis- 
cern a single syllable, nor could any pen 
ever be made fine enough to imitate such 
writing. The ink was of a rich purple, the 
cover of a bright chesnut colour. Mahom- 
med continually carried this wonderful book 
about him in his bosom, and when he slept 
he had it always under his pillow or next 
his heart. After his decease it disappeared, 
nor though Othman and Ali diligently sought 
for it could it ever be found; it was believed, 
therefore, to have returned to the place from 
whence it came. 

But this is a legend of later date ; and 
learned Mahommedans would reject it not 
merely as being apocryphal, but as false. 

Before I have done with the subject, let 
me here, on the competent authority of 
Major Edward Moore, inform the European 
reader, who may be ignorant of Arabic, that 
the name of the Arabian False Prophet is, 
in the language of his own country, written 
with four letters — M. H. M. D. — a charac- 
ter called teshdid over the medial M de- 
noting that sound to be prolonged or doubled ; 
so that Mahamraad would better than any 
other spelling represent the current vernacu- 
lar pronunciation. 

Here let me observe by the way, that the 
work which the reader has now the privi- 
lege of perusing is as justly entitled to the 
name of the Koran as the so-called pseudo- 
bible itself, because the word signifies " that* 
which ought to be read;'" and, moreover, 
that like the Musselman's Koran, it might 
also be called Dhikr, which is, being inter- 



THE DOCTOR. 



171 



preted, " the Admonition" because of the 
salutary instruction and advice which it is 
intended to convey. 

Take, if ye can, ye careless and supine, 
Counsel and caution from a voice like mine ! 
Truths that the theorist could never reach, 
And observation taught me, I would teach.* 

Having given the reader this timely inti- 
mation, I shall now explain in what my 
commentators will find a difficulty of the 
same kind as that which Abubeker would 
have had, if, in putting together the disor- 
derly writings entrusted to his care, he had 
endeavoured to arrange them according to 
the order in which the several portions were 
produced. 

When Mahommed wanted to establish an 
ordinance for his followers, or to take out 
a licence for himself for the breach of his 
own laws, as when he chose to have an extra 
allowance of wives, or coveted those of his 
neighbours, he used to promulgate a frag- 
ment of the Koran, revealed pro re natd, 
that is to say in honest old English, for the 
nonce. It has been determined with suffi- 
cient accuracy at what times certain portions 
were composed, because the circumstances 
in his public or private history which ren- 
dered them necessary, or convenient, are 
known. And what has been done with these 
parts, might have been done with the whole, 
if due pains had been taken, at a time when 
persons were still living who knew when, and 
why, every separate portion had been, — as 
they believed, — revealed. This would have 
required more diligence than the first Ca- 
liph had either leisure or inclination to 
bestow, and perhaps more sagacity than he 
possessed ; the task would have been diffi- 
cult, but it was possible. 

But my commentators will never be able 
to ascertain any thing more of the chronology 
of this Koran, than the dates of its concep- 
tion, and of its birth-day, the interval be- 
tween them having been more than twenty 
years. 



INTERCHAPTER X. 

MORE ON THE FOREGOING SUBJECT. ELUCI- 
DATION FROM HENRY MORE AND DOCTOR 
WATTS. AN INCIDENTAL OPINION UPON 
HORACE WALPOLE. THE STREAM OF 

THOUGHT "FEOWETH AT ITS OWN SWEET 
WILE." PICTURES AND BOOKS. A SAYING 
OF MR. PITT'S CONCERNING WILBERFORCE. 
THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS IN WHAT SENSE 
IT MIGHT BE SAID THAT HE SOMETIMES 
SHOOTS WITH A LONG BOW. 

Vorrei, disse il Signor Gasparo Pallavicino, che voi 
ragionassi nn poco piu minutamente di questo, che non- 
fate ; che en vero vi tenete molto al generate, et quasi ci 
mostraie le cose per transito. Il Cortegiano. 

Henry More, in the Preface General to 
the collection of his philosophical writings, 
says to the reader, " if thy curiosity be for- 
ward to inquire what I have done in these 
new editions of my books, I am ready to 
inform thee that I have taken the same 
liberty in this Intellectual Garden of my 
own planting, that men usually take in their 
natural ones ; which is, to set or pluck up, 
to transplant and inoculate, where and what 
they please. And therefore if I have rased 
out some things, (which yet are but very 
few) and transposed others, and interserted 
others, I hope I shall seem injurious to no 
man in ordering and cultivating this Philo- 
sophical Plantation of mine according to 
mine own humour and liking." 

Except as to the rasing out, what our 
great Platonist has thus said for himself, 
may here be said for me. " Many things," 
as the happy old lutanist, Thomas Mace, 
says, " are good, yea, very good ; but yet 
upon after-consideration we have met with 
the comparative, which is better ; yen, and 
after that, with the superlative, (best of all), 
by adding to, or altering a little, the same 
good things." 

During the years that this Opus has been 
in hand (and in head and heart also) no- 
thing was expunged as if it had become 
obsolete because the' persons therein alluded 
to had departed like shadows, or the subjects 
there touched on had grown out of date ; 



172 



THE DOCTOR. 



but much was introduced from time to time 
where it fitted best. Allusions occur in 
relation to facts which are many years 
younger than the body of the chapter in 
which they have been grafted, thus render- 
ing it impossible for any critic, however 
acute, to determine the date of any one 
chapter by its contents. 

What Watts has said of his own Treatise 
upon the Improvement of the Mind may 
therefore, with strict fidelity, be applied to 
this book, which I trust, O gentle Eeader, 
thou wilt regard as specially conducive to 
the improvement of thine. " The work was 
composed at different times, and by slow 
degrees. Now and then indeed it spread 
itself into branches and leaves, like a plant 
in April, and advanced seven or eight pages 
in a week ; and sometimes it lay by without 
growth, like a vegetable in the winter, and 
did not increase half so much in the revolu- 
tion of a year. As thoughts occurred to me 
in reading or meditation, or in my notices 
of the various appearances of things among 
mankind, they were thrown under appropri- 
ate heads, and were, by degrees, reduced 
to such a method as the subject would 
admit. The language and dress of these 
sentiments is such as the present temper of 
mind dictated, whether it were grave or 
pleasant, severe or smiling. And a book 
which has been twenty years in writing may 
be indulged in some variety of style and 
manner, though I hope there will not be 
found any great difference of sentiment." 
With little transposition Watts' s words have 
been made to suit my purpose ; and when 
he afterwards speaks of " so many lines 
altered, so many things interlined, and so 
many paragraphs and pages here and there 
inserted," the circumstances which he men- 
tions as having deceived him in computing 
the extent of his work, set forth the embar- 
rassment which the commentators will find 
in settling the chronology of mine. 

The difficulty would not be obviated were 
I, like Horace Walpole, — (though Heaven 
knows for no such motives as influenced that 
posthumous libeller,) — to leave a box con- 
taining the holograph manuscript of this 



Opus in safe custody, with an injunction 
that the seals should not be broken till the 
year of our Lord 2000. Nothing more than 
what has been here stated would appear in 
that inestimable manuscript. Whether I 
shall leave it as an heir-loom in my family, 
or have it deposited either in the public 
library of my Alma Mater, or that of my 
own College, or bequeath it as a last mark 
of affection to the town of Doncaster, con- 
cerns not the present reader. Nor does it 
concern him to know whether the till-then- 
undiscoverable name of the author will be 
disclosed at the opening of the seals. An 
adequate motive for placing the manuscript 
in safe custody is, that a standard would 
thus be secured for posterity whereby the 
always accumulating errors of the press 
might be corrected. For modern printers 
make more and greater blunders than the 
copyists of old. 

In any of those works which posterity will 
not be " willing to let perish," how greatly 
would the interest be enhanced, if the whole 
history of its rise and progress were known, 
and amid what circumstances, and with 
what views, and in what state of mind, 
certain parts were composed. Sir Walter, 
than whom no man ever took more accurate 
measure of the public taste, knew this well ; 
and posterity will always be grateful to him 
for having employed his declining years in 
communicating so much of the history of 
those works which obtained a wider and 
more rapid celebrity than any that ever 
preceded them, and perhaps than any that 
ever may follow them. 

An author of the last generation, (I can- 
not call to mind who,) treated such an opi- 
nion with contempt, saying in his preface that 
" there his work was, and that as the Public 
were concerned with it only as it appeared 
before them, he should say nothing that 
would recal the blandishments of its child- 
hood : " whether the book was one of which 
the maturity might just as well be forgotten 
as the nonage, I do not remember. But he 
must be little versed in bibliology who has 
not learnt that such reminiscences are not 
more agreeable to an author himself, than 



THE DOCTOR. 



173 



they are to his readers, (if he obtain any,) 
in after times ; for every trifle that relates 
to the history of a favourite author, and of 
his works, then becomes precious. 

Far be it for me to despise the relic - 
mongers of literature, or to condemn them, 
except when they bring to light things which 
ought to have been buried with the dead ; 
like the Dumfries craniologists, who, when 
the grave of Burns was opened to receive 
the corpse of his wife, took that opportunity 
of abstracting the poet's skull that they 
might make a cast from it ! Had these men 
forgotten the malediction which Shakespeare 
utters from his monument ? And had they 
never read what Wordsworth says to such 
men in his Poet's epitaph — 

Art thou one all eyes, 
Philosopher ! a fingering slave, 
One that would peep and botanize 
Upon his mother's grave ? 

Wrapt closely in thy sensual fleece, 
O turn aside, — and take, I pray, 
That he below may rest in peace, 
Thy pin-point of a soul away ! 

O for an hour of Burns' for these men's 
sake! Were there a Witch of Endor in 
Scotland it would be an act of comparative 
piety in her to bring up his spirit ; to stig- 
matise them in verses that would burn for 
ever would be a gratification for which he 
might think it worth while to be thus 
brought again upon earth. 

But to the harmless relic- mongers we owe 
much ; much to the Thomas Hearnes and 
John Nichols, the Isaac Reids and the 
Malones, the Haslewoods and Sir Egertons. 
Individually, I owe them much, and willingly 
take this opportunity of acknowledging the 
obligation. And let no one suppose that Sir 
Egerton is disparaged by being thus classed 
among the pioneers of literature. It is no 
disparagement for any man of letters, how- 
ever great his endowments, and however 
extensive his erudition, to take part in those 
patient and humble labours by which honour 
is rendered to his predecessors, and informa- 
tion preserved for those who come after him. 

But in every original work which lives 
and deserves to live, there must have been 
some charms which no editorial diligence can 



preserve, no critical sagacity recover. The 
pictures of the old masters suffer much when 
removed from the places for which they, and 
in which many of them were painted. It 
may happen that one which has been con- 
veyed from a Spanish palace or monastery to 
the collection of Marshal Soult, or any 
other Plunder-Master- General in Napoleon's 
armies, and have passed from thence, — 
honestly as regards the purchaser, — to the 
hands of an English owner, may be hung at 
the same elevation as in its proper place, 
and in the same light. Still it loses much. 
The accompaniments are all of a different 
character ; the air and odour of the place 
are different. There is not here the locality 
that consecrated it, — no longer the religio 
loci. Wealth cannot purchase these ; power 
may violate and destroy, but it cannot 
transplant them. The picture in its new 
situation is seen with a different feeling, by 
those who have any true feeling for such 
things. 

Literary works of imagination, fancy, or 
feeling, are liable to no injury of this kind ; 
but in common with pictures they suffer a 
partial deterioration in even a short lapse of 
time. In such works as in pictures, there 
are often passages which once possessed a 
peculiar interest, personal and local, subor- 
dinate to the general interest. The painter 
introduced into an historical piece the por- 
trait of his mistress, his wife, his child, his 
dog, his friend, or his faithful servant. The 
picture is not, as a work of art, the worse 
where these persons were not known, or when 
they are forgotten : but there was once a 
time when it excited on this account in very 
many beholders, a peculiar delight which it 
can never more impart. 

So it is with certain books : and though 
there is perhaps little to regret in any thing 
that becomes obsolete, an author may be 
allowed to sigh over what he feels and knows 
to be evanescent. 

Mr. Pitt used to say of Wilberforce that 
he was not so single minded in his speeches 
as might have been expected from the sin- 
cerity of his character, and as he would have 
been if he had been less dependant upon 



174 



THE DOCTOR. 



popular support. Those who knew him, 
and how he was connected, he said, could 
perceive that some things in his best speeches 
were intended to tell in such and such quar- 
ters, — upon Benjamin Sleek in one place, 
Isaac Drab in another, and Nehemiah Wily- 
man in a third. — Well would it be if no 
man ever looked askant with worse motives ! 

Observe, Reader, that I call him simply 
Wilberforce, because any common prefix 
would seem to disparage that name, espe- 
cially if used by one who regarded him with 
admiration ; and with respect, which is bet- 
ter than admiration, because it can be felt 
for those only whose virtues entitle them to 
it ; and with kindliness, which is better than 
both, because it is called forth by those 
kindly qualities that are worth more than 
any talents, and without which a man, 
though he may be both great and good, 
never can be amiable. No one was ever 
blest with a larger portion of those gifts and 
graces which make up the measure of an 
amiable and happy man. 

It will not be thought then that I have 
repeated with any disrespectful intention 
what was said of Wilberforce by Mr. Pitt. 
The observation was brought to mind while 
I was thinking how many passages in these 
volumes were composed with a double in- 
tention, one for the public and for posterity, 
the other private and personal, written with 
special pleasure on my part, speciali gratia, 
for the sake of certain individuals. Some of 
these, which are calculated for the meridian of 
Doncaster, the commentators may possibly, 
if they make due research, discover ; but 
there are others which no ingenuity can 
detect. Their quintessence exhales when 
the private, which was in these cases the 
primary, intention has been fulfilled. Yet 
tin: consciousness of the emotions which 
those passages will excite, the recollections 
they will awaken, the surprise and the smile 
with which they will be received, — yea and 
the melancholy gratification, — even to tears, 
— which they will impart, has been one and 
not the least of the many pleasures which I 
have experienced while employed upon this 
work. 



JloXKoc fu.01 {/%■' ccynSj- 
-vog iiy,ia. /3iXt] 
EvSuv Ivr) <p«£ST§«j 
Q>mu.vT(x. trui/tro'icriv .* 

But while thus declaring that these 
volumes contain much covert intention of 
this kind, I utterly disclaim all covert male- 
volence. My roving shafts are more harm- 
less even than bird bolts, and can hurt none 
on whom they fall. The arrows with which 
I take aim carry tokens of remembrance and 
love, and may be likened to those by which 
intelligence has been conveyed into besieged 
places. Of such it is that I have been speak- 
ing. Others, indeed, I have in the quiver 
which are pointed and barbed. 

-rtx,TOv (ZiXos oi,Kxa. r%i<pu.* 

When one of these is let fly, (with sure aim 
and never without just cause,) it has its 
address written on the shaft at full length, 
like that which Aster directed from the 
walls of Methone to Philip's right eye. 

Or 1 e'est assez s* estre esgare de son grand 
chemin: j^y retourne et le bats, et le trace 
comme devant.f 



CHAPTER LXXVIII. 

AMATORY POETRY NOT ALWAYS OF THE 
WISEST KIND. AN ATTEMPT TO CONVEY 
SOME NOTION OF ITS QUANTITY. TRUE 
LOVE, THOUGH NOT IN EVERY CASE THE 
BEST POET, THE BEST MORALIST ALWAYS. 

El Amor es tan ingenioso, que en mi opinion, maspoetas 
ha hecho el solo, que la misma nnturaleza. 

Perez de Montalvan. 

I return to the loves of Leonard and 
Margaret. 

That poet asked little from his mistress, 
who entreated her to bestow upon him, not 
a whole look, for this would have been too 
great a mercy for a miserable lover, but 
part of a look, whether it came from the 
white of her eye, or the black, and if even 
that were too much, then he besought her 
only to seem to look at him : 



TlNDAH. 



t Brantomi 



THE DOCTOR. 



175 



Un guardo — un guardo ? no, troppo pietate 

E per misero Amante un guardo intero ; 
Solo un de' vostri raggi, occhi girate, 

parte del bel bianco, o del bel nero. 
E se troppo vi par, non mi mirate ,• 

Ma fate sol sembiante di mirarmi, 

Che nol potete far senza bearmi.* 

This is a new thought in amatory poetry ; 
and the difficulty of striking out a new- 
thought in such poetry, is of all difficulties 
the greatest. Think of a look from the 
white of an eye ! Even part of a look, 
however, is more than a lady will bestow 
upon one whom she does not favour ; and 
more than one whom she favours will con- 
sent to part with. An Innamorato Furioso in 
one of Dryden's tragedies says : 

I'll not one corner of a glance resign ! 

Poor Robert Greene, whose repentance 
has not been disregarded by just posterity, 
asked his mistress in his licentious days, to 
look upon him with one eye, (no doubt he 
meant a sheep's eye ;) this also was a new 
thought ; and he gave the reason for his re- 
quest in this sonnet — 

On women nature did bestow two eyes, 

Like heaven's bright lamps, in matchless beauty shining, 

Whose beams do soonest captivate the wise, 

And wary heads, made rare by art's refining. 

But why did nature, in her choice combining, 

Plant two fair eyes within a beauteous face ? 

That they might favour two with equal grace. 

Venus did soothe up Vulcan with one eye, 

With the other granted Mars his wished glee. 

If she did so whom Hymen did defy, 

Think love no sin, but grant an eye to me ! 

In vain else nature gave two stars to thee. 

If then two eyes may well two friends maintain, 

Allow of two, and prove not nature vain. 

Love, they say, invented the art of tracing 
likenesses, and thereby led the way to por- 
trait painting. Some painters it has cer- 
tainly made ; whether it ever made a poet 
may be doubted : but there can be no doubt 
that under its inspiration more bad poetry 
has been produced than by any, or all other 



Haec via jam cunctis nota est, haec trita poetis 
Materia, hanc omnis tractat ubique liber. f 

As the most forward bud 
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow, 
Even so by Love the young and tender wit 
Is turn'd to folly.J 



* Chiabrera. 



f SCAURANUS 



X Shakespeare. 



Vanity, presumption, ambition, adulation, 
malice and folly, flatulent emptiness and ill- 
digested fulness, misdirected talent and mis- 
applied devotion, wantonness and want, 
good motives, bad motives, and mixed mo- 
tives have given birth to verses in such 
numberless numbers, that the great lake of 
Oblivion in which they have sunk, must 
long ago have been filled up, if there had 
been any bottom to it. But had it been so 
filled up, and a foundation thus laid, the 
quantity of love poems which have gone to 
the same place, would have made a pile 
there that would have been the eighth won- 
der of the world. It would have dwarfed 
the Pyramids. Pelion upon Ossa would 
have seemed but a type of it ; and the 
Tower of Babel would not, even when that 
Tower was at its highest elevation, have 
overtopped it, though the old rhyme says 
that 

Seven mile sank, and seven mile fell, 
And seven mile still stand and ever shall. 
Ce n'est que feu de leursfroids chaleurs, 
Ce n'est qu' horreur de leurs feintes douleurs, 
Ce n'est encor de leurs souspirs etpleurs, 

Que vents, pluye, et orages : 
Et bref, ce n'est a ouir leurs chansons, 
De leurs amours, que flammes etglagons, 
Fleches, liens, et mille autres f aeons 

De semblables outrages. 

De vox beautex, ce n'est que tout fin or, 
Perlcs, crystal, marbre, et ivoyre encor, 
Et tout Vhonneur de VIndique thresor, 

Fleurs, lis, ceillets, et roses : 
De vox doulceurs ce n'est que succre et miel, 
De vox rigueures n'est qu' aloe's, etfiel, 
Devox esprits e'est tous ce que le ciel 

Tient de graces encloses. 

* * * * 
II n'y a roc, qui n'entende leurs voix, 
Leurs piieux cris ontfaict cent mille fois 
Pleurer les monts, les plaines, et les bois, 

Les ant res etfonteines. 
Bref, il n'y a ny solitaires lieux, 
N'y lieux hantex, voyre mesmes les cieux, 
Qui qa et la ne montrent a leurs yeux 

L'image de leurs peines. 

Cestuy-la porte en son cueur fiuclucux 
De I' Ocean les flots tumultueux, 
Cestuy l' horreur des vents impctueux 

Sortans de leur caverne : 
L'un d'un Caucase, et Mongibcl sc plaingt, 
L' autre en veillant plus de songes se peingt, 
Qu'il n'enfut onq'en cest ormc, qu'onfcinct 

En la fosse d'Averne. 

Qui contrefaiet ce Tan/ale mourant 
Enisle de soif au milieu d'un torrent, 
Qui repaissant unaigle devorant, 
S'accoustre en Promethce : 



176 



THE DOCTOR. 



Et qui encor, par un plus chaste vccu, 
En se bruslant, veult Hcrcule estre veu, 
Mais qui sc mue en eau, air, terre, etfeu, 
Comme uu second Protee. 

L'un meurt defroid, et F autre meurt de chauldj 

L'un vole bas, et V autre vole hault, 

L'uji est c/tctif, V autre a ce qui luy fault ; 

L'un sur Vesprit sefonde, 
L 'autre s'arreste a la beaute die corps ; 
On ne vid onq' si horribles discords 
En ce cahos, qui troubloit les accords 

Donifut basty le monde.* 

But, on the other hand, if love, simple love, 
is the worst of poets, that same simple love is 
beyond comparison the best of letter writers. 
In love poems conceits are distilled from the 
head ; in love letters feelings flow from the 
heart; and feelings are never so feelingly 
uttered, affection never so affectionately 
expressed, truth never so truly spoken, as 
in such a correspondence. Oh, if the dis- 
position which exists at such times were 
sustained through life, marriage would then 
be indeed the perfect union, the " excellent 
mystery" which our Father requires from 
those who enter into it, that it should be 
made ; and which it might always be, 
under his blessing, were it not for the mis- 
conduct of one or the other party, or of 
both. If such a disposition were maintained, 
— " if the love of husbands and wives were 
grounded (as it then would be) in virtue 
and religion, it would make their lives a 
kind of heaven on earth ; it would prevent 
all those contentions and brawlings which 
are the great plagues of families, and the 
lesser hell in passage to the greater." Let 
no reader think the worse of that sentence 
because it is taken from that good homely 
old book, the better for being homely, en- 
titled the Whole Duty of Man. 

I once met with a book in which a ser- 
vant girl had written on a blank leaf, "no£ 
much love after marriage, but a good deal be- 
fore ! " In her station of life this is but too 
true ; and in high stations also, and in all 
those intermediate grades where either the 
follies of the world, or its cares, exercise 
over us an unwholesome influence. But it 
is not so with well constituted minds in 
those favourable circumstances wherein the 



Joachim do Bellay. 



heart is neither corrupted by wealth, nor 
hardened by neediness. So far as the ten- 
dency of modern usages is to diminish the 
number of persons who are thus circum- 
stanced, in that same proportion must the 
sum of happiness be diminished, and of 
those virtues which are the only safeguard 
of a nation. And that modern policy and 
modern manners have this tendency, must 
be apparent to every one who observes the 
course both of public and private life. 

This girl had picked up a sad maxim 
from the experience of others ; I hope it did 
not as a consequence make her bestow too 
much love before marriage herself, and meet 
with too little after it. I have said much of 
worthless verses upon this subject ; take 
now, readers, some that may truly be called 
worthy of it. They are by the Manchester 
poet, Charles Swain. 
i. 

Love ? — I will tell thee what it is to love ! 
It is to build with human thoughts a shrine, 
Where Hope sits brooding like a beauteous dove ; 
Where Time seems young, and Life a thing divine. 
All tastes, all pleasures, all desires combine 
To consecrate this sanctuary of bliss. 
Above, the stars in shroudless beauty shine ; 
Around, the streams their flowery margins kiss ; 
And if there's heaven on earth, that heaven is surely this ! 

2. 
Yes, this is Love, the stedfast and the true, 
The immortal glory which hath never set ; 
The best, the brightest boon the heart e'er knew : 
Of all life's sweets the very sweetest yet ! 
Oh ! who but can recall the eve they met 
To breathe, in some green walk, their first young vow, 
While summer flowers with moonlight dews were wet, 
And winds sigh'd soft around the mountain's brow, 
And all was rapture then which is but memory now ! 

The dream of life indeed can last with none 
of us, — 

As if the thing beloved were all a Saint, 
And every place she entered were a shrine : t 

but it must be our own fault, when it has 
passed away, if the realities disappoint us : 
they are not "weary, stale, flat and unpro- 
fitable," unless we ourselves render them so. 
The preservation of the species is not the 
sole end for which love was implanted in 
the human heart ; that end the Almighty 
might as easily have effected by other 
means : not so the development of our 

t C.ONniBEItT. 



THE DOCTOR. 



177 



moral nature, which is its higher purpose. 

The comic poet asserts that 

Varum Mud verbum est vulgo quod diet solet, 
0/niies sibi esse melius malle, quam alteri : * 

but this is not true in love. The lover never 
says 

Heus proximus sum egomei mihi ; * 

He knows and understands the falsehood of 
the Greek adage, 

fi).;7S' ictv70v rrXnov ouiiis oii^ivx' 

and not lovers alone, but husbands and 
wives, and parents, feel that there are others 
who are dearer to them than themselves. 
Little do they know of human nature who 
speak of marriage as doubling our pleasures 
and dividing our griefs : it doubles, or more 
than doubles both. 



CHAPTER LXXIX. 

AN EARLY BEREAVEMENT. TRUE LOVE ITS 
OWN COMFORTER. A LONELY FATHER AND 
AN ONLY CHILD. 

Read ye that run the aweful truth, 
With which I charge my page ; 

A worm is in the bud of youth, 
And at the root of age. Cowper. 

Leonard was not more than eight-and- 
twenty when he obtained a living, a few 
miles from Doncaster. He took his bride 
with him to the vicarage. The house was 
as humble as the benefice, which was worth 
less than £50 a-year ; but it was soon made 
the neatest cottage in the country round, 
and upon a happier dwelling the sun never 
shone. A few acres of good glebe were 
attached to it ; and the garden was large 
enough to afford healthful and pleasurable 
employment to its owners. The course of 
true love never ran more smoothly ; but its 
course was short. 

O how this spring of love resembleth 
The uncertain glory of an April day, 

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, 
And by and by a cloud takes all away ! f 

Little more than five years from the time of 
their marriage had elapsed, before a head- 



* Terence. 



t Shakespeare. 



stone in the adjacent churchyard told where 
the remains of Margaret Bacon had been 
deposited in the 30th year of her age. 

When the stupor and the agony of that 
bereavement had passed away, the very in- 
tensity of Leonard's affection became a 
source of consolation Margaret had been 
to him a purely ideal object during the 
years of his youth ; death had again ren- 
dered her such. Imagination had beautified 
and idolised her then ; faith sanctified and 
glorified her now. She had been to him on 
earth all that he had fancied, all that he had 
hoped, all that he had desired. She would 
again be so in heaven. And this second 
union nothing could impede, nothing could 
interrupt, nothing could dissolve. He had 
only to keep himself worthy of it by cherish- 
ing her memory, hallowing his heart to it 
while he performed a parent's duty to their 
child ; and so doing to await his own sum- 
mons, which must one day come, which 
every day was brought nearer, and which 
any day might bring. 

'Tis the only discipline we are born for; 

All studies else are but as circular lines, 

And death the centre where they must all meet. J 

The same feeling which from his child- 
hood had refined Leonard's heart, keeping- 
it pure and undefiled, had also corroborated 
the natural strength of his character, and 
made him firm of purpose. It was a saying 
of Bishop Andrewes that "good husbandry 
is good divinity;" "the truth whereof," 
says Fuller, " no wise man will deny." Fru- 
gality he had always practised as a needful 
virtue, and found that in an especial manner 
it brings with it its own reward. He now 
resolved upon scrupulously setting apart a 
fourth of his small income to make a pro- 
vision for his child, in case of her surviving 
him, as in the natural course of things might 
be expected. If she should be removed 
before him, — for this was an event the pos- 
sibility of which he always bore in mind, — 
he had resolved that whatever should have 
been accumulated with this intent, should be 
disposed of to some other pious purpose, — - *■ 

% Massinger. 



178 



THE DOCTOR. 



for such, within the limits to which his poor 
means extended, he properly considered 
this. And having entered on this prudential 
course with a calm reliance upon Providence 
in case his hour should come before that 
purpose could be accomplished, he was 
without any earthly hope or fear, — those 
alone excepted, from which no parent can 
be free. 

The child had been christened Deborah 
after her maternal grandmother, for whom 
Leonard ever gratefully retained a most 
affectionate and reverential remembrance. 
She was a healthy, happy creature in body 
and in mind ; at first 

one of those little prating girls 

Of whom fond parents tell such tedious stories ;* 

afterwards, as she grew up, a favourite with 
the village school-mistress, and with the 
whole parish ; docile, good-natured, lively 
and yet considerate, always gay as a lark 
and busy as a bee. One of the pensive 
pleasures in which Leonard indulged was 
to gaze on her unperceived, and trace the 
likeness to her mother. 

Oh Christ ! 
How that which was the life's life of our being, 
Can pass away, and we recall it thus !f 

That resemblance which was strong in 
childhood lessened as the child grew up ; 
for Margaret's countenance had acquired a 
cast of meek melancholy during those years 
in which the bread of bitterness had been 
her portion ; and when hope came to her, it 
was that " hope deferred " which takes from 
the cheek its bloom, even when the heart, 
instead of being made sick, is sustained by 
it. But no unhappy circumstances depressed 
the constitutional buoyancy of her daughter's 
spirits. Deborah brought into the world 
the happiest of all nature's endowments, an 
easy temper and a light heart. Eesemblant 
therefore as the features were, the dissimili- 
tude of expression was more apparent ; and 
when Leonard contrasted in thought the 
sunshine of hilarity that lit up his daughter's 
face, with the sort of moonlight loveliness 



which had given a serene and saint-like 
character to her mother's, he wished to per- 
suade himself that as the early translation of 
the one seemed to have been thus prefi- 
gured, the other might be destined to live 
for the happiness of others till a good old 
age, while length of years in their course 
should ripen her for heaven. 



CHAPTER LXXX. 

OBSERVATIONS WHICH SHOW THAT WHAT- 
EVER PRIDE MEN MAY TAKE IN THE 
APPELLATIONS THEY ACQUIRE IN THEIR 
PROGRESS THROUGH THE WORLD, THEIR 
DEAREST NAME DIES BEFORE THEM. 



Thus they who reach 

Grey hairs, die piecemeal. 



Sou THEY. 



* DCIYDF.N. 



t Isaac Comnf.nus. 



The name of Leonard must now be dropped 
as we proceed. Some of the South- Ame- 
rican tribes, among whom the Jesuits la- 
boured with such exemplary zeal, and who 
take their personal appellations, (as most 
names were originally derived,) from beasts, 
birds, plants, and other visible objects, abo- 
lish upon the death of every individual the 
name by which he was called, and invent 
another for the thing from which it was 
taken, so that their language, owing to this 
curiously inconvenient custom, is in a state 
of continual change. An abolition almost 
as complete with regard to the person had 
taken place in the present instance. The 
name, Leonard, was consecrated to him by 
all his dearest and fondest recollections. 
He had been known by it on his mother's 
knees, and in the humble cottage of that 
aunt who had been to him a second mother ; 
and by the wife of his bosom, his first, last, 
and only love. Margaret had never spoken 
to him, never thought of him, by any other 
name. From the hour of her death, no 
human voice ever addressed him by it again. 
He never heard himself so called, except in 
dreams. It existed only in the dead letter ; 
he signed it mechanically in the course of 
business, but it had ceased to be a living 
name. 



THE DOCTOR. 



179 



Men willingly prefix a handle to their 
names, and tack on to them any two or 
more honorary letters of the alphabet as a 
tail ; they drop their surnames for a dignity, 
and change them for an estate or a title. 
They are pleased to be Doctor'd and Pro- 
fessor'd ; to be Captain'd, Major'd, Colonel'd, 
General'd, or Admiral'd; — to be Sir John'd, 
my-Lorded, or your-Graced. " You and I," 
says Cranmer in his Answer to Gardiner's 
book upon Transubstantiation — " you and 
I were delivered from our surnames when 
we were consecrated Bishops ; sithence 
which time we have so commonly been used 
of all men to be called Bishops, you of Win- 
chester, and I of Canterbury, that the most 
part of the people know not that your name 
is Gardiner, and mine Cranmer. And I 
pray God, that we being called to the name 
of Lords, have not forgotten our own baser 
estates, that once we were simple squires ! " — 
But the emotion with which the most suc- 
cessful suitor of Fortune hears himself first 
addressed by a new and honourable title, 
conferred upon him for his public deserts, 
touches his heart less, (if that heart be sound 
at the core,) than when, after long absence, 
some one who is privileged so to use it, accosts 
him by his christian name, — that household 
name which he has never heard but from 
his nearest relations, and his old familiar 
friends. By this it is that we are known to 
all around us in childhood ; it is used only 
by our parents and our nearest kin when 
that stage is passed ; and as they drop off, it 
dies as to its oral uses with them. 

It is because we are remembered more 
naturally in our family and paternal circles 
by our baptismal than our hereditary names, 
and remember ourselves more naturally by 
them, that the Roman Catholic, renouncing, 
upon a principle of perverted piety, all 
natural ties when he enters a convent and 
voluntarily dies to the world, assumes a new 
one. This is one manifestation of that in- 
tense selfishness which the law of monastic 
life inculcates, and affects to sanctify. Alas, 
there need no motives of erroneous religion 
to wean us from the ties of blood and of 
affection ! They are weakened and dissolved 



by fatal circumstances and the ways of the 
world, too frequently and too soon. 

" Our men of rank," said my friend one 
day when he was speaking upon this subject, 
" are not the only persons who go by dif- 
ferent appellations in different parts of their 
lives. We all moult our names in the 
natural course of life, I was Dan in my 
father's house, and should still be so with 
my uncle William and Mr. Guy, if they 
were still living. Upon my removal to 
Doncaster, my master and mistress called 
me Daniel, and my acquaintance Dove. In 
Holland I was Mynheer Duif. Now I am 
the Doctor, and not among my patients 
only; friends, acquaintance, and strangers, 
address me by this appellation ; even my 
wife calls me by no other name ; and I shall 
never be any thing but the Doctor again, — 
till I am registered at my burial by the 
same names as at my christening." 



CHAPTER LXXXI. 

A QUESTION WHETHER LOVE SHOULD BE 
FAITHFUL TO THE DEAD. DOUBTS AD- 
VANCED AND CASES STATED. 

even in spite of death, yet still my choice, 
Oft with the inward all-beholding eye 

1 think I see thee, and I hear thy voice ! 

Lord Sterline. 

In the once popular romance of Astrea the 
question si Amour peut mourir par la mort 
de la chose aimee ? is debated in reference 
to the faithful shepherd, Tyrcis, who, having 
lost his mistress Cleon, (Cleon serving for a 
name feminine in French, as Stella has done 
in English,) and continuing constant to her 
memory, is persecuted by the pertinacious 
advances of Laonice. The sage shepherd, 
Sylvandre, before whom the point is argued, 
and to whom it is referred for judgment, 
delivers, to the great disappointment of the 
lady, the following sentence : Qiiune Amour 
perissable riest pas vray Amour ; car il doit 
suivre le sujet qui luy a domic naissancc. 
Cest pourquoy ceux qui out aime le corps 
seulemcnt, doivent enclorre toidcs les amours 



180 



THE DOCTOR. 



du corps dans le mesme tombeau ou il senserre : 
mats ceux qui outre cela out aime V esprit, 
doivent avec leur Amour voter apres cet esprit 
aime jusques au plus haut del, sans que les 
distances les puissent separer. 

The character of a constant mourner is 
sometimes introduced in romances of the 
earlier and nobler class ; but it is rare in 
those works of fiction, and indeed it is not 
common in what has happily been called 
the romance of real life. Let me, however, 
restrict this assertion within its proper 
bounds. What is meant to be here asserted 
(and it is pertinent to this part of our story) 
is, that it is not common for any one who 
has been left a widow or widower, early in 
life, to remain so always out of pure affection 
to the memory of the dead, unmingled with 
any other consideration or cause. Such 
constancy can be found only where there is 
the union of a strong imagination and a 
strong heart, — which, perhaps, is a rare 
union ; and if to these a strong mind be 
united, the effect would probably be different. 

It is only in a strong imagination that the 
deceased object of affection can retain so 
firm a hold, as never to be dispossessed from 
it by a living one ; and when the imagina- 
tion is thus possessed, unless the heart be 
strong, the heart itself, or the intellect, is 
likely to give way. A deep sense of religion 
would avert the latter alternative; but I 
will not say that it is any preservative 
against the former. 

A most affecting instance of this kind is 
related by Dr. Uwins in his Treatise on Dis- 
orders of the Brain. A lady on the point 
of marriage, whose intended husband usually 
travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, 
went one day to meet him, and found instead 
of him an old friend, who came to announce 
to her the tidings of his sudden death. 
She uttered a scream, and piteously ex- 
claimed — " he is dead ! " But then all con- 
sciousness of the affliction that had befallen 
her ceased. "From that fatal moment," 
s;ivs the Author, "has this unfortunate fe- 
male daily for fifty years, in all seasons, 
traversed the distance of a few miles to the 
spot where she expected her future husband 



to alight from the coach ; and every day she 
utters in a plaintive tone, ' he is not come 
yet ! I will return to-morrow ! ' " 

There is a more remarkable case in which 
love, after it had long been apparently 
extinct, produced a like effect upon being 
accidentally revived. It is recorded in a 
Glasgow newspaper. An old man residing 
in the neighbourhood of that city found a 
miniature of his wife, taken in her youth. 
She had been dead many years, and he was 
a person of strictly sedate and religious 
habits ; but the sight of this picture over- 
came him. From the time of its discovery 
till his death, which took place some months 
afterwards, he neglected all his ordinary 
duties and employments, and became in a 
manner imbecile, spending whole days with- 
out uttering a word, or manifesting the 
slightest interest in passing occurrences. 
The only one with whom he would hold any 
communication was a little grandchild, who 
strikingly resembled the portrait ; to her he 
was perfectly docile ; and a day or two before 
his death he gave her his purse, and strictly 
enjoined her to lay the picture beside him 
in his coffin, — a request which was accord- 
ingly fulfilled. 

Mr. Newton, of Olney, says, that once in 
the West Indies, upon not receiving letters 
from his wife in England, he concluded that 
surely she wa£ dead, and this apprehension 
affected him so much, that he was nearly 
sinking under it. " I felt, " says he, " some 
severe symptoms of that mixture of pride 
and madness which is commonly called a 
broken heart; and indeed, I wonder that this 
case is not more common than it appears to 
be. How often do the potsherds of the 
earth presume to contend with their Maker ! 
and what a wonder of mercy is it that they 
are not all broken ! " 

This is a stern opinion ; and he who de- 
livered it held stern tenets, though in his 
own disposition compassionate and tender. 
He was one who could project his feelings, 
and relieve himself in the effort. No hus- 
band ever loved his wife more passionately, 
nor with a more imaginative affection ; the 
long and wasting disease by which she was 



THE DOCTOR. 



181 



consumed, affected him proportionably to 
this deep attachment ; but immediately upon 
her death he roused himself, after the ex- 
ample of David, threw off his grief, and 
preached her funeral sermon. He ought to 
have known that this kind of strength and 
in this degree is given to very few of us, — 
that a heart may break, even though it be 
thoroughly resigned to the will of God, and 
acquiesces in it, and has a lively faith in God's 
mercies; — yea, that this very resignation, 
this entire acquiescence, this sure and certain 
hope, may even accelerate its breaking; and 
a soul thus chastened, thus purified, thus 
ripened for immortality, may unconsciously 
work out the deliverance which it ardently, 
but piously withal, desires. 

What were the Doctor's thoughts upon 
this subject, and others connected with it, 
will appear in the proper place. It is 
touched upon here in relation to Leonard. 
His love for Margaret might be said to have 
begun with her life, and it lasted as long as 
his own. No thought of a second marriage 
even entered his mind ; though in the case 
of another person, his calm views of human 
nature and of the course of life would have 
led him to advise it. 



CHAPTER LXXXII. 

THE DOCTOR IS INTRODUCED, BY THE SMALL- 
POX, TO HIS FUTURE WIFE. 

/ Long-waiting love doth entrance find J 
j Into fche slow-believing mind. 

/ Sydney Godolphin. 

When Deborah was about nineteen, the 
small-pox broke out in Doncaster, and soon 
spread over the surrounding country, occa- 
sioning everywhere a great mortality. At 
that time inoculation had very rarely been 
practised in the provinces ; and the preju- 
dice against it was so strong, that Mr. Bacon, 
though convinced in his own mind that the 
practice was not only lawful, but advisable, 
refrained from having his daughter inocu- 
lated till the disease appeared in his own 
parish. He had been induced to defer it 



during her childhood, partly because he was 
unwilling to offend the prejudices of his 
parishioners, which he hoped to overcome by 
persuasion and reasoning when time and 
opportunity might favour ; still more because 
he thought it unjustifiable to introduce such 
a disease into his own house, with immi- 
nent risk of communicating it to others, 
which were otherwise in. no danger, in which 
the same preparations would not be made, 
and where, consequently, the danger would 
be greater. But when the malady had shown 
itself in the parish, then he felt that his 
duty as a parent required him to take the 
best apparent means for the preservation of 
his child ; and that as a pastor also it became 
him now in his own family to set an example 
to his parishioners. 

Deborah, who had the most perfect re- 
liance upon her father's judgment, and 
lived in entire accordance with his will in 
all things, readily consented; and seemed 
to regard the beneficial consequences of the 
experiment to others with hope, rather than 
to look with apprehension to it for herself. 
Mr. Bacon therefore went to Doncaster and 
called upon Dr. Dove. " I do not," said he, 
" ask whether you would advise me to have 
my daughter inoculated ; where so great a 
risk is to be incurred, in the case of an only 
child, you might hesitate to advise it. But 
if you see nothing in her present state of 
health, or in her constitutional tendencies, 
which would render it more than ordinarily 
dangerous, it is her own wish and mine, 
after due consideration on my part, that she 
should be committed to your care, — putting 
our trust in Providence." 

Hitherto there had been no acquaintance 
between Mr. Bacon and the Doctor, farther 
than that they knew each other by sight and 
by good report. This circumstance led to 
a growing intimacy. During the course of 
his attendance the Doctor fell in friendship 
with the father, and the father with him. 

"Did he fall in love with his patient?" 

"No, ladies." 

You have already heard that he once fell 
in love, and how it happened. And you 
have also been informed that he caught love 



182 



THE DOCTOR. 



once, though I have not told you how, be- 
cause it would have led me into too melan- 
choly a tale. In this case he neither fell in 
love, nor caught it, nor ran into it, nor 
walked into it ; nor was he overtaken in it, 
as a boon companion is in liquor, or a run- 
away in his flight. Yet there was love 
between the parties at last, and it was love 
for love, to the heart's content of both. 
How this came to pass will be related at 
the proper time and in the proper place. 

For here let me set before the judicious 
Reader certain pertinent remarks by the 
pious and well-known author of a popular 
treatise upon the Right Use of Reason, — a 
treatise which has been much read to little 
purpose. That author observes, that " those 
writers and speakers, whose chief business 
is to amuse or delight, to allure, terrify, or 
persuade mankind, do not confine them- 
selves to any natural order, but in a cryp- 
tical or hidden method, adapt every thing 
to their designed ends. Sometimes they omit 
those things which might injure their design, 
or grow tedious to their hearers, though they 
seem to have a necessary relation to the 
point in hand ; sometimes they add those 
things which have no great reference to the 
subject, but are suited to allure or refresh 
the mind and the ear. They dilate some- 
times, and flourish long upon little inci- 
dents, and they skip over, and but lightly 
touch the drier part of the theme. — They 
omit things essential which are not beautiful ; 
they insert little needless circumstances and 
beautiful digressions : they invert times and 
actions, in order to place every thing in the 
most affecting light ; — they place the first 
things last, and the last things first with 
wondrous art; and yet so manage it as to 
conceal their artifice, and lead the senses 
and passions of their hearers into a pleasing 
and powerful captivity." 



CHAPTER LXXXIII. 

THE AUTHOR REQUESTS THE READER NOT 
TO BE IMPATIENT. SHOWS FROM LORD 
SHAFTESBURY AT WHAT RATE A JUDICIOUS 
WRITER OUGHT TO PROCEED. DISCLAIMS 
PROLIXITY FOR HIMSELF, AND GIVES 
EXAMPLES OF IT IN A GERMAN PROFESSOR, 
A JEWISH RABBI, AND TWO COUNSELLORS, 
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN. 

Pand. He that will have a cake out of the wheat, must 
tarry the grinding. 

Troilus. Have I not tarried ? 

Pand. Ay, the grinding ; but you must tarry the bolting. 

Troilus. Have I not tarried ? 

Pand. Ay, the bolting; but you must tarry the 
leavening. 

Troilus. Still have I tarried. 

Pand. Ay, to the leavening: but here's yet in the 
word hereafter, the kneading, the making of the cake, the 
heating of the oven, and the baking ; nay, you must stay 
the cooling too ; or you may chance to burn your lips. 
Troilus and Cressida. 

I passed over fourteen years of the Doctor's 
boyhood and adolescence, as it may be re- 
membered was stated in the twenty -fifth 
Chapter ; but I must not in like manner pass 
over the years that intervened between his 
first acquaintance with Deborah Bacon, and 
the happy day whereon the bells of St. 
George's welcomed her to Doncaster as his 
bride. It would be as inconsistent with my 
design to pretermit this latter portion of his 
life, as it would have been incompatible 
with my limits to have recorded the details 
of the former, worthy to be recorded as they 
were. If any of my readers should be im- 
patient on this occasion, and think that I 
ought to have proceeded to the marriage 
without delay, or at least to the courtship, I 
must admonish them in the words of a 
Turkish saying, that " hurry comes from the 
Devil, and slow advancing from Allah." — 
"Needs must go when the Devil drives," 
says the proverb : but the Devil shall never 
drive me. I will take care never to go at 
such a rate, " as if haste had maimed speed 
by overrunning it at starting." 

" The just composer of a legitimate piece," 
says Lord Shaftesbury, " is like an able tra- 
veller, who exactly measures his journey, 
considers his ground, premeditates his stages 



THE DOCTOR. 



183 



and intervals of relaxation and intention, to 
the very conclusion of his undertaking, that 
he happily arrives where he first proposed 
at setting out. He is not presently upon the 
spur, or in his full career, but walks his steed 
leisurely out of the stable, settles himself in 
his stirrups, and when fair road and season 
offer, puts on perhaps to a round trot, thence 
into a gallop, and after a while takes up. As 
down, or meadow, or shady lane present 
themselves, he accordingly suits his pace, 
favours his palfrey, and is sure not to bring 
him puffing, and in a heat, into his last inn." 
Yes, Reader, 

matter needless, of importless burden* 

may as little be expected to flow from the 
slit of my pen, as to " divide the lips " of 
wise Ulysses. On the other hand what is 
needful, what is weighty in its import, let 
who will be impatient, must not be left un- 
said. 

Varie fila a varie tele 
Uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intcndo.\ 

It is affirmed by the angelic Doctor, St. 
Thomas Aquinas, that of corporeal things the 
quantity is in proportion to the quality, that 
which is best being always in the same degree 
the greatest. "Thus in this our universe," 
he says, " the water is more than the earth, 
the air more than the water, the fire more 
than the air ; the first heaven larger than 
the sphere of fire, the second than the first, 
the third than the second ; and so they pro- 
ceed increasing to the tenth sphere, and to 
the empyrean, which is, inestimabilis et in- 
comparabilis magnitudinis." 

Upon the principle which this greatest of 
the schoolmen has assumed, I leave the 
reader to infer what would be the probable 
and proper extent of the present opus, were 
I to indulge my genius and render justice to 
the subject. 

To make it exceed in length the histories 
of Sir Charles Grandison and of Clarissa 
Harlowe, or the bulkier romances of Cal- 
prenede and the Scuderys, it would not be 
necessary to handle it in the manner of a 



Troilus and Ckessida. 



t Ariosto. 



lawyer who, having no more argument than 
would lie in a nut-shell, wire-draws it and 
hammers at it, and hammers at it and wire- 
draws it, and then wire draws it and ham- 
mers at it again, like a lecturer who is ex- 
hibiting the infinite ductility of gold. 

"What a gift," says Puller, " had John 
Halsebach, Professor at Vienna, in tedious- 
ness, who being to expound the Prophet 
Isaiah to his auditors, read twenty-one years 
on the first chapter, and yet finished it not ! " 
Mercator, in the description of Austria in 
his Atlas, has made mention of this Arch- 
Emperor of the Spintexts. 

If I had been in John Halsebach's place, 
my exposition of that first chapter would 
have been comprised in one lecture, of no 
hungry or sleepy duration. But if John 
Halsebach were in mine, he would have filled 
more volumes than Rees's Cyclopaedia with 
his account of Daniel Dove. 

And yet Rabbi Chananiah may contest 
the palm wifh the Vienna Professor. It is 
recorded of him that when he undertook to 
write a commentary upon part of the Prophet 
Ezekiel, he required the Jews to supply 
him with three hundred tons of oil for the 
use of his lamp, while he should be engaged 
in it. I 

It is well known upon one of the English 
circuits that a leading barrister once under- 
took to speak while an express went twenty 
miles to bring back a witness whom it was 
necessary to produce upon the trial. But 
what is this to the performance of an Ame- 
rican counsellor, who upon a like emergency 
held the judge and the jury by their ears for 
three mortal days ! He indeed was put to 
his wits' end for words wherewith to fill up 
the time ; and he introduced so many 
truisms, and argued at the utmost length so 
many indisputable points, and expatiated so 
profusely upon so many trite ones, that 
Judge Marshal (the biographer of Wash- 



% " The Jews did not suffer this book, or at least the 
beginning of it, to be read by any who had not attained 
their thirtieth year ; and restrictions were imposed upon 
Commentators who might be disposed to write upon it." 
— Bishop Gray's Key to the Old Testament. 



184 



THE DOCTOR. 



ington and the most patient of listeners,) 
was so far moved at last as to say, " Mr. 
Such a one ! — (addressing him by his name 
in a deliberate tone of the mildest repre- 
hension,) — there are some things with 
which the Court should be supposed to be 
acquainted." 

I can say with Burton, malo decern potius 
verba, decies repetita licet, abundare, quarn 
unum desiderari. " To say more than a man 
can say, I hold it not fit to be spoken : but 
to say what a man ought to say, — there," 

— with Simon the tanner of Queenborough, 

— "I leave you." 



CHAPTER LXXXIV. 

A LOOP DROPPED IN THE FOREGOING CHAP- 
TER IS HERE TAKEN UP. 

Enobarbus. Every time 

Serves for the matter that is then born in it. 
Lrpicius. But small to greater matters must give way. 
Enoburbus. Not if the small come firs' - . 

Shakespeare. 

In the last chapter an illustration of tedious- 
ness was omitted, because it so happily ex- 
hibits the manner in which a stop may be 
put to a tedious discourse without incivility, 
that it deserves a chapter to itself. 

When Madame de Stael resided at Copet, 
it was her custom to collect around her in 
the evening a circle of literati, the blue legs 
of Geneva, by some one of whom an essay, a 
disquisition, or a portion of a work in pro- 
gress was frequently read aloud to entertain 
the rest. Professor Dragg's History of 
Religion had occupied on one of those even- 
ing more time than was thought necessary, 
or convenient by the company, and espe- 
cially by the lady of the chateau. It began 
at the beginning of the world, and did not 
pass to the Deluge with the rapidity which 
Dandin required from the pleader in Racine's 
comedy, who in like manner opened his case 
before the Creation. Age after age rolled 
away over the Professor's tongue, the course 
of which seemed to be interminable as that 
of the hand of the dial, while the clock 
struck the hour, and the quarter, and 



the half hour, and the third quarter, and 
then the whole hour again, and then again 
the quarters. " A tedious person," says 
Ben Jonson, " is one a man would leap a 
steeple from." Madame de Stael could tole- 
rate nothing that was dry, except her father; 
but she could neither leap out of her own 
window, nor walk out of her own room, to 
escape from Professor Dragg. She looked 
wistfully round, and saw upon many a 
countenance an occasional and frequent 
movement about the lips, indicating that a 
yawn was at that moment painfully stifled 
in its birth. Dumont committed no such 
violence upon nature ; he had resigned him- 
self to sleep. The Professor went steadily 
on. Dumont slept audibly. The Professor 
was deaf to every sound but that of his own 
voice. Madame de Stael was in despair. 
The Professor coming to the end of an elo- 
quent chapter declaimed with great force 
and vehemence the emphatic close, and pre- 
pared to begin the next. Just in that in- 
terstice of time, Dumont stirred and snorted. 
Madame de Stael seized the opportunity ; 
she clapped her hands and ejaculated Mon 
Dieul Voyez Dumont! II a dormi pendant 
deux siecles ! Dumont opened his eyes, and 
Professor Dragg closed his manuscript. 



CHAPTER LXXXV. 

THE DOCTOR'S CONTEMPORARIES AT LEYDEN. 
EARLY FRIENDSHIP. COWPER's MELAN- 
CHOLY OBSERVATION THAT GOOD DISPOSI- 
TIONS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE CORRUPTED 
THAN EVIL ONES TO BE CORRECTED. 
YOUTHFUL CONNECTIONS LOOSENED IN THE 
COMMON COURSE OP THINGS. A PINE 
FRAGMENT BY WALTER LANDOR. 

Lass mich den Stunde gedenhen, und jedes Iileineren 
urnstands. 
Ach, wer rujt nicht so gem unwiederbringliches an I 
Jenes siisse Gedr'dngc der leichtesten irdischen Tage, 

Ach, wer sch'citxt ihn genug, diesen vereilenden Werth ! 
Klein erscheinet es nun, dock ach ! nicht kleinlich dim 
Herzen ; 
Macht die Liebe, die Kunst,jegliches Kleinc doch gross. 

Goethe. 

The circumstances of my friend's boyhood 
and early youth, though singularly favour- 



THE DOCTOR. 



185 



able to his peculiar cast of mind, in many or 
indeed most respects, were in this point dis- 
advantageous, that they afforded him little 
or no opportunity of forming those early 
friendships which, when they are well 
formed, contribute so largely to our future 
happiness. Perhaps the greatest advantage 
of public education, as compared with pri- 
vate, is, that it presents more such oppor- 
tunities than are ever met with in any 
subsequent stage of human life. And yet 
even then in friendship, as afterwards in 
love, we are for the most part less directed 
by choice than by what is called chance. 

Daniel Dove never associated with so 
many persons of his own age at any other 
time as during his studies at Leyden. But 
he was a foreigner there, and this is almost 
as great an obstacle to friendship as to 
matrimony ; and there were few English 
students among whom to choose. Dr. 
Brocklesby took his degree, and left the 
University the year before he entered it; 
Brocklesby was a person in whose society he 
might have delighted ; but he was a cruel 
experimentalist, and the dispathy which this 
must have excited in our friend, whose love 
of science, ardent as it was, never overcame 
the sense of humanity, would have counter- 
acted the attraction of any intellectual 
powers, however brilliant. Akenside, with 
whom in many respects he would have felt 
himself in unison, and by whose society he 
might have profited, graduated also there 
just before his time. 

He had a contemporary more remarkable 
than either in his countryman John Wilkes, 
who was pursuing his studies there, not 
without some diligence, under the superin- 
tendence of a private tutor ; and who ob- 
tained much notice for those lively and 
agreeable talents which were afterwards so 
flagrantly abused. But the strict and con- 
scientious frugality which Dove observed, 
rendered it unfit for him to associate with 
one who had a liberal allowance, and ex- 
pended it lavishly : and there was also a 
stronger impediment to any intimacy be- 
tween them ; for no talents however com- 
panionable, no qualities however engi 



ensasrmff, 



could have induced him to associate with a 
man whose irreligion was of the worst kind, 
and who delighted in licentious conversa- 
tion. 

There was one of his countrymen indeed 
there (so far as a Scotchman may be called 
so) with whom he formed an acquaintance 
that might have ripened into intimacy, if 
their lots had fallen near to each other in 
after life. This was Thomas Dickson, a 
native of Dumfries ; they attended the same 
lectures, and consorted on terms of friendly 
familiarity. But when their University 
course is completed, men separate, like 
stage-coach travellers, at the end of a jour- 
ney, or fellow passengers in a ship when 
they reach their port. While Dove " pur- 
sued the noiseless tenor of his way " at 
Doncaster, Dickson tried his fortune in the 
metropolis, where he became Physician to 
the London Hospital, and a Fellow of the 
Royal Society. He died in the year 1784, 
and is said in his epitaph to have been " a 
man of singular probity, loyalty, and huma- 
nity ; kind to his relations, beloved by all 
who knew him, learned and skilful in his 
profession. Unfeed by the poor, he lived to 
do good, and died a Christian believer." 
For awhile some intercourse between him 
and the Doctor had been kept up by letters ; 
but the intervals in their correspondence 
became longer and longer as each grew 
more engaged in business ; and new con- 
nexions gradually effaced an impression 
which had not been made early, nor had 
ever been very deep. The friendship that, 
with no intercourse to nourish it, keeps itself 
alive for years, must have strong roots in a 
good soil. 

Cowper regarded these early connexions 
in an unfavourable and melancholy mood. 
" For my own part," says he, " I found such 
friendships, though warm enough in their 
commencement, surprisingly liable to ex- 
tinction ; and of seven or eight whom I had 
selected for intimates out of about throe 
hundred, in ten years' time not one was left 
me. The truth is that there may be, and 
often is, an attachment of one boy to an- 
other, that looks very like a friendship ; and 



186 



THE DOCTOR. 



while they are in circumstances that enable 
them mutually to oblige and to assist each 
other, promises well and bids fair to be last- 
ing. But they are no sooner separated from 
each other, by entering into the world at 
large, than other connexions and new em- 
ployments in which they no longer share 
together, efface the remembrance of what 
passed in earlier days, and they become 
strangers to each other for ever. Add to 
this, the man frequently differs so much from 
the Z>oy, — his principles, manners, temper, 
and conduct, undergo so great an alteration, 
— that we no longer recognise in him our 
old play-fellow, but find him utterly un- 
worthy and unfit for the place he once held 
in our affections." These sentiments he has 
also expressed in verse : — 

School-friendships are not always found, 

Though fair in promise, permanent and sound; 

The most disinterested and virtuous minds, 

In early years connected, time unbinds ; 

New situations give a different cast 

Of habit, inclination, temper, taste ; 

And he that seem'd our counterpart at first, 

Soon shows the strong similitude revet sed. 

Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm, 

And make mistakes for manhood to reform. 

Boys are, at be^t, but pretty buds unblown, 

Whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known ; 

Each dreams that each is just what he appears, 

But learns his error in maturer years, 

When disposition, like a sail unfurled, 

Shows all its rents and patches to the world. 

Disposition, however, is the one thing which 
undergoes no other change, than that of 
growth in after life. The physical constitu- 
tion, when any morbid principle is innate in 
it, rarely alters ; the moral constitution — 
(except by a miracle of God's mercy) — 
never. 

'O ij.iv norths, obhh a.XXo x\'w thx.ho;.* 

" Believe, if you will," say the Persians, 
" that a mountain has removed from one 
place to another ; but if you are told that a 
man has changed his nature, believe it 
not ! " 

The best of us have but too much cause 
for making it part of our daily prayer that 
we full into no sin ! But there is an ori- 
ginal pravity which deserves to be so called 



* Ruitii'inr.s. 



in the darkest import of the term, — an 
inborn and incurable disease of the moral 
being, manifested as soon as it has strength 
to show itself; and wherever this is per- 
ceived in earliest youth, it may too surely 
be predicted what is to be expected when 
all control of discipline is removed. Of 
those that bring with them such a disposition 
into the world, it cannot be said that they 
fall into sin, because it is too manifest that 
they seek and pursue it as the bent of their 
nature. No wonder that wild theories have 
been devised to account for what is so mys- 
terious, so awful, and yet so incontestable ! 
Zephaniah Holwell, who will always be re- 
membered for his sufferings in the Black 
Hole, wrote a strange book in which he en- 
deavoured to prove that men were fallen 
angels, that is, that human bodies are the 
forms in which fallen angels are condemned 
to suffer for the sins which they have com- 
mitted in their former state. Akin to this 
is the Jewish fancy, held by Josephus, as 
well as his less liberalised countrymen, that 
the souls of wicked men deceased got into 
the bodies of the living and possessed them ; 
and by this agency they accounted for all 
diseases. Holwell's theory is no doubt as 
old as any part of the Oriental systems of 
philosophy and figments ; it is one of the 
many vain attempts to account for that 
fallen nature of which every man who is 
sincere enough to look into his own heart, 
finds there what may too truly be called an 
indwelling witness. Something like the 
Jewish notion was held by John Wesley and 
Adam Clarke ; and there are certain cases 
in which it is difficult not to admit it, espe- 
cially when the question of the demoniacs 
is considered. Nor is there any thing that 
shocks us in supposing this to be possible 
for the body, and the mind also, as depend- 
ing upon the bodily organs. — But that the 
moral being, the soul itself, the life of life, 
the immortal part, should appear, as so often 
it undoubtedly does, to be thus possessed, 
this indeed is of all mysterious things the 
darkest. 

For a disposition thus evil in its nature 
it almost seems as if there could be no hope. 



THE DOCTOR. 



181 



On the other hand, there is no security in a 
good one, if the support of good principles 
(that is to say, of religion — of Christian 
faith — ) be wanting. It may be soured by 
misfortunes, it may be corrupted by wealth, 
it may be blighted by neediness, it may lose 
" all its original brightness." 

School friendships arise out of sympathy 
of disposition at an age when the natural 
disposition is under little control and less 
disguise ; and there are reasons enough, of a 
less melancholy kind than Cowper contem- 
plated, why so few of these blossoms set, 
and of those which afford a promise of fruit, 
why so small a proportion should bring it to 
maturity. " The amity that wisdom knits 
not folly may easily untie * ; " and even 
when not thus dissolved, the mutual attach- 
ment which in boyhood is continually 
strengthened by similarity of circumstance 
and pursuits, dies a natural death in most 
cases when that similarity ceases. If one 
goes north in the intellectual bearings of his 
course in life, and the other south, they will 
at last be far as the poles asunder. If 
their pursuits are altogether different, and 
their opinions repugnant, in the first case 
they cease to think of each other with any 
warm interest ; in the second, if they think 
of each other at all, it is with an uncomfort- 
able feeling, and a painful sense of change. 

The way in which too many ordinary 
minds are worsened by the mere course of 
time is finely delineated by Landor, in some 
verses which he designed as an imitation, 
not of a particular passage in a favourite 
Greek author, but of his manner and style 
of thought. 

Friendship, in each successive stage of life, 
As we approach him, varies to the view ; 
In youth he wears the face of Love himself, 
Of Love without his arrows and his wings. 
Soon afterwards with Bacchus and with Pan 
Thou findest him ; or hearest him resign, 
To some dog-pastor, by the quiet fire, 
With much good-will and jocular adieu, 
His age-worn mule, or broken-hearted steed. 
Fly not, as thou wert wont, to his embrace ; 
Lest, after one long yawning gaze, he swear 
Thou art the best good fellow in the world, 



♦ Shakespeare. 



But he had quite forgotten thee, by Jove ! 

Or laughter wag his newly bearded chin 

At recollection of his childish hours. 

But wouldst thou see, young man, his latest form, 

When e'en this laughter, e'en this memory fails, 

Look at yon fig-tree statue ! golden once, 

As all would deem it, rottenness falls out 

At every little hole the worms have made ; 

And if thou triest to lift it up again 

It breaks upon thee ! Leave it ! touch it not ! 

Its very lightness would encumber thee. 

Come — thou hast seen it : 'tis enough ; be gone ! 

The admirable writer who composed these 
verses in some melancholy mood, is said to 
be himself one of the most constant and af- 
fectionate of friends. It may indeed safely 
be affirmed, that generous minds, when they 
have once known each other, never can be 
alienated as long as both retain the cha- 
racteristics which brought them into union. 
No distance of place, or lapse of time, can 
lessen the friendship of those who are 
thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth. 
There are even some broken attachments in 
friendship as well as in love which nothing 
can destroy, and it sometimes happens that 
we are not conscious of their strength till 
after the disruption. 

There are a few persons known to me in 
years long past, but with whom I lived in no 
particular intimacy then, and have held no 
correspondence since, whom I could not now 
meet without an emotion of pleasure deep 
enough to partake of pain, and who, I doubt 
not, entertain for me feelings of the same 
kind and degree ; whose eyes sparkle when 
they hear, and glisten sometimes when thej 
speak of me ; and who think of me as I do of 
them, with an affection that increases as we 
advance in years. This is because our moral 
and intellectual sympathies have strengthen- 
ed ; and because, though far asunder, we 
know that we are travelling the same road 
toward our resting place in heaven. " There 
is such a pleasure as this," says Cowper, 
" which would want explanation to some 
folks, being perhaps a mystery to those whose 
hearts are a mere muscle, and serve only for 
the purposes of an even circulation." 



188 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER LXXXVI. 

PETER HOPKINS. REASONS FOR SUPPOSING 
THAT HE WAS AS GOOD A PRACTITIONER 
AS ANY IN ENGLAND ; THOUGH NOT THE 
BEST. TOE FITTEST MASTER FOR DANIEE 
DOVE. HIS SKILL IN ASTROLOGY. 

Que sea Medico mas grave 
Quien mas aforismos sabe, 

Bien puede ser. 
Mas que no sea mas experto 
El que mas huviere muerio, 

No puede ser. Gongora. 

Of all the persons with whom Daniel Dove 
associated at Doncaster, the one who pro- 
duced the most effect upon his mind was his 
master and benefactor, Peter Hopkins. The 
influence indeed which he exercised, in- 
sensibly as it were, upon his character, was 
little less than that whereby he directed and 
fixed the course of his fortune in life. A 
better professional teacher in his station 
could nowhere have been found ; for there 
was not a more skilful practitioner in 
the Three Ridings, consequently not in 
England ; consequently not in Christen- 
dom, and by a farther consequence not in 
the world. Fuller says of Yorkshire that 
" one may call, and justify it to be the best 
shire in England ; and that not by the help 
of the general katachresis of good for great, 
(as a good blow, a good piece, &c.,) but in 
the proper acceptation thereof. If in Tully's 
Orations, all being excellent, that is adjudged 
optima quce longissima, the best which is the 
longest ; then by the same proportion, this 
Shire, partaking in goodness alike with others, 
must be allowed the best." Yorkshire there- 
fore being the best county in England, as 
being the largest, of necessity it must have 
as good practitioners in medicine as are to 
be found in any other county ; and there 
cing no better practitioner than Peter 
Hopkins there, it would have been in vain 
to seek for a better elsewhere. 

As good a one undoubtedly might have 
been found ; 



I trust there were within this realm 
Five hundred as good as he,* 

though there goes more to the making of 
a Peter Hopkins than of an Earl Percy. 
But I very much doubt (and this is one of 
the cases in which doubt scarcely differs a 
shade from disbelief) whether there could 
anywhere have been found another person 
whose peculiarities would have accorded so 
curiously with young Daniel's natural bent, 
and previous education. Hopkins had asso- 
ciated much with Guy, in the early part of 
their lives ; (it was indeed through this 
connexion that the lad was placed at Don- 
caster) ; and, like Guy, he had tampered with 
the mystical sciences. He knew the theories, 
and views, and hopes 

which set the Chymist on 

To search that secret-natured stone, 
Which the philosophers have told, 
When found, turns all things into gold ; 
But being hunted and not caught, 
Oh ! sad reverse ! turns gold to nought, f 

This knowledge he had acquired, like his 
old friend, for its own sake, — for the pure 
love of speculation and curious inquiry, — 
not with the slightest intention of ever pur- 
suing it for the desire of riches. He liked 
it, because it was mysterious ; and he could 
listen with a half-believing mind to the le- 
gends (as they may be called) of those Adepts 
who from time to time have been heard of, 
living as erratic a life as the Wandering 
Jew ; but with this difference, that they are 
under no curse, and that they may forego 
their immortality, if they do not choose to 
renew the lease of it, by taking a dose of the 
elixir in due time. 

He could cast a nativity with as much ex- 
actness, according to the rules of art, as 
William Lilly, or Henry Coley, that Merli- 
nus Anglicus Junior, upon whom Lilly's 
mantle descended ; or the Vicar of Thornton 
in Buckinghamshire, William Bredon, a pro- 
found Divine, and " absolutely the most 
polite person for nativities in that age ; " 
who being Sir Christopher Hey don's chap- 
lain, had a hand in composing that Knight's 
Defence of Judicial Astrology ; but withal 



ClIBVS Chace 



f Arbutiinot. 



THE DOCTOR. 



189 



was so given over to tobacco and drink, that 
when he had no tobacco, he would cut the 
bell-ropes, and smoke them. 

Peter Hopkins could erect a scheme either 
according to the method of Julius Firmicus, 
or of Aben-Ezra, or of Campanus, Alcabi- 
tius, or Porphyrius, " for so many ways are 
there of building these houses in the air ; " 
and in that other called the Eational Way, 
which in a great degree superseded the rest, 
and which Johannes Muller, the great Regio- 
montanus, gave to the world in his Tables of 
Directions, drawn up at the Archbishop of 
Strigonia's request. He could talk of the 
fiery and the earthly Trigons, the aerial and 
the watery ; and of that property of a tri- 
angle — (now no longer regarded at Cam- 
bridge) — whereby Sol and Jupiter, Luna and 
Venus, Saturn and Mercury, respectively 
become joint Trigonocrators, leaving Mars 
to rule over the watery Trigon alone. He 
knew the Twelve Houses as familiarly as he 
knew his own ; the Horoscope, which is the 
House of Life, or more awfully to unlearned 
ears, Domus Vitce ; the House of Gain and 
the House of Fortune ; — for Gain and 
Fortune no more keep house together in 
heaven, than either of them do with Wisdom, 
and Virtue, and Happiness on earth ; the 
Hypogeum, or House of Patrimony, which is 
at the lowest part of heaven, the Imum Coeli, 
though it be in many respects a good house 
to be born in here below ; the Houses of 
Children, of Sickness, of Marriage, and of 
Death ; the House of Religion ; the House of 
Honours, which, being the Mesouranema, is 
also called the Heart of Heaven ; the Aga- 
thodemon, or House of Friends, and the 
Cacodemon, or House of Bondage. All 
these he knew, and their Consignificators, 
and their Chronocrators or Alfridarii, who 
give to these Consignificators a septennial 
dominion in succession. 

He could ascertain the length of the 
planetary hour at any given time and place, 
anachronism being nowhere of greater con- 
sequence, — for if a degree be mistaken in 
the scheme, there is a year's error in the 
prognostication, and so in proportion for any 
inaccuracy more or less. Sir Christopher 



Heydon, the last great champion of this 
occult science, boasted of possessing a watch 
so exact in its movements, that it would give 
him with unerring precision not the minute 
only, but the very scruple of time. That 
erudite professor knew — 

In quas Fortune leges qiueque hora valerct ; 
Quantaque quam parvi facer ent discrimina motus.* 

Peter Hopkins could have explained to a 
student in this art, how its astronomical part 
might be performed upon the celestial globe 
"with speed, ease, delight, and demonstra- 
tion." He could have expatiated upon con- 
junctions and oppositions ; have descanted 
upon the four Cardinal Houses ; signs fixed, 
moveable, or common ; signs human and 
signs bestial; semi-sextiles, sextiles, quin- 
tiles, quartiles, trediciles, trines, biquintiles 
and quincunxes ; the ascension of the planets, 
and their declination ; their dignities essen- 
tial and accidental ; their exaltation and 
retrogradation ; till the hearer by under- 
standing a little of the baseless theory, here 
and there, could have persuaded himself that 
he comprehended all the rest. And if it had 
been necessary to exact implicit and profound 
belief, by mysterious and horisonant terms, 
he could have amazed the listener with the 
Lords of Decanats, the Five Fortitudes, 
and the Head and Tail of the Dragon ; and 
have astounded him by ringing changes upon 
Almugea, Cazimi, Hylech, Aphetes, Ana- 
cretes and Alcochodon. 

" So far," says Fabian Withers, " are they 
distant from the true knowledge of physic 
which are ignorant of astrology, that they 
ought not rightly to be called physicians, 
but deceivers : — for it hath been many 
times experimented and proved, that that 
which many physicians could not cure or 
remedy with their greatest and strongest 
medicines, the astronomer hath brought to 
pass with one simple herb, by observing the 
moving of the signs. — There be certain evil 
times and years of a mans life, which are at 
every seven years' end. Wherefore if thou 
wilt prolong thy days, as often as thou 
comest to every seventh or ninth year (if 



190 



THE DOCTOR. 



thou givest any credit to Marsilius Ficirms, 
or Firrnicus), diligently consult with an as- 
tronomer, from whence and by what means 
any peril or danger may happen, or come 
unto thee ; then either go unto a physician, 
or use discretion and temperance, and by 
that means thou mayest defer and prolong 
thy natural life through the rules of astro- 
nomy, and the help of the physician. Neither 
be ashamed to inquire of the physician what 
is thy natural diet, and of the astronomer 
what star doth most support and favour thy 
life, and to see in what aspect he is with the 
moon." 

That once eminent student in the mathe- 
matics and the celestial sciences, Henry 
Coley, who, as Merlin junior continued Lilly's 
Almanac, and published also his own yearly 
Nuncius Sydereus, or Starry Messenger, — 
the said Coley, whose portrait in a flowing 
wig and embroi ered band, most unlike to 
Merlin, has made his Ephemeris in request 
among the Graingerites, — he tells us it is 
from considering the nature of the planets, 
together with their daily configurations, and 
the mixture of their rays or beams of light 
and heat, that astrologers deduce their 
judgment of what may probably, not posi- 
tively happen : for Nature, he observes, 
works very abstrusely ; and one person may 
be able to make a better discovery than 
another, whence arise diversities of opinion 
too often about the same thing. The phy- 
sician knows that the same portion of either 
single or compound simples will not work 
upon all patients alike ; so neither can the 
like portion and power of qualities stir up, 
or work always the same; but may some- 
times receive either intention or remission 
according to the disposed aptness of the 
subject, the elements or elementary bodies 
not always admitting of their powers alike, 
or when they be overswayed by more potent 
and prevalent operations. For universal and 
particular causes do many times differ so as 
the one hinders the operation of the other ; 
and Nature may sometimes be so abstrusely 
shut up, that what we see not may over- 
power and work beyond what we see." 

Thus were these professors of a pseudo- 



science always provided with an excuse, 
however grossly their predictions might be 
contradicted by the event. It is a beautiful 
specimen of the ambiguity of the art that the 
same aspect threatened a hump -back or the 
loss of an eye ; and that the same horoscope 
which prognosticated a crown and sceptre 
was held to be equally accomplished if the 
child were born to a fool's-cap, a bauble, and 
a suit of motley. "The right worshipful, 
and of singular learning in all sciences, Sir 
Thomas Smith, the flower in his time of the 
University of Cambridge," and to whom, 
more than to any other individual, both 
Universities are beholden ; for when Parlia- 
ment, in its blind zeal for ultra-reformation, 
had placed the Colleges, as well as the Re- 
ligious Houses at the King's disposal, he, 
through Queen Katharine Par, prevailed 
upon Henry to preserve them, instead of 
dividing them also among the great court 
cormorants ; and he it was who reserved 
for them the third part of their rents in 
corn, making that a law which had always 
been his practice when he was Provost of 
Eton : — this Sir Thomas used, as his grateful 
pupil Richard Eden has recorded, to call 
astrology ingeniosissimam artem mentiendi, — 
the most ingenious art of lying. 

Ben Jonson's servant and pupil* has given 
some good comic examples of the way in 
which those who honestly endeavoured to 
read the stars might be deceived, — though 
when the stars condescended " to palter in a 
double sense " it was seldom in so good a 
humour. 

One told a gentleman 

His son should be a man-killer, and be hang'd for't; 
Who after proved a great and rich physician, 
And with great fame, in the University 
Hang'd up in picture for a grave example ! 

Another schemist 

Found that a squint-eyed boy should prove a notable 
Pick-purse, and afterwards a most strong thief; 
When he grew up to be a cunning lawyer, 
And at last died a Judge ! 



THE DOCTOR. 



191 



CHAPTER LXXXV11. 

ASTROLOGY. ALMANACKS. PRISCILLIANISM 
RETAINED IN THEM TO THIS TIME. 

I wander 'twixt the poles 
And heavenly hinges, 'mongst eccentricals, 
Centers, concentricks, circles, and epicycles. 

Albumazar. 

The connexion between astrology and the 
art of medicine is not more firmly believed 
in Persia at this day, than it was among the 
English people during the age of almanack- 
makers. The column which contained the 
names of the saints for every day, as fully 
as they are still given in Roman Catholic 
almanacks, was less frequently consulted 
than those in which the aspects were set 
down, and the signs and the parts of the 
human body under their respective gover- 
nance. Nor was any page in the book re- 
garded with more implicit belief than that 
which represented the " Anatomy of Man's 
body as the parts thereof are governed by 
the twelve Constellations, or rather by the 
Moon as she passeth by them." In those 
representations man indeed was not more 
uglily than fearfully made, — as he stood 
erect and naked, spiculated by emitted in- 
fluences from the said signs, like another St. 
Sebastian ; or as he sate upon the globe 
placed like a butt for him, while they radi- 
ated their shafts of disease and pain. 

Portentous as the Homo in the almanack 
is, he made a much more horrific appearance 
in the Margarita Philosophica, which is a 
Cyclopaedia of the early part of the 16th cen- 
tury. There Homo stands, naked but not 
ashamed, upon the two Pisces, one foot upon 
each, the Fish being neither in air, nor 
water, nor upon earth, but self-suspended 
as it appears in the void. Aries has alighted 
with two feet on Homo's head, and has sent 
a shaft through the forehead into his brain. 
Taurus has quietly seated himself across his 
neck. The Gemini are riding astride a little 
below his right shoulder. The whole trunk 
is laid open, as if part of the old accursed 
punishment for high treason had been per- 
formed upon him. The Lion occupies the 



thorax as his proper domain, and the Crab 
is in possession of the abdomen. Sagitta- 
rius, volant in the void, has just let fly an 
arrow, which is on the way to his right arm. 
Capricornus breathes out a visible influence 
that penetrates both knees ; Aquarius inflicts 
similar punctures upon both legs. Virgo 
fishes as it were at his intestines ; Libra at 
the part affected by schoolmasters in their 
anger ; and Scorpio takes the wickedest aim 
of all. 

The progress of useful knowledge has in 
our own days at last banished this man from 
the almanack ; at least from all annuals of 
that description that carry with them any 
appearance of respectability. If it has put 
an end to this gross superstition, it has done 
more than the Pope could do fourteen cen- 
turies ago, when he condemned it, as one of 
the pernicious errors of the Priscillianists. 

In a letter to Turribius, Bishop of As- 
torga, concerning that heresy, Pope St. Leo 
the Great says : Si universes kcereses, quce 
ante Priscilliani tempus exortce sunt, diligen- 
tius retractentur, nullus pene invenitur error 
de quo non traxerit impietas ista contagium : 
quce non contenta eorum recipere fedsitates, qui 
ab Evangelio Christi sub Christi nomine de- 
viarunt, tenebris se etiam paganitatis immersit, 
ut per magicarum artium prophana secreta, 
et mathematicorum. vana mendacia, religionis 
fidem, morumque rationem in pote state dcemo- 
num, et in qffectu syderum collocarent. Quod 
si et credi liceat et doceri, nee virtutibus pre- 
mium, nee vitiis poena debebitur, omniaque non 
solum humanarum legum, sed etiam divinarwn 
constitidionum decreta solventur : quia neque 
de bonis, neque de malis actibus ullum poterit 
esse judicium, si in utramque partem fatalis 
necessitas motum mentis impellit, et qidcquid 
ab hominibus agitur, non est hominum, sed 
astrorum. Ad banc insaniam pertinet pro- 
digiosa ilia totius humani corporis per duo- 
decim Cceli signa distinctio, id diversispartibus 
diverse prcesideant potestates ; et creatura* 
quam Deus ad imaginem suam fecit, in tanta 
sit obligatione sydenun, in quanta est connec- 
tione membrorum. 

But invention has been as rare among 
; heretics as among poets. The architect of 



192 



THE DOCTOR. 



the Priscillian heresy (the male heresy of 
that name, for there was a female one also) 
borrowed this superstition from the mathe- 
maticians, — as the Romans called the astro- 
logical impostors of those times. For this 
there is the direct testimony of Saint Au- 
gustine : Astruunt etiam fataiibus stellis ho- 
mines colligatos, ipsumque corpus nostrum 
secundum duodecim signa cadi esse composi- 
tum ; sicut hi qui Mathematici vulgo appellan- 
tur, constituentes in capite Arietem, Taurum 
in cervice, Geminos in humeris, Cancrum in 
pectore, et cetera nominatim signa percurrentes 
ad plantas usque perveniunt, quas Piscibus 
tribuunt, quod ultimum signum ab Astrologis 
nuncupatur. 

These impostors derived this part of their 
craft from Egypt, where every month was 
supposed to be under the care of three 
Decans or Directors, for the import of the 
word must be found in the neighbouring 
language of the Hebrews and Syrians. 
There were thirty-six of these, each super- 
intending ten days ; and these Decans were 
believed to exercise the most extensive in- 
fluence over the human frame. Astrological 
squares calculated upon this mythology are 
still in existence. St. Jerome called it the 
opprobrium of Egypt. 

The medical superstition derived from this 
remote antiquity has continued down to the 
present generation in the English almanacks, 
is still continued in the popular almanacks 
of other countries, and prevails at this time 
throughout the whole Mahommedan and 
Eastern world. So deeply does error strike 
its roots, and so widely scatter its seeds ; 
and so difficult is it to extirpate any error 
whatsoever, or any evil, which it is the in- 
terest of any class of men to maintain. And 
the rogues had much to say for themselves. 

" Notwithstanding the abuses put upon 
the art of Astrology," said an eminent Pro- 
fessor, " doubtless some judgment may be 
made thereby what any native may be by 
nature prone or addicted to. For the as- 
pects of the Planets among themselves, as 
also the Fixed Stars, 'tis more than sup- 
posed, may cause many strange effects in 
sublunary bodies, but especially in those 



that have been almost worn out with de- 
crepit age, or debilitated with violent or 
tedious diseases ; wherefore this knowledge 
may be requisite, and of excellent use to 
physicians and chirurgeons, &c, for old aches 
and most diseases do vary according to the 
change of the air and weather, and that pro- 
ceeds from the motion of the heavens and 
aspects of the planets." — Who that has any 
old aches in his bones, — or has felt his 
corns shoot — but must acknowledge the 
truth that was brought forward here in sup- 
port of an impudent system of imposture? 
The natural pride, and the natural piety of 
man, were both appealed to when he was 
told that the stars were appointed for signs 
and tokens, — that "the reason why God 
hath given him an upright countenance is, 
that he might converse with the celestial 
bodies, which are placed for his service as 
so many diamonds in an azure canopy of 
perpetuity," — and that astrologers had a 
large field to walk in, for " all the produc- 
tions of Time were the subjects of their 
science, and there is nothing under the Sun 
but what is the birth of Time." There is 
no truth however pure, and however sacred, 
upon which falsehood cannot fasten, and en- 
graft itself therein. 

Laurence Humphrey, who was sufficiently 
known in Queen Elizabeth's days as one of 
the standard-bearers of the Nonconformists, 
but who, like many others, grew conform- 
able in the end as he grew riper in ex- 
perience and sager in judgment, — in his 
Optimates or Treatise concerning Nobility, 
which he composed for the use of that class 
and of the Gentry, observed how " this sci- 
ence above all others was so snatched at, so 
beloved, and even devoured by most persons 
of honour and worship, that they needed no 
excitement to it, but rather a bridle ; no 
trumpeter to set them on, but a reprover to 
take them off from their heat. Many," he 
said, " had so trusted to it, that they almost 
distrusted God." He would not indeed 
wholly condemn the art, but the nobility 
should not have him a persuader nor an ap- 
plauder of it ; for there were already enough ! 
In vain might a Bishop warn his hearers 



THE DOCTOR. 



193 



from the pulpit and from the press that " no 
soothsayer, no palterer, no judicial astro- 
loger is a,ble to tell any man the events of 
his life." Man is a dupeable animal. Quacks 
in medicine, quacks in religion, and quacks 
in politics know this, and act upon that 
knowledge. There is scarcely any one who 
may not, like a trout, be taken by tickling. 



CHAPTER LXXXVIIT. 

AN INCIDENT WHICH BRINGS THE AUTHOR 
INTO A FORTUITOUS RESEMBLANCE WITH 
THE PATRIARCH OF THE PREDICANT 
ERIARS. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FACT 
AND THE FABLE ; AND AN APPLICATION 
WHICH, UNLIKE THOSE THAT ARE USUALLY 
APPENDED TO ESOP's FABLES, THE REA- 
DER IS LIKELY NEITHER TO SKIP NOR TO 
FORGET. 

Dire aqui una maldad grande del Demonio. 

Pedro de Cieca de Leon. 

While I was writing that last chapter, a 
flea appeared upon the page before me, as 
there did once to St. Dominic. 

But the circumstances in my case and in 
St. Dominic's were different. 

For, in the first place I, as has already 
been said, was writing ; but St. Dominic 
was reading. 

Secondly, the flea which came upon my 
paper was a real flea, a flea of flea-flesh and 
blood, partly flea-blood and partly mine, 
which the said flea had flea- feloniously ap- 
propriated to himself by his own process of 
flea-botomy. That which appeared upon 
St. Dominic's book was the Devil in dis- 
guise. 

The intention with which the Devil 
abridged himself into so diminutive a form, 
was that he might distract the Saint's atten- 
tion from his theological studies, by skipping 
upon the page, and perhaps provoke him to 
unsaintlike impatience by eluding his fingers. 

But St. Dominic was not so to be de- 
ceived : he knew who the false flea was ! 

To punish him therefore for this diabo- 
lical intrusion, he laid upon him a holy spell 



whereby Flea Beelzebub was made to serve 
as a marker through the whole book. When 
Dominic, whether in the middle of a sen- 
tence or at the end, lifted his eyes from 
the page in meditation, Flea Beelzebub 
moved to the word at which the Saint had 
paused, — he moved not by his own dia- 
bolical will, but in obedience to an impulse 
which he had no power to resist ; and there 
he remained, having as little power to re- 
move, till the Saint's eye having returned to 
the book, and travelled farther, stopped at 
another passage And thus St. Dominic 
used him through the volume, putting him 
moreover whenever he closed the book to 
the peine forte et dure. 

When Dominic had finished the volume, 
he dismissed his marker. Had it been a 
heretic, instead of the Devil, the canonised 
founder of the Friars Predicant, and Patron 
Saint of the Inquisition, would not have let 
him off* so easily. 

Indeed I cannot but think that his lenity 
in this case was ill-placed. He should have 
dealt with that flea as I did with mine. 

" How, Mr. Author, was that ?" 

" I dealt with it, Sir, as Agesilaus un- 
ceremoniously did with one victim upon the 
altar- of Chalcioecious Pallas, at the same 
time that with all due ceremony he was 
sacrificing another. An ox was the pre- 
meditated and customary victim ; the ex- 
temporaneous and extraordinary one was a 
six-footed ' small deer.' Plutarch thought 
the fact worthy of being recorded ; and we 
may infer from it that the Spartans did not 
always comb their long hair so carefully as 
the Three Hundred did at Thermopyla?, 
when on the morning of that ever-glorious 
fight, they made themselves ready to die 
there in obedience to the institutions of 
their country. What the King of Lace- 
damion did with his crawler, I did with my 
skipper ; — I cracked it, Sir." 

" And for what imaginable reason can 
you have thought fit to publish such an in- 
cident to the world ? " 

"For what reason, Sir? — why, that Hop- 
o'-my-thumb the critic may know what he 
has to expect, if I' lay hold of him !" 



194 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER LXXXIX. 

A CHAPTER CHARACTERISTIC OF FRENCH 
ANTIQUARIES, FRENCH LADIES, FRENCH 
LAWYERS, FRENCH JUDGES, FRENCH LITER- 
ATURE, AND FRENCUNESS IN GENERAL. 

Quid de pulicibus ? vitce salientia puncta. 

Cowley. 

Xow, Reader, having sent away the small 
Critic with a flea in his ear, I will tell you 
something concerning one of the curiosities 
of literature. 

The most famous flea, for a real flea, that 
has yet been heard of, — for not even the 
King of the Fleas, who, as Dr. Clarke and 
his fellow traveller found to their cost, keeps 
his court at Tiberias, approaches it in cele- 
brity, — nor the flea of that song, which 
Mephistopheles sung in the cellar at Leip- 
zig, — that flea for whom the King ordered 
breeches and hose from his own tailor ; who 
was made prime minister ; and who, when 
he governed the realm, distinguished him- 
self, like Earl Grey, by providing for all his 
relations: — the most illustrious, I say, of 
all fleas, — pulicum facile princeps — was 
that flea which I know not whether to call 
Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, or Pasquier' s 
flea, or the flea of Poictiers. 

In the year 1579, when the Grands Jours, 
or Great Assizes, were held at Poictiers 
under President de Ilarlay, Pasquier, who 
was one of the most celebrated advocates, 
most accomplished scholars, and most learned 
men in France, attended in the exercise of 
liifl profession. Calling there one day upon 
Madame des Roches and her daughter, 
Mademoiselle Catherine, whom he describes 
s jjh/s belles et sages de nostre 
France, while he was conversing with the 
young lady he espied a ilea, parquee an beau 
milieu de son sein. 

Upon this Pasquier made such a speech 

enchman might be expected to make 

so felicitous an occasion, admiring the 

i" the flea, envying it- happiness, and 

lii) f _ r at its boldness de s'estre mise en 



si beau jour ; parce que jaloux de son heur, 
peu s'en falloit, he says, que je ne misse la 
main sur elle, en deliberation de luy /aire un 
mauvais tour ; et Men luy prenoit quelle estoit 
en lieu de franchise ! This led to a conten- 
tion mignarde between the young lady and 
the learned lawyer, who was then more than 
fifty years of age ; fnalement, ayant este 
Vautheur de la noise, says Pasquier, je luy dis 
que puisque ceste Puce avoit receu tant d'heur 
de se repaistre de son sang, et (Testre reci- 
proquement honor ee de nos propos, elle meritoit 
encores d'estre enchdssee dedans nos papiers, 
et que tres-voloiitiers je my employerois, si 
cette Dame vouloit de sa part faire le sem- 
blable ; chose quelle maccorda liberalement. 
Each was in earnest, but each, according to 
the old Advocate, supposed the other to be 
in jest : both went to work upon this theme 
after the visit, and each finished a copy of 
verses about the same time, tombants en 
quelques rencontres de mots les plus signalez 
pour le subject. Pasquier thinking to sur- 
prise the lady, sent his poem to her as soon 
as he had transcribed it, on a Sunday morn- 
ing, — the better the day the better being 
the deed*, and the lady apprehending that 
they might have fallen upon some of the 
same thoughts, lest she should be suspected 
of borrowing what she knew to be her own, 
sent back the first draught of her verses by 
his messenger, not having had time to write 
them fairly out. Heureuse, certes, rencontre 
et jouyssance de deux esp?*its, qui passe (Tun 
long entrejet, toutes ces opinions follastres et 
vulgaires damour. Que si en cecy tu me 
permits dty apporter quelque chose de mon 
jugement je te diray, quen Fun tu trouveras 
les discours (Tune sage file, en V autre les dis- 
cours (Tun homme qui riest pas trop fol; 
ay ants Tun et V autre par une bienseance des 
nos sexes joile tels roolles que demons. 

The Demoiselle, after describing in her 
poem the feats of the flea, takes a hint from 
the resemblance in sound between puce and 
pucelle, and making an allegorical use of 
mythology, makes by that means a decorous 
allusion to the vulgar notion concerning the 
unclean circumstances by which fleas, as 
they say, are bred : 



THE DO'".'. 






Puce, si ma plume estcit digne, 

Je descrirois wostre origine ; 
Et comment le plus grand des Dieux 
Pour la terre quiitant lea eieux, 

Tons fit naitre. camme il me semble, 
Orion et varus tout ensemble. 

She proceed- f : b : ~ that Pan became ena- 
moured of this sister of Orion ; that Diana, 
to preserve her from his pursuit, metamor- 
phosed her into a flea {en puce), and that in 
this transformation nothing remained of her 

S-:-.:n 
La crainte, Fadresse, et le nam. 

Pas quier in his poem gave himself a pretty 
free scope in his imaginary pursuits of the 
flea, and in all the allusions to which its 
name would on such an occasion invite an 
old Frenchman. If the story had ended 
here, it would have been characteristic 
enough of French manners : Or toy, je te 
prie, says Pasquier, quel fruict nous a pro- 
duit cette belle altercation, ou pour mieux 
dire, symbolization de deux ames. Ces deux 
petits Jeux poetiques commencerent a courir 
par les mains de plusieurs, et se trouverent si 
agreables, que sur leur modelle, quelques per- 
sonnages de marque voulurent estre de la 
partie ; et s employ ererd sur mesrae subject a 
qui mieux mieux. les uns en Latin, les autres 
7 icois, et quelques-uns en Tune et T autre 
langue : ayant chacun si bien exploite en son 
endroict, qu a chacun doit demeurer la vic- 
toire. 

Among the distinguished persons who ex- 

] their talents upon this worthy oc- 
casion, Brisson was one ; that Brisson of 
whom Henri III. sail that no king but him- 
self could boast of so learned a subject : 
who lent the assistance of his great name 
and talents towards setting up the most 

i of all tyrannies, that of an insurrec- 
tionary government ; and who suffered death 
under that tyranny, as the reward such men 

a (and righteously as concerns them- 
selves, however iniquitous the sentence) re- 
ceive from the miscreants with whom they 
have leagued- He began his poem much as 
a scholar might be expected to do, by allud- 

the well-known pieces which had been 
composed upon somewhat similar sub; 



Fcelices meritb Mures Ranceque loquaces 

Queis ceeci vat is contigit ore cani : 
:: extento tepid us Passer cuius cevo 

Caniatus numeris, culte Catulte tuis. 
Te quoque, parve Culex, nulla unquam muta siltbit 

? ianmu opus. 

Ausoniusque Pules, duhius quern condiJit test 

Camescet scechs innumerabilibus. 

d at Pulicii longe preselcrior est sors, 

Quern fovet in tepido casta puella sinu. 
¥ : note Pulex nimium, tua si bona noris, 

Jlternis vatum nobilitate mctris. 

In the remainder of his poem Brisson 
takes the kind of range which, if the subject 
did not actually invite, it seemed at least to 
permit. He produced also four Latin epi- 
grams against such persons as might censure 
him for such a production, and tt: 
well as the poem itself, were translated into 
French by Pasquier. TL: 
for the public, not for Madame des Boehes, 
and her daughter, who were versed both in 
Latin and Greek. Among the numerous 
persons whom the Assizes had brought to 
Poictiers, whether as judges, advocates, 
suitors, or idlers, every one who could write 
a Latin or a French verse tried Lis skill 
upon this small subject. Tout le Pamasse 
latin et francois du royaume, says Titon du 
Tillet, voulut prendre part a cette rare de- 
couuerte, sur taut apres avoir reconnu que la 
file, quoique tres-sage, entendoit raillerie. 
There is one Italian sonnet in the collection, 
one Spanish, and, according to the Abbe 
Gronjet, there are some Grerli verses, but in 
the republication of Pasquier s works these 
do not appear : they were probably omitted, 
as not being likely ever again to meet with 
readers. Some of the writers were men 
whose names would have been altogether 
forgotten if they had not been thus pre- 
served ; and others might as well have been 
forgotten for the value of any thing which 
they have left ; but some were deservedly 
distinguished in their generation, and had 
won for themselves an honourable remem- 
brance, which will not pass be Pre- 
sident Harlay himself encouraged Pasquier 
by an eulogistic epigram, and no less a per- 
son than Joseph Scaliger figures in Catullian 
verse among the flea-poets. 

The name f the Demo: 
afforded occasion for such allusions I 



196 



THE DOCTOR. 



rocks of Parnassus as the dealers in common- 
place poetry could not fail to profit by. 

Nil rerum variat perennis ordo. 
Et constant sibi Phoebus et sorores ; 
Nee Pidex rnodo tot simul Poelas, 
Sed Parnassia fecit ipsa rupes, — 
Rupes, aut Hcliconia Hippocrene. 

These verses were written by Pithou, to 
whose satirical talents his own age was 
greatly indebted for the part which he took 
in the Satyre Menippee ; and to whose col- 
lections and serious researches his country 
will always remain so. Many others harped 
upon the same string ; and Claude Binet, in 
one of his poems, compared the Lady to 
Rochelle, because all suitors had found her 
impregnable. 

Nicolas Rapin, by way of varying the 
subject, wrote a poem in vituperation of the 
aforesaid flea, and called it La Contrepuce. 
He would rather, he said, write in praise of 
a less mentionable insect ; which, however, 
he did mention ; and, moreover, broadly 
explained, and in the coarsest terms, the 
Lady's allusion to Orion. 

The flea having thus become the business, 
as well as the talk of Poictiers, some epi- 
grams were sported upon the occasion. 

Causidicos habuil vigilantes Curia ; namque 
Illis perpetuus tinnit in aure Pulex. 

The name of Nicolas Rapinus is affixed to 
this; that of Raphael Gallodonius to the 
following. 

Ad consultissimos Supremi Senatus Gallici 
Patronos, in liupece Pulicem ludentes. 

Abdita causarum si vis responsa rcferre, 
Hos tarn perspicuos consule Causidicos : 

Qui juris callent apices, vestigia morsu 
Metiri pulicum carmine certa sciunt, 

Ecquid eos latuisse putas dum scria tractant, 
<lui dum nuganlur, tarn bene parva canuntf 

The President of the Parliament of Paris, 
Pierre de Soulfour, compared the flea to the 
Trojan horse, and introduced this gigantic 
compliment with a stroke of satire. 

Quid Magni prpercre Dies ? res mira canenda est, 

Vera tam en ; Pulicem progenuere breve m. 
Quicquid id est, lamen est magnum ; Magnisque 
Die bus 

Non sine divino numinc progenitum. 
Hie utero potuit plures gestare poetas, 

Quam i nut. atidaces techno Pelasga duces. 
Tros equus heroes tantoa nonfudit ab alvo, 

Dulcisonos votes quot tulit iste Pulex, 



Pasquier was proud of what he had done 
in starting the flea, and of the numerous and 
distinguished persons who had been pleased 
to follow his example in poetising upon it ; 
pour memorial do laquelle, he says, jai voulu 
dresser ce trophee, qui est la publication de 
leurs vers. So he collected all these verses 
in a small quarto volume, and published 
them in 1582, with this title — La Puce ; ou 
Jeux Poetiques Francois et Latins : composez 
sur la Puce aux Grands Jours de Poictiers 
Van 1579 : dont Pasquier futle premier motif. 
He dedicated the volume to the President 
Harlay, in the following sonnet : 

Pendant que du Harlay de Themis la lumiere, 
Pour bannir de Poictou Vespouventable mal, 
Exergant la justice a tous de poids dgal, 

Restablessoit VAstree en sa chair e premiere ; 

Quelques nobles esprit s, pour se donner carrier e, 
Voulourent exalter un petit animal, 
Et luy coler aux flancs les aisles du cheval 

Qui prend jusque au ciel sa course coutumiere. 

Harlay, mon Achille, relasche tes esp?-its ; 

Sousguigne ffun bon ceil tant soit pen ces escrils, 
II attendent de toy, ou la rnort, ou la vie : 

Si tu pers a les lire un seul point de ton temps, 

lis vivront i?nrnortels dans le temple des ans, 
Malgre Voubly, la mort, le mesdire et Venvie. 

The original volume would have passed 
away with the generation to which it be- 
longed, or if preserved, it would, like many 
others more worthy of preservation, have 
been found only in the cabinets of those who 
value books for their rarity rather than 
their intrinsic worth : this would have been 
its fate if it had not been comprised in the 
collective edition of Pasquier's works, which, 
as relating to his own times, to the antiqui- 
ties of his country, and to French literature, 
are of the greatest importance. It was pro- 
perly included there, not merely because it 
is characteristic of the nation, and of the 
age, but because it belongs to the history of 
the individual. 

Here in England the Circuit always serves 
to sharpen the wits of those who are wait- 
ing, some of them hungrily, and but too 
many hopelessly, for practice ; and as no- 
where there is more talent running to seed 
than at the bar, epigrams circulate there as 
freely as opinions, — and much more harm- 
lessly. But that the ciders of the profession, 
and the judges, should take part in such 



THE DOCTOR. 



107 



levities as the Jeux Poetiques of Poictiers. 

would at all times have been as much out of 
character in England, as it -would be still in 
character among our lighter-heeled, lighter- 
hearted, and lighter-headed neighbours. 
The same facility in composing Latin Ferae 
would not now be found at the French bar ; 
but if a flea was started there, a full cry 
might as easily be raised after it, as it was 
at the Grands Jours held under the Pre- 
sident Harlay ; and they who joined in the 
cry would take exactly the same tone. Tou 
would find in their poetry just as much of 
what Pasquier call dise. and just as 

little exertion of intellect in any other direc- 
tion. 

It is not language alone, all but all-power- 
ful in this respect as language is, which 
makes the difference in whatever belongs to 
poetry, between the French and the English. 
We know how Donne has treated this very 
subject ; and we know how Cleveland, and 
Randolph and Cowley would have treated 
it, licentiously indeed, but with such a pro- 
fusion of fantastic thought, that a prodigality 
of talent would seem even greater than the 
abuse. In later times, if such a theme had 
presented itself, Darwin would have put the 
flea in a solar microscope, and painted the 
monster with surprising accuracy in the 
most elaborate rhymes : he would then have 
told of fleas which had been taken and 
tamed, and bound in chains, or yoked to 
carriages ; and this he would have done in 
couplets so nicely turned, and so highly 
polished, that the poetical artist might seem 
to vie with the flea-tamer and carriage- 
builder in patience and in minute skill. 
Cowper would have passed with playful but 
melancholy grace 

From gay to grave, from lively to severe, 

and might have produced a second Task. 

And in our own days, Rogers would case 
the flea., like his own gnat, in imperishable 
amber. Leigh Hunt would luxuriate in a 
fairy poem, fanciful as Drayton's Xymphidia, 
or in the best style of Herrick. Charles 
Lamb would crack a joke upon the subject ; 
but then he would lead his readers to think 



while he was amusing them, make them feel 
if they were capable of feeling, and perhaps 
leave them in tears. Southey would give 
us a strain of scornful satire and meditative 
playfulness in blank verse of the Elizabethan 
standard. Wordsworth, — no, Wordsworth 
would disdain the flea : but some imitator 
c f Wordsworth would enshrine the flea in a 
Sonnet the thought and diction of which 
would be as proportionate to the subject 
matter, as the Great Pyramid is to the 
nameless one of the Pharaohs for whose 
tomb it was constructed. Oxford and Cam- 
bridge would produce Latin verses, good in 
their manner as the best of Pasquier's col- 
lection, and belter in every thing else : they 
would give us Greek verses also, as many 
and as good. Landor would prove himself 
as recondite a Latinist as Scaliger, and a 
better poet ; but his hendecasyllabies * would 
not be so easily construed. Cruikshank 
would illustrate the whole collection with 
immortal designs, such as no other country, 
and no other man could produce. The flea 
would be introduced upon the stage in the 
next new Pantomime : Mr. Lwing would 
discover it in the Apocalypse : and some 
preacher of Rowland Hill's school would 
improve it (as the phrase is) in a sermon, 
and exhort his congregation to flee from sin. 

I say nothing of Mr. Moore, and the half 
dozen Lords who would mignardi.se the sub- 
ject like so many Frenchmen. But how 
would Bernard Barton treat it ? Perhaps 
Friend Barton will let us see in one of the 
next year's Annuals. 

I must not leave the reader with an un- 
favourable opinion of the lady whose flea 
obtained such singular celebrity, and who 
quoique tres sage entendoit raillerie. Titon du 
Tillet intended nothing equivocal by that ex- 
pression ; and the tone which the Flea-poets 
took was in no degree derogatory to her, for 
the manners of the age permitted it. Les 
Dames des Roches, both mother and daugh- 



* Lander's " Pbaleuciorum Liber " was published at 
Pisa in 1S20. It is appended to his " Idyllia Heroica 
Decern." The copy before me was his presentation copy 
to Southey, with corrections in his own handwriting. 



198 



THE DOCTOR. 



ter, were remarkable and exemplary women ; 
and there was a time when Poictiers derived 
as much glory from these blue ladies as from 
the Black Prince. The mother, after living 
most happily with her husband eight-and- 
twenty years, suffered greatly in her widow- 
hood from vexatious lawsuits, difficult cir- 
cumstances, and broken health ; but she had 
great resources in herself, and in the dutiful 
attachment of Catherine, who was her only 
child, and whom she herself had nursed and 
educated; the society of that daughter 
enabled her to bear her afflictions, not only 
with patience but with cheerfulness. No 
solicitations could induce Catherine to marry ; 
she refused offers which might in all other 
respects have been deemed eligible, because 
she would not be separated from her mother, 
from whom she said death itself could not 
divide her. And this was literally verified, 
for in 1587 they both died of the plague on 
the same day. 

Both were women of great talents and 
great attainments. Their joint works in 
prose and verse were published in their life- 
time, and have been several times reprinted, 
but not since the year 1604. The poetry is 
said to be of little value ; but the philoso- 
phical dialogues are praised as being neither 
deficient in genius nor in solidity, and as 
compositions which may still be perused 
with pleasure and advantage. This is the 
opinion of a benevolent and competent critic, 
the Abbe Goujet. I have never seen the 
book. 

Before I skip back to the point from 
which my own flea and the Poictiers' flea 
have led me, I must tell a story of an 
English lady who under a similar circum- 
stance was not so fortunate as Pasquier's ac- 
complished friend. This lady, who lived in 
the country, and was about to have a large 
dinner party, was ambitious of making as 
great a display as her husband's establish- 
ment;, a tolerably large one, could furnish : 
so that there might seem to be no lack of 
servants, a great lad, who had been employed 
only in farm work, was trimmed and dressed 
for the occasion, and ordered to take his 
stand behind his mistress's chair, with strict 



injunctions not to stir from the place, nor 
do any thing unless she directed him ; the 
lady well knowing that although no footman 
could make a better appearance as a piece 
of still-life, some awkwardness would be in- 
evitable, if he were put in motion. Accord- 
ingly Thomas, having thus been duly drilled 
and repeatedly enjoined, took his post at the 
head of the table behind his mistress, and 
for a while he found sufficient amusement in 
looking at the grand set-out, and staring at 
the guests : when he was weary of this, and 
of an inaction to which he was so little used, 
his eyes began to pry about nearer objects. 
It was at a time when our ladies followed 
the French fashion of having the back and 
shoulders under the name of the neck un- 
covered much lower than accords either with 
the English climate, or with old English 
notions ; — a time when, as Landor ex- 
presses it, the usurped dominion of neck had 
extended from the ear downwards, almost 
to where mermaids become fish. This lady 
was in the height, or lowness of that fashion ; 
and between her shoulder-blades, in the 
hollow of the back, not far from the confines 
where nakedness and clothing met, Thomas 
espied what Pasquier had seen upon the 
neck of Mademoiselle des Roches. The 
guests were too much engaged with the 
business and the courtesies of the table to 
see what must have been worth seeing, the 
transfiguration produced in Thomas's coun- 
tenance by delight, when he saw so fine an 
opportunity of showing himself attentive, 
and making himself useful. The lady was 
too much occupied with her company to feel 
the flea ; but to her horror she felt the great 
finger and thumb of Thomas upon her back, 
and to her greater horror heard him exclaim 
in exultation, to the still greater amuse- 
ment of the party — a vlea, a vlea ! my lady, 
ecod Tve caught 'en ! 



THE DOCTOK. 



199 



CHAPTER XC. 

WHEREIN THE CURIOUS READER MAY FIND 
SOME THINGS WHICH HE IS NOT LOOKING 
FOR, AND WHICH THE INCURIOUS ONE MAY 
SKIP IF HE PLEASES. 

Voulant doncques satisfaire a la curiosity de toiits bons 
compagnons,fay revolve toutes les P autarches des Cieux, 
calcule les quadrats dela Lune, crochete tout ce que jamais 
penserent louts les Astropkiles, Hypernephelistes, Anemo- 
phylaces, Uranopetes et Omprophozes. Rabelais. 

A minute's recollection will carry the reader 
back to the chapter whereon that accidental 
immolation took place, which was the means 
of introducing him to the bas-bleus of Poic- 
tiers. We were then engaged upon the con- 
nection which in Peter Hopkins's time still 
subsisted between astrology and the practice 
of medicine. 

Court de Gebelin in his great hypotheti- 
cal, fanciful, but withal ingenious, erudite, 
and instructive work, says that the almanack 
was one of the most illustrious and most 
useful efforts of genius of the first men, and 
that a complete history of it would be a 
precious canvass for the history of the human 
race, were it not that unfortunately many 
of the necessary materials have perished. 
On pent assurer, he says, que sans almanack, 
les operations de V agriculture seroient incer- 
taines ; que les travaux des champs ne se 
rencontreroient que per hazard dans les terns 
convenables : qui il riy auroit ni fetes ni as- 
semblies publiques, et que la memoir e des terns 
anciens ne seroit qiiun cahos. 

This is saying a little too much. But 
who is there that has not sometimes occasion 
to consult the almanack ? Maximilian I. 
by neglecting to do this failed in an enter- 
prise against Bruges. It had been con- 
certed with his adherents in that turbulent 
city, that he should appear before it at a 
certain time, and they would be ready to 
rise in his behalf, and open the gates for 
him. He forgot that it was leap-year, and 
came a day too soon ; and this error on his 
part cost many of the most zealous of his 
friends their lives. It is remarkable that 



neither the historian who relates this, nor 
the writers who have followed him, should 
have looked in the almanack to guard against 
any inaccuracy in the relation; for they 
have fixed the appointed day on the eve of 
St. Matthias, which being the 23d of Fe- 
bruary could not be put out of its course 
by leap-year. 

This brings to my recollection a legal 
anecdote, that may serve in like manner to 
exemplify how necessary it is upon any im- 
portant occasion to scrutinise the accuracy 
of a statement before it is taken upon trust. 
A fellow was tried (at the Old Bailey, if I 
remember rightly) for highway robbery, 
and the prosecutor swore positively to him, 
saying he had seen his face distinctly, for it 
was a bright moonlight night. The counsel 
for the prisoner cross-questioned the man, 
so as to make him repeat that assertion, and 
insist upon it. He then affirmed that this 
was a most important circumstance, and a 
most fortunate one for the prisoner at the 
bar : because the night on which the alleged 
robbery was said to have been committed 
was one in which there had been no moon ; 
it was during the dark quarter ! In proof 
of this he handed an almanack to the Bench, 
— and the prisoner was acquitted accord- 
ingly. The prosecutor, however, had stated 
every thing truly ; and it was known after- 
wards that the almanack with which the 
counsel came provided had been prepared 
and printed for the occasion. 

There is a pleasing passage in Sanazzaro's 
Arcadia, wherein he describes two large 
beechen tablets, suspended in the temple of 
Pan, one on each side of the altar, scritte di 
rusticane lettere ; le quali successivamente di 
tempo in tempo per molti anni conservate dai 
passati pastori, contenevano in se le antiche 
leggi, e gli ammaestramenti della pastorale 
vita : dalle quali tutto quello che fra le selve 
oggi se adopra, ebbe prima origine. One of 
these tablets contained directions for the 
management of cattle. In the other eran 
notati tutti i di delV anno, e i varj mutamcnti 
delle stagioni, e la inequalita delle notte e del 
giorno, insieme con la osservazione delle ore, 
non poco necessarie a viventi, e li non falsi 



200 



THE DOCTOR. 



pronostici delle tempestati : e quando il Sole 
con suo nascimento denunzia serenita, e quando 
pioggia, e quando venti, e quando grandini; 
e quali giorni son delta luna fortunati, e quali 
infelici alle opre de" mortali : e ehe ciascuno 
in ciascuna ora dovesse fuggire, o seguitare, 
per non offendere le osservabili volonta degli 
Dii. 

It is very probable that Sanazzaro has 
transferred to his pastoral what may then 
have been the actual usage in more retired 
parts of the country, and that before the 
invention of printing rendered almanacks 
accessible to every one, a calendar, which 
served for agricultural as well as ecclesias- 
tical purposes, was kept in every consider- 
able church. Olaus Magnus says that the 
northern countrymen used to have a calen- 
dar cut upon their walking-sticks (baculos 
annates, he calls them) ; and that when they 
met at church from distant parts, they laid 
their heads together and mc.de their com- 
putations. The origin of these wooden 
almanacks, which belong to our own anti- 
quities, as well as to those of Scandinavia, is 
traced hypothetically to the heathen temple, 
authentically to the Church. It has been 
supposed that the Cimbri received the Julian 
calendar from Caesar himself, after his con- 
quest, as it is called, of Britain; and that it 
was cut in Runic characters for the use of 
the priests, upon the rocks, or huge stones, 
which composed their rude temples, till 
some one thought of copying it on wood and 
rendering it portable, for common use : — 
donee tandem, (are Wormius's words,) in- 
genii rara dexteritate emersit Me, quisquis 
tandem fuerit, qui per lignea hcBCce compen- 
dia, tarn utile tamque necessarium negotium 
plebi communicandum duxit: cujus nomen si 
exstaret aquiore jure fastis hisce insereretur, 
quam multorum tituli, quos boni publici cura 
vix unquam tetigit. 

The introduction of the Julian calendar 
at that time is, however, nothing better than 
an antiquary's mere dream. At a later 
period the Germans, who had much more 
communication with the Romans than ever 
the Scandinavians had, divided the year into 
three seasons, if Tacitus was rightly in- 



formed ; this being one consequence of the 
little regard which they paid to agriculture. 
Hyems et ver et astas intellectum ac vocabula 
habent; autumni perinde nomen ac bona igno- 
rantur. 

Moreover, Wormius was assured, (and 
this was a fact which might well have been 
handed down by memory, and was not likely 
to have been recorded), that the wooden 
almanacks were originally copied from a 
written one in a very ancient manuscript 
preserved in the church at Drontheim. 
There is no proof that a pagan Rimstoke 
ever existed in those countries. The clergy 
had no interest in withholding this kind of 
knowledge from the people even in the 
darkest ages of papal tyranny and monkish 
imposture. But during the earlier idolatries 
o© the Romans it seems to have been with- 
held ; and it was against the will of the 
Senate that the Fasti were first, divulged to 
the people by Cneius Flavius Scriba. 

The carelessness of the Romans during 
many ages as to the divisions of time, seems 
scarcely compatible even with the low de- 
gree of civilisation which they had attained. 
We are told that when the Twelve Tables 
were formed, no other distinctions of the 
day than those of sunrise and sunset were 
known among them by name; that some 
time after they began to compute from noon 
to noon ; and that for three hundred years 
they had nothing whereby to measure an 
hour, nor knew of any such denomination, 
tamdiu populi Romani indiscreta luxfuit. A 
brazen pillar, which marked the hour of 
noon by its shortest shadow, was the only 
means of measuring time, till, in the first 
Punic war, the Consul M. Valerius Messala 
brought thither a sun-dial from the spoils of 
Catana in Sicily. This was in the 477th year 
of the City ; and by that dial the Romans 
went ninety-nine years without adapting it 
to the meridian of Rome. A better was 
then erected; but they were still without 
any guide in cloudy weather, till in the year 
595 after the building of the City, Scipio 
Nasica introduced the water- clock, which is 
said to have been invented about eighty 
years before by Ctesibius of Alexandria. 



THE DOCTOR. 



201 



When the Romans had begun to advance in 
civilisation, no people ever made a more 
rapid progress in all the arts and abuses which 
follow in its train. Astrology came with 
astronomy from the East, for science had 
speedily been converted into a craft, and in 
the age of the Csesars the Egyptian profes- 
sors of that craft were among the pests of 
Rome. 

More than one Roman calendar is in ex- 
istence, preserved by the durability of the 
material, which is a square block of marble. 
Each side contains three months, in parallel 
columns, headed by the appropriate signs of 
the zodiac. In these the astronomical inform- 
ation was given, with directions for the agri- 
cultural business of the month, and notices 
of the respective gods under whose tutelage 
the months were placed, and of the religious 
festivals in their course, with a warning to 
the husbandmen against neglecting those 
religious duties, upon the due performance 
of which the success of their labours de- 
pended. 

Those learned authors who look in the 
Scriptures for what is not to be found there, 
and supply by conjectures whatever they 
wish to find, have not decided whether as- 
tronomy was part of Adam's infused know- 
ledge, or whether it was acquired by him, 
and his son Seth ; but from Seth they say it 
descended to Abraham, and he imparted, it 
to the Egyptians. Whatever may be thought 
of this derivation, the Egyptian mind seems 
always to have pullulated with superstition, 
as the slime of their own Nile is said to have 
fermented into low and loathsome forms of 
miscreated life. The Rabbis say that ten 
measures of witchcraft were sent into the 
world, and Egypt got nine of them. 

The Greeks are said to have learned from 
the Babylonians the twelve divisions of the 
day. The arrow-headed* inscriptions at 
Babylon are supposed by some of those who 
have bestowed most attention upon them to 
be calendars : and there can be little doubt 



* See the Paper of N. L. Westergaard on the Median 
Species of Arrow-headed Writing, in the Memoires de la 
Scciete Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 1844, p. 271., 
&c 



that where the divisions of time were first 
scientifically observed, there the first calen- 
dar would be formed. In Egypt, however, 
it is that we hear of them first ; and such 
resemblances exist between the Egyptian 
calendar, and the oldest of those which have 
been discovered in the north of Europe, that 
Court de Gebelin supposes they must have 
had a common origin, and in an age anterior 
to those Chaldeans whose astronomical ob- 
servations ascended nineteen hundred years 
before the age of Alexander. This is too 
wild an assumption to be soberly maintained. 
What is common to both found its way to 
Scandinavia in far later times. Christianity 
was imported into those countries with all 
the corruptions which it had gathered in the 
East as well as in the West ; and the Chris- 
tian calendar brought with it as many super- 
stitions of European growth, as there was 
room for inserting. There was room for 
many even upon the Norwegian staff". 

The lineal descendant of that rimstoke was 
still in use in the middle of England at the 
close of the 17th century ; though it was 
then, says Plot, a sort of antiquity so little 
known that it had hardly been heard of in 
the southern parts, and was understood but 
by few of the gentry in the northern. 
Clogg f was the English name, whether so 
called from the word log, because they were 
generally made of wood, and not so com- 
monly of oak or fir as of box ; or from the 
resemblance of the larger ones to the clogs, 
" wherewith we restrain the wild, extrava- 
gant, mischievous motions of some of our 
dogs," he knew not. There were some few 
of brass. Some were of convenient size for 
the pocket ; and there were larger ones, 
which used to hang at one end of the mantle 
tree of the chimney for family use ; as in 
Denmark the rimstoke was found in every 
respectable yeoman's house at the head of 
the table, or suspended from a beam. Plot 
minutely and carefully described these, and 
endeavoured, but not always with success, 

t The Icelandic is Klohr, — the Danish, Klog. On this 
point, see the Specimen Calendarii Gentilis, appended to 
the 3d vol. of the JEdda Scemundar Jiins Froda, pp. 999— 
1124. 



202 



THE DOCTOR. 



to explain some of the hieroglyphes or sym- 
bols by which the festivals were denoted; 
all which he had seen had only the Prime 
(or Golden Number) and the immovable 
feasts ; the Prime, so called as indicating 
primas lunas through the year, our ancestors 
set in the margin of their calendars in cha- 
racters of gold, — and thence its other name. 

The rudest that has ever been discovered 
was found in pulling down part of a chateau 
in Bretagne. Its characters had so magical 
an appearance, that it would have been con- 
demned by acclamation to the flames, if the 
Lord of the Chateau had not rescued it, 
thinking it was more likely to puzzle an an- 
tiquary than to raise the Devil. He sent it 
to Sainte-Palaye, and M. Lancelot succeeded 
in fully explaining it. Most barbarous as it 
was, there is reason for concluding that it 
was not older than the middle of the 17th 
century. 

In Peter Hopkins's time the clogg was 
still found in farm houses. He remem- 
bered when a countryman had walked to the 
nearest large town, thirty miles distant, for 
the express purpose of seeing an almanack, 
the first that had been heard of in those 
parts. His inquiring neighbours crowded 
round the man on his return. " Well — 
well," said he, " I know not ! it maffles 
and talks. But all I could make out is that 
Collop Monday falls on a Tuesday next 
year." 



CHAPTER XCL 

THE AUTHOR DISPLAYS A LITTLE MORE OF 
SUCH READING AS IS SELDOM READ, AND 
SHOWS THAT LORD BYRON AND AN ESSEX 
WIDOW DIFFERED IN OPINION CONCERN- 
ING FRIDAY. 

SiJ'avoi's disperse ceci en divers cndroits de mon ouv- 
rage,J'auroit evile la censure de ccux qui appcllcront ce 
chapitrc un fatras de petit recuetls. Mais comme je 
ckerche la commodite de mes lecteurs plutdt que la mienne, 
je vcux bien au depens de cette censure, leur epargncr la 
peine de r assembler cc qucfaurois disperse. Bayle. 

There is no superstition, however harmless 
it may appeal*, and may indeed long con- 



tinue to be, but has in it some latent evil. 
Much has arisen from the distinction of un- 
lucky days, which may very innocently and 
naturally have originated, though it was 
afterwards dexterously applied by astro- 
logers, and by the priests of false religions, 
to their own purposes. ~No one would 
willingly commence an important under- 
taking on the anniversary of a day which 
had brought to him some great and irrepar- 
able calamity. It would be indecent to fix 
upon St. Bartholomew's for a day of public 
rejoicing in France; or in Portugal, upon 
that day on which Lisbon was laid in ruins 
by the great earthquake. On the other 
hand an English General, and an English 
army, would feel something more than their 
wonted hope and expectation of victory, if 
they gave the enemy battle on the anniver- 
saries of Waterloo, or Blenheim, Cressy, 
Poictiers, or Agincourt. God be thanked 
neither our fleets, nor armies have ever yet 
caused a day to be noted with black in the 
English calendar ! 

But many a good ship has lost that tide 
which might have led to fortune, because 
the captain and the crew thought it unlucky 
to begin their voyage on a Friday. You 
were in no danger of being left behind by 
the packet's sailing on that day, however 
favourable the wind, if it were possible for 
the captain to devise any excuse for re- 
maining till the morrow in harbour. Lord 
Byron partook this superstition ; and if any 
thing of the slightest importance in which 
he was concerned were commenced on a 
Friday, he was seriously disconcerted. 

Such, however, are the effects of supersti- 
tious animosity, that (as the Puritans in the 
next generation made Christmas- day a fast 
by an ordinance of Parliament) in James 
the First's reign Friday was kept as a sort 
of holyday. The biographer of a Spanish 
lady, who came to England for the purpose 
of secretly serving the Roman Catholic 
cause, says " that among her other griefs 
she had that of hearing the wheel go round, 
by which they roasted whole quarters of 
beef on every Friday, delighting to profane 
with forbidden food that day on which the 



THE DOCTOR. 



203 



catholics, by fasting and other works of 
penitence, manifested their sense, every week 
throughout the year, of the sufferings of 
their Lord and Saviour. In all English 
houses," he says, " both private and public 
(to which latter great part of the people 
went for their meals), all kinds of meat 
roasted and boiled are seen on Fridays, 
Good Friday not excepted, as if it were a 
land of Jews or Turks. The nobles in par- 
ticular reserve their feasts and entertain- 
ment of all kinds of meats and delicacies for 
Frfdays. It is the sport of the great, and 
their sort of piety, to testify by these sacri- 
leges their hatred to the Roman church." 

There is probably some exaggeration in 
this statement ; and if the biographer was 
conversant with the history of his own 
country, he must have known that there 
was a time when his own countrymen made 
it a point of duty to eat pork on Saturdays, 
for the sake of despiting the Jews. But 
the practice cannot, have been so common as 
he represents it ; for if it had, Friday would 
not have retained its inauspicious character 
to the present time. Yet even this which 
is in common opinion the most unlucky of 
all the days, may, from particular circum- 
stances, deserve, it appears, to be marked 
with a white stone. Upon a trial brought 
at the Chelmsford Assizes, by a disconsolate 
widow against a faithless suitor, for breach 
of promise, a letter of the defendant's was 
produced, containing this passage : " Mrs. 
Martha Harris, you say I have used you ill ; 
but I do not think I have at all ; for I told 
you not to count too much, lest something 
should happen to disappoint. You say the 
day was mine ; but respecting that, I said, 
' if before harvest it must be very soon, or 
it would be in harvest ; ' and you said ' fix 
any time soon.' But you said you should 
like to marry on a Friday, for you thought 
that a good day ; for on a Friday your hus- 
band died, and on a Friday I first came to 
<ee you, and Friday was market day." 

Old opinions, however groundless, are not 
often so easily overcome. The farmer has 
let precious days pass by without profiting 
by favourable weather, because he was 



warned against them by his almanack, or 
by tradition ; and for the same reason, mea- 
sures which might have relieved and saved 
a patient have been fatally procrastinated. 
There were about thirty days in the Christian 
year to which such malignant influences 
were imputed, that the recovery of any per- 
son who fell ill upon them was thought to 
be almost impossible ; in any serious disease 
how greatly must this persuasion have in- 
creased the danger ! 

More than half the days in the year are 
unlucky in Madagascar : and the Ombiasses, 
as the sort of bastard Mahomedan jugglers 
in that great island are called, have made 
the deluded people believe that any child 
born on one of those days will, if it be 
allowed to grow up, prove a parricide, be 
addicted to every kind of wickedness, and 
moreover be miserable throughout the whole 
course of its life. The infant is always ex- 
posed in consequence ; and unless some 
humaner parents employ a slave or relation 
to preserve it, and remove it for ever from 
their knowledge, it is left for beasts, birds, 
or reptiles to devour ! 

The unfortunate days in Christendom, ac- 
cording to the received superstition in dif- 
ferent countries, were either a little more or 
less than thirty, — about a twelfth part of 
the year ; the fortunate were not quite so 
many, all the rest are left, if the astrologers 
had so pleased, in their natural uncertainty. 
And how uncertain all were is acknowledged 
in the oldest didactics upon this subject, 
after what were then the most approved 
rules had been given. 

AiSt fjLiv r,uicai tig- in tiixfloviots fJt.iy'' ovutz§. 

A/S' ocXXxi iaitoloovtoi, axf,$ioi, oitn ficovcxi. 
" AXXa? §' oc,XXo!r,v ccitU, tolZ^oi §= t' 'itrctgiv. 
"AXXo-rt /u.r,T£ur)} ts'As/ qjUEgif, kXXoTt .tt^rt-f. 

Tcim fjSxiuav n xoci ixSio? o; Ta.'bt irotvroe, 

Ei'Sa)? \oyit,\r,ra.i o\va.i~io; ot-OocvotToig-iv, 
"OjwSaj x^ivaiv, xau uT-^ota-ia.; ccXttiya/v.* 

These are the days of which the careful heed 
Each human enterprise will favouring speed: 
Others there are, which intermediate fall, 
Mark'd with no auspice, and unomen'd all : 
And these will some, and those will others praise ; 
But few are vers'd in mysteries of days. 
Now as a stepmother the day we find 
Severe, and now as is a mother kind. 



Hesiod. 



204 



THE DOCTOR. 



O fortunate the man ! O blest is he, 

Who skill'd in these, fulfils his ministry ! — 

He to whose note the auguries are giv'n, 

No rite transgress'd, and void of blarne to Heaven.* 

The fixed days for good and evil were 
said to have been disclosed by an angel to 
Job. I know not whether it comes from 
the Rabbinical mint of fables that Moses de- 
termined upon Saturday for the Israelites' 
Sabbath, because that day is governed by 
Saturn, and Saturn being a malignant planet, 
all manner of work that might be under- 
taken on the Saturday might be expected 
not to prosper. The Sabbatarians might 
have found here an astrological argument 
for keeping their sabbath on the same day 
as the Jews. 

Sunday, however, is popularly supposed in 
France to be a propitious day for a Romish 
sabbath, — which is far better than a Sir- 
Andrew-Agnewish one. II est reconnu, — 
says a Frenchman, whose testimony on such 
a point is not invalidated by his madness. — 
que les jours de hi semaine ne pewcent se res- 
semhler, puisqu'ils coulent sous Tinfluence de 
differeides pianettes. Le soleil, qui preside 
au dimanche, est cense nous procurer un beau 
jour plus riant que les autres jours de la 
semaine ; et voila aussi pourquoi on se reserve 
ce jour pour se livrer aux pjlaisirs et amuse- 
mens honnetes. 

The Jews say that the Sun always shines 
on "Wednesdays, because his birthday was 
on Wednesday, and he keeps it in this man- 
ner every week. In Feyjoo's time the 
Spaniards had a proverbial saying, that no 
Saturday is ever without sunshine ; nor 
could they be disabused of this notion be^ 
cause in their country it is really a rare 
thing to have a Saturday, or any other day, 
in some part or other of which the sun is 
. But on the Wednesday in Passion 
week they held that it always rains, because 
on that day it was that Peter went out and 
wept bitterly, and they think that it behoves 
the heavens to weep, after this manner, as if 
in commemoration of his tears. 

The saint ~ indeed have been supposed to 
affect the weather so much upon their own 



« Elton. 



holydays, that a French Bishop is said to 
have formed an ingenious project for the 
benefit of a particular branch of agriculture, 
by reforming a small part of the Calendar. 
This prelate was the Bishop of Auxerre, 
Francis DTnteville, first of that name. He 
had observed that for many years the vine- 
yards had suffered severely on certain Saints' 
days, by frost, hail, cold rains or blighting 
winds, and he had come to the conclusion 
that though the said Saints had their festi- 
vals during the time when the sun is pass- 
ing through Taurus, they were nevertheless 
Saints gresleurs, geleurs, et gasteurs du bour- 
geon. 

ISTow this Bishop loved good wine, comme 
fait tout homme de Men ; and he conceived 
that if these foul-weather Saints, who 
seemed in this respect to act as if they had 
enrolled themselves in a Temperance Society, 
were to have their days changed, and be 
calendared between Christmas Day and St. 
Typhaines, they might hail, and freeze, and 
bluster to their hearts content ; and if their 
old festivals were assigned to new patrons, 
who were supposed to have no dislike for 
vineyards, all would go on well. St. George, 
St. Mark, St. Philip and St. Vitalis were 
some of the Samts who were to be provided 
for at Christmas ; St. Christopher, St. Do- 
minic, St. Laurence, and St. Magdalene, the 
most illustrious of those who should have 
been installed in their places, — for on their 
days tant sen faut quon soit en danger de 
gelee. que lors mestier au monde nest, qui 
tant soit de requeste ; comme est des faiseurs 
de friscades, et refraischisseurs de vin* 
These changes, however, in the Saints' ad- 
ministration were not effected; and it appears 
by Rabelais' manner of relating the fact, 
that the Bishop never got from the optative 
to the potential mood. 

Master Rabelais says that the Bishop 
called the mother of the Three Kings St. 
Typhaine ; — it is certain that such a Saint 
was made out of Le Sainte JEpiphanie, and 
that the Three Kings of Cologne were filiated 
upon her. But whether or not this Prelate 

* Livre in. c.xxxiii. 



THE DOCTOR. 



205 



were in this respect as ignorant as his flock, 
he is praised by writers of his own com- 
munion for having by his vigilance and zeal 
kept his diocese, as long as he lived, free 
from the Lutheran pestilence. And he de- 
serves to be praised by others for having 
given a fine organ to his cathedral, and a 
stone pulpit, which was scarcely surpassed 
in beauty by any in the whole kingdom. 

The Japanese, who are a wise people, 
have fixed upon the five most unfortunate 
days in the year for their five great festivals; 
and this they have done purposely, and pru- 
dently, in order by this universal mirth to 
divert and propitiate their Camis, or Deities; 
and also by their custom on those days of 
wishing happiness to each other, to avert the 
mishaps that might otherwise befal them. 
They too are careful never to begin a 
journey at an inauspicious time, and there- 
fore in all their road and house books there 
is a printed table, showing what days of the 
month are unfortunate for this purpose : 
they amount to four- and -twenty in the year. 
The wise and experienced Astrologer, Abino 
Seimei, who invented the table, was a per- 
sonage endowed with divine wisdom and 
the precious gift of prognosticating things to 
come. It is to be presumed that he derived 
this from his parentage, which was very re- 
markable on the mother's side. Take, gentle 
Reader, for thy contentment, what Light- 
foot would have called no lean story. 

Prince Abino Jassima was in the Temple 
of Inari, who, being the God and the Pro- 
tector of Foxes, ought to have a temple in 
the Bishopric of Durham, and in Leicester- 
shire, and wherever Foxes are preserved. 
Foxes' lungs, it seems, were then as much 
esteemed as a medicine by the Japanese, as 
Fox-glove may be by European physicians ; 
and a party of Courtiers were fox-hunting 
at this time, in order to make use of the 
lungs in a prescription. They were in full 
cry after a young fox, when the poor crea- 
ture ran into the temple, and instead of 
looking for protection to the God Inari, took 
shelter in Prince Jassima's bosom. The 
Prince on this occasion behaved very well, 
and the fox-hunters very ill, as it may be 



feared most fox-hunters would do in similar 
circumstances. They insisted upon his turn- 
ing the fox out ; he protested that he would 
commit no such crime, for a crime it would 
have been in such a case ; they attempted to 
take the creature by force, and Prince Jas- 
sima behaved so bravely that he beat them 
all, and set the fox at liberty. He had a 
servant with him, but whether this servant 
assisted him has not been recorded ; neither 
is it stated that the Fox- God, Inari, took 
any part in the defence of his own creature 
and his princely votary ; though from what 
followed it may be presumed that he was far 
from being an unconcerned spectator. I 
pass over the historical consequences which 
make " the hunting of that day " more im- 
portant in Japanese history, than that of 
Chevy Chace is in our own. I pass them 
over because they are not exactly pertinent 
to this place. Suffice it to say, that King 
Jassima, as he must now be called, revenged 
his father's murder upon these very hunters, 
and succeeded to his throne; and then, after 
his victory, the fox appeared, no longer in 
vulpine form, but in the shape of a lady of 
incomparable beauty, whom he took to wife, 
and by whom he became the happy father 
of our Astrologer, Abino Seimei. Gratitude 
had moved this alopegyne, gynalopex, fox- 
lady, or lady-fox, to love ; she told her love 
indeed, — but she never told her gratitude : 
nor did King Jassima know, nor could he 
possibly suspect, that his lovely bride had 
been that very fox whose life he had with 
so much generosity and courage preserved, 
— that very fox, I say, " another and the 
same ; " — never did he imagine, nor never 
could he have imagined this, till an extra- 
ordinary change took place in his beautiful 
and beloved wife. Her ears, her nose, her 
claws and her tail began to grow, and bv 
degrees this wonderful creature became a 
fox again ! My own opinion is, that she 
must have been a daughter of the groat 
Fox -God Inari himself. 

Abino Seimei, her son, proved to be, as 
might have been expected, a cunning per- 
sonage, in the old and good meaning of that 
word. But as he inherited this cunning from 



206 



THE DOCTOR. 



his mysterious mother, he derived also an 
equal share of benevolence from his kind- 
hearted father, King Jassima: and there- 
fore, after having calculated for the good of 
mankind the table of unfortunate days, he, 
for their farther good, composed an Uta, or 
couplet, of mystical words, by pronouncing 
which the poor traveller who is necessitated 
to begin a journey upon one of those days, 
may avert all those evils, which, if he were 
not preserved by such a spell, must in- 
fallibly befal him. He did this for the 
benefit of persons in humble life, who were 
compelled at any time to go wherever their 
lords and masters might send them. I know 
not whether Lord Byron would have ven- 
tured to set out on a Friday, after reciting 
these words, if he had been made acquainted 
with their value ; but here they are, ex- 
pressed in our own characters, to gratify the 
" curious in charms." 

Sada Mejesi Tabicatz Fidori Josi Asijwa, 
Omojitatz Figo Kitz Nito Sea. 



CHAPTER XCII. 

CONCERNING PETER HOPKINS AND THE IN- 
FLUENCE OF THE MOON AND TIDES UPON 
THE HUMAN BODY. A CHAPTER WHICH 
SOME PERSONS MAY DEEM MORE CURIOUS 
THAN DULL, AND OTHERS MORE DULL 
THAN CURIOUS. 

A man that travelleth to the most desirable home, hath 
a habit of desire to it all the way ; but his present business 
is his travel ; and horse, and company, and inns, and 
ways, and weariness, &c., may take up more of his sensible 
thoughts, and of his talk and action, than his home. 

Baxter. 

Few things in this world are useless, — none 
indeed but what are of man's own invention. 
It was one of Oberlin's wise maxims that 
nothing should be destroyed, nothing thrown 
away, or wasted ; he knew that every kind 
of refuse which will not serve to feed pigs, 
may be made to feed both man and beast in 
another way by Berving for manure: per- 
haps lie learned this from the Chinese proverb, 



that a wise man saves even the parings of 
his nails and the clippings of his beard, for 
this purpose. " To burn a hair," says Dar- 
win, "or a straw, unnecessarily^diminishes 
the sum of matter fit for quick nutrition, by 
decomposing it nearly into its elements : and 
should therefore give some compunction to 
a mind of universal sympathy." Let not 
this cant about universal sympathy nauseate 
a reader of common sense, and make him 
regard Darwin's opinion here with the con- 
tempt which his affectation deserves. Every 
thing may be of use to the farmer. And so 
it is with knowledge ; there is none, however 
vain in itself, and however little it may be 
worth the pains of acquiring it, which may 
not at some time or other be turned to ac- 
count. 

Peter Hopkins found that his acquaintance 
with astrology was sometimes of good service 
in his professional practice. In his days 
most of the Almanacks contained Rules As- 
trological showing under what aspects and 
positions different modes of remedy were to 
be administered, and different complexions 
were to let blood. He had often to deal 
with persons who believed in their Almanack 
as implicitly as in their Bible, and who 
studied this part of it with a more anxious 
sense of its practical importance to them- 
selves. When these notions were opposed 
to the course of proceeding which the case 
required, he could gain his point by talking 
to them in their own language, and display- 
ing, if it were called for, a knowledge of the 
art which might have astonished the Alma- 
nack-maker himself. If he had reasoned 
with them upon any other ground, they 
would have retained their own opinion, even 
while they submitted to his authority ; and 
would neither have had faith in him, nor in 
his prescriptions. 

Peter Hopkins would never listen to any 
patient who proposed waiting for a lucky 
day before he entered upon a prescribed 
course of medicine. " Go by the moon as 
much as you please," he would say ; " have 
your hair cut, if you think best, while it 
wexes, and cut your corns while it wanes ; 
and put off any thing till a lucky day that 



THE DOCTOE. 



207 



may as well be done on one day as another. 
But the right day to be bled is when you 
want bleeding ; the right day for taking 
physic is when physic is necessary." 

He was the better able to take this course, 
because he himself belonged to the debate- 
able land between credulity and unbelief. 
Some one has said that the Devil's dubitative 
is a negative, — dubius in fide, infidelis est * ; 
and there are cases, as in Othello's, in which, 
from the infirmity of human nature, it is too 
often seen that 

to be once in doubt 

Is — once to be resolved. 

There is, however, a state of mind, or to 
speak more accurately, a way of thinking, in 
which men reverse the "Welshman's conclu- 
sion in the old comedy, and instead of saying 
" it may be, but it is very impossible," re- 
solve within themselves that it is very im- 
possible, but it may be. So it was in some 
degree with Peter Hopkins ; his education, 
his early pursuits, and his turn of mind, dis- 
posed him to take part with what was then 
j the common opinion of common men, and 
counterbalanced, if they did not, perhaps, a 
little preponderate against the intelligence of 
the age, and his own deliberate judgment, 
if he had been called upon seriously to de- 
clare it. He saw plainly that astrology had 
been made a craft by means whereof knaves 
practised upon fools ; but so had his own 
profession ; and it no more followed as a 
necessary consequence from the one ad- 
mission that the heavenly bodies exercised 
no direct influence upon the human frame, 
than it did from the other that the art of 
medicine was not beneficial to mankind. 

In the high days of astrology, when such 
an immediate influence was affirmed upon 
the then undisputed authority of St. Augustin, 
it was asked how it happened that the pro- 
fessors of this science so frequently deceived 
others, and were deceived themselves ? The 
answer was that too often, instead of con- 
fining themselves within the legitimate limits 
of the art, they enlarged their phylacteries 
too much. Farther, that there were many 

* Sexits Pythagoras. 



more fixed stars than were known to us, yet 
these also must have their influence ; and 
moreover that the most learned professors 
differed upon some of the most important 
points. Nevertheless, so many causes and 
effects in the course of nature were so visibly 
connected, that men, whether astrologers or 
not, drew from them their own conclusions, 
and presaged accordingly : Mirum non est, 
si his et similibus solerter pensiculatis, non tarn 
astrologi qnam pMlosophi, medici, et longd 
experientid edocti agricolce et naidce, qnotidie 
de futuris multa vera prcedicunt, etiamsine as- 
trologies regulis de mortis, de annond, deque 
tempestatibus. 

All persons in Peter Hopkins's days be- 
lieved that change of weather may be 
looked for at the change of the Moon ; and 
all men, except a few philosophers, believe so 
still, and all the philosophers in Europe could 
not persuade an old sailor out of the belief. 
And that the tides have as much influence 
over the human body, in certain stages of 
disease, as the moon has over the tides, is a 
popular belief in many parts of the world. 
The Spaniards think that all who die of 
chronic diseases breathe their last during the 
ebb."}" Among the wonders of the Isle and 
City of Cadiz, which the historian of that 
city, Suares de Salazar, enumerates, one is, 
according to P. Labat, that the sick never die 
there while the tide is rising or at its height, 
but always during the ebb : he restricts the 
notion to the Isle of Leon, but implies that 
the effect was there believed to take place in 
diseases of any kind, acute as well as 
chronic. " Him fever," says the Negro in 
the West Indies, " shall go when the water 
come low. Him alway come hot when the 
tide high." 

If the Negroes had ever heard the theory 
of the tides which Herrera mentions, they 
would readily believe it, and look upon it as 
completely explaining the ground of their 
assertion ; for according to that theory the 
tides are caused by a fever of the sea, which 



f Dame Quickly, in telling of FalstafTs death to 
Bardolph, says : —"'A parted even just between twelve 
and one, e'en at turning o' the tide." — Henry V. Act n. 
Scene iii. 



208 



THE DOCTOR. 



rages for six hours, and then intermits for 
as many more. 

But the effect of the tides upon the human 
constitution in certain states is not a mere 
vulgar opinion. Major Moor says that near 
the tropics, especially in situations where 
the tide of the sea has a great rise and 
fall, scarcely any person, and certainly no one 
affected with feverish or nervous symp- 
toms, is exempted from extraordinary sen- 
sations at the periods of spring tides. That 
these are caused by the changes of the 
moon he will not say, for he had never fully 
convinced himself, however plausible the 
theory, that the coincident phenomena of 
spring tides, and full and change of the moon, 
were cause and effect ; but at the conjunc- 
tion and opposition, or what amounts to the 
same, at the spring tides, these sensations are 
periodically felt. There is an account of 
one singular case in which the influence was 
entirely lunar. When Mr. Gait was travel- 
ling in the Morea, he fell in with a pea- 
sant, evidently in an advanced stage of 
dropsy, who told him, that his father had 
died of a similar complaint, but differing 
from his in this remarkable respect — the' 
father's continued to grow regularly worse, 
without any intervah»of alleviation ; but at the 
change of the moon the son felt comparatively 
much easier. As the moon advanced to the 
full, the swelling enlarged ; and as she 
waned, it again lessened. Still, however, 
though this alteration continued, the disease 
was gaining ground. 

" The moon," Mr. Gait observes, " has, or 
is believed to have, much more to say in the 
affairs of those parts, than with us. The 
climate is more regular ; and if the air have 
tides, like the ocean, of course their effects 
are more perceptible." 

In an early volume of the Philosophical 
Transactions are some observations made by 
Mr. Paschal on the motions of diseases, and 
on the births and deaths of men and other 
animals, in different parts of the day and 
night. Having suspected, he says, that the 
causes of the tides at sea exert their power 
elsewhere, though the effect may not be so 
sensibly perceived on the solid as on the 



fluid parts of the globe, he divided, for trial 
of this notion, the natural day into four 
senaries of hours ; the first consisting of 
three hours before the moon's southing, and 
three after ; the second, of the six hours 
following ; and the third and fourth con- 
tained the two remaining quarters of the 
natural day. Observing then the times of 
birth and death, both in human and other 
subjects, as many as came within the circle 
of his knowledge, he found, he says, none 
that were born or died a natural death in the 
first and third senaries (which he called first 
and second tides), but every one either in 
the second or fourth senaries (which he 
called the first and second ebbs). He then 
made observations upon the motions of 
diseases, other circumstances connected with 
the human frame, alterations of the weather, 
and such accounts as he could meet with of 
earthquakes and other things, and he met 
with nothing to prevent him from laying 
down this as a maxim: — that motion, 
vigour, action, strength, &c, appear most 
and do best, in the tiding senaries; and that 
rest, relaxation, decay, dissolution, belong to 
the ebbing ones. 

This theorist must have been strongly 
possessed with a favourite opinion, before he 
could imagine that the deep subterranean 
causes of earthquakes could in any degree 
be affected by the tides. But that the same 
influences which occasion the ebb and flow 
of the ocean have an effect upon certain 
diseases, is a conclusion to which Dr. 
Pinckard came in the West Indies, and Dr. 
Balfour in the East, from what they ob- 
served in the course of their own practice, 
and what they collected from the informa- 
tion of others. " In Bengal," Dr. Balfour 
says, " there is no room to doubt that the 
human frame is affected by the influences 
connected with the relative situations of the 
sun and moon. In certain states of health 
and vigour, this influence has not power to 
show itself by any obvious effects, and in 
such cases its existence is often not ac- 
knowledged. But in certain states of debility 
and disease it is able to manifest itself by 
exciting febrile paroxysms. Such paroxysms 



THE DOCTOR. 



209 



show themselves more frequently during the 
period of the spring tides, and as these ad- 
vance become more violent and obstinate, 
and on the other hand tend no less in- 
variably to subside and terminate during the 
recess. 

I have no doubt, says this practitioner, 
that any physician who will carefully attend 
to the diurnal and nocturnal returns of the 
tides, and will constantly hold before him 
$ie prevailing tendency of fevers to appear 
at the commencement, and during the period 
of the spring ; and to subside and terminate 
at the commencement and during the period 
of the recess, will soon obtain more infor- 
mation respecting the phenomena of fevers, 
and be able to form more just and certain 
judgments and prognostics respecting every 
event, than if we were to study the history 
of medicine, as it is now written, for a 
thousand years. There is no revolution or 
change in the course of fevers that may not 
be explained by these general principles in 
a manner consistent with the laws of the 
human constitution, and of the great system 
of revolving bodies which unite together in 
producing them. 

Dr. Balfour spared no pains in collect- 
ing information to elucidate and confirm his 
theory during the course of thirty years' 
practice in India. He communicated upon 
it with most of the European practitioners 
in the Company's dominions ; and the then 
Governor General, Lord Teignmouth, con- 
sidered the subject as so important, that he 
properly as well as liberally ordered the cor- 
respondence and the treatise, in which its 
results were embodied, to be printed and 
circulated at the expense of the government. 
The author drew up his scheme of an as- 
tronomical ephemeris, for the purposes of 
medicine and meteorology, and satisfied him- 
self that he had " discovered the laws of 
febrile paroxysms, and unfolded a history 
and theory of fevers entirely new, consistent 
with itself in every part, and with the other 
appearances of nature, perfectly conform- 
able to the laws discovered by the immortal 
Xewton, and capable of producing import- 
ant improvements in medicine and meteor- 



ology. He protested against objections to 
his theory as if it were connected with the 
wild and groundless delusions of astrology. 
Yet the letter of his correspondent, Dr. 
Helenus Scott, of Bombay, shows how na- 
turally and inevitably it would be connected 
with them in that country. " The influence 
of the moon on the human body," says that 
physician, " has been observed in this part 
of India by every medical practitioner. It 
is universally acknowledged by the doctors 
of all colours, of all castes, and of all coun- 
tries. The people are taught to believe it 
in their infancy, and as they grow up, they 
acknowledge it from experience. I suppose 
that in the northern latitudes this power of 
the moon is far less sensible than in India. 
Here we universally think that the state of 
weakly and diseased bodies is much influ- 
enced by its motions. Every full and change 
increases the number of the patients of every 
practitioner. That the human body is 
affected in a remarkable manner by them I 
am perfectly convinced, and that an atten- 
tion to the power of the moon is highly 
necessary to the medical practitioner in 
India." 

This passage tends to confirm, what, in- 
deed, no judicious person can doubt, that 
the application of astrology to medicine, 
though it was soon perverted and debased 
till it became a mere craft, originated in 
actual observations of the connection be- 
tween certain bodily affections, and certain 
times and seasons. Many, if not most of 
the mischievous systems in physics and 
divinity have arisen from dim perceptions 
or erroneous apprehensions of some import- 
ant truth. And not a few have originated 
in the common error of drawing bold and 
hasty inferences from weak premises. Sai- 
lors say, what they of all men have most 
opportunities of observing, that the moon as 
it rises clears the sky of clouds : a puesta del 
sol, says a Spanish chronicler, parescio la 
lima, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves. 
The "learned and reverend" Dr. Goad, 
sometime master of the Merchant Taylors' 
School, published a work "of vast pains, 
reading and many years experience," which 



210 



THE DOCTOR. 



he called " Astro- Meteorologia, or a Demon- 
stration of the Influences of the Stars in the 
alterations of the Air ; proving that there is 
not an Earthquake, Comet, Parhelia, Halo, 
Thunder-storm or Tempest, or any other 
phenomena, but is referable to its particular 
planetary aspect, as the sub-solar cause 
thereof." 



CHAPTER XCIII. 

REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER 
ANTICIPATED AND ANSWERED. 

Oil [/.VYifAOVlUUS obx.'iT'' olViv ; SOPHOCLES. 

Novel readers are sometimes so impatient 
to know how the story is to end, that they 
look at the last chapter, and so — escape, 
should I say — or forfeit that state of agi- 
tating suspense in which it was the author 
or authoress's endeavour to keep them till 
they should arrive by a regular perusal at 
the well-concealed catastrophe. It may be 
apprehended that persons of this temper, 
having in their composition much more of 
Eve's curiosity than of Job's patience, will 
regard with some displeasure a work like 
the present, of which the conclusion is not 
before them : and some, perhaps, may even 
be so unreasonable as to complain that they 
go through chapter after chapter without 
making any progress in the story. " What 
care the Public," says one of these readers, 
(for every reader is a self-constituted repre- 
sentative of that great invisible body) — 
" what do the Public care for Astrology and 
Almanacks, and the Influence of the Tides 
upon diseases, and Mademoiselle de Roches's 
flea, and the Koran, and the Chronology of 
this fellow's chapters, and Potteric Carr, 
and the Corporation of Doncaster, and the 
Theory of Signatures, and the Philosophy 
of the Alchemists, and the Devil knows 
what besides ! What have these things to 
do with the subject of the book, and who 
would ever have looked for them in a 
Novel?" 



"A Novel do you call it, Mr. Reader?" 

" Yes, Mr. Author, what else should I call 
it ? It has been reviewed as a Novel and 
advertised as a Novel." 

" I confess that in this very day's news- 
paper it is advertised in company with four 
new Novels ; the first in the list being 
' Warleigh, or the Fatal Oak,' a Legend of 
Devon, by Mrs. Bray : the second, ' Dacre,' 
edited by the Countess of Morley ; Mr. 
James's ' Life and Adventures of John Marr 
ston Hall,' is the third : fourthly, comes the 
dear name of ' The Doctor ; ' and last in the 
list, ' The Court of Sigismund Augustus, or 
Poland in the Seventeenth Century.' " 

I present my compliments to each and all 
of the authoresses and authors with whom I 
find myself thus associated. At the same 
time I beg leave to apologise for this appa- 
rent intrusion into their company, and to 
assure them that the honour which I have 
thus received has been thrust upon me. 
Dr. Stegman had four patients whose dis- 
ease was that they saw themselves double : 
" they perceived," says Mr. Turner, "another 
self, exterior to themselves ! " I am not one 
of Dr. Stegman's patients ; but I see myself 
double in a certain sense, and in that sense 
have another and distinct self, — the one 
incog, the other out of cog. Out of cog I 
should be as willing to meet the novelist of 
the Polish Court, as any other unknown 
brother or sister of the quill. Out of cog I 
should be glad to shake hands with Mr. 
James, converse with him about Charle- 
magne, and urge him to proceed with his 
French biography. Out of cog I should 
have much pleasure in making my bow to 
Lady Morley or her editor. Out of cog I 
should like to be introduced to Mrs. Bray 
in her own lovely land of Devon, and see the 
sweet innocent face of her humble friend 
Mary Colling. But without a proper intro- 
duction I should never think of presenting 
myself to any of these persons ; and having 
incog the same sense of propriety as out of 
cog, I assure them that the manner in which 
my one self has been associated with them is 
not the act and deed of my other self, but 
that of Messrs. Longman, Rees, Orme, 



THE DOCTOR. 



211 



Brown, Green and Longman, my very wor- 
thy and approved good publishers. 

" Why, Mr. Author, you do not mean to 
say that the book is not printed as a novel, 
does not appear as one, and is not intended 
to pass for one. Have you the face to deny 
it?" 

" Lecteur, mon ami, la demande est bien 
faite sans doute, et bien apparent e ; mais la 
response vous contentera, ou fai le sens mal- 
gallefretu I " 

"Lecteur, mon ami! an Incog has no face. 
But this I say in the face, or in all the faces, 
of that Public which has more heads than a 
Hindoo Divinity, that the character and con- 
tents of the book were fairly, fully, carefully 
and considerately denoted, — that is to say, 
notified or made known, in the title-page. 
Turn to it, I entreat you, Sir! The first 
thing which you cannot but notice, is, that 
it is in motley. Ought you not to have 
inferred, concerning the author, that in his 
brain 

— he hath strange places cramm'd 
. With observation, the which he vents 
In mangled forms.* 

And if you could fail to perceive the con- 
spicuous and capacious 

which in its omni significance may promise 
anything, and yet pledges the writer to 
nothing ; and if you could also overlook the 
mysterious monograph 




your attention was invited to all this by a 
sentence of Butler's on the opposite page, so 
apposite that it seems as if he had written it 

* Shakespeare. 



with a second-sight of the application thus 
to be made of it : ' There is a kind of 
physiognomy in the titles of books no less 
than in the faces of men, by which a skilful 
observer will as well know what to expect 
from the one as the other.' This was the 
remark of one whose wisdom can never be 
obsolete ; and whose wit, though much of it 
has become so, it will always be worth while 
for an Englishman to study" and to under- 
stand. 

" Mr. DTsraeli has said that ' the false idea 
which a title conveys is alike prejudicial to 
the author and the reader, and that titles 
are generally too prodigal of their promises;' 
but yet there is an error on the other hand 
to be avoided, for if they say too little they 
may fail of attracting notice. I bore in 
mind what Baillet says upon this subject, to 
which he has devoted a long chapter : le 
titre d'un Livre doit etre son abrege, et il en 
doit renfermer tout V esprit, autant quHl est 
possible. 11 doit etre le centre de toutes les 
paroles et de toutes les pensees du Livre ; de 
telle sorte qiion riy en puisse pas meme trou- 
ver une qui n'y dit de la correspondance et du 
rapport. From this rule there has been no 
departure. Everything that is said of Peter 
Hopkins relates to the Doctor prospectively, 
because he was the Doctor's master : every 
thing that may be said of, or from myself, 
relates to the Doctor retrospectively, or 
reflectively, because he, though in a different 
sense, was mine : and everything that is said 
about anything else relates to him collater- 
ally,, being either derivative or tributary, 
either divergent from the main subject, or 
convergent to its main end. 

"But albeit I claim the privilege of motley, 
and in right thereof 

— I must have liberty 
Withal, as large a charter as the wind, 
To blow on whom I please ; * 

yet I have in no instance abused that 
charter, nor visited any one too roughly. 
Nor will I ever do against all the world 
what John Kinsaider did, in unseemly de- 
fiance, — nor against the wind either ; though 



* Shakespeare. 



p a 



212 



THE DOCTOR. 



it has been no maxim of mine, nor ever shall 
be, to turn -with the tide, or go with the 
crowd, unless they are going my road, and 
there is no other way that I can take to 
escape the annoyance of their company." 

" And is this any reason, Mr. Author, why 
you should get on as slowly with the story 
of your book, as the House of Commons 
with the business of the nation, in the pre- 
sent reformed Parliament, with Lord Al- 
thorpe for its leader ? " 

" Give me credit, Sir, for a temper as 
imperturbably good as that which Lord 
Althorpe presents, like a sevenfold shield 
of lamb's wool, to cover him against all at- 
tacks, and I will not complain of the dis- 
paragement implied in your comparison." 

" Your confounded good temper, Mr. 
Author, seems to pride itself upon trying 
experiments on the patience of your readers. 
Here I am in the middle of the third volume, 
and if any one asked me what the book is 
about, it would be impossible for me to an- 
swer the question. I have never been able 
to guess at the end of one chapter what 
was likely to be the subject of the next." 

" Let me reply to that observation, Sir, 
by an anecdote. A collector of scarce books' 
was one day showing me his small but 
curious hoard ; l Have you ever seen a copy 
ot 1 this book?' he asked, with every rare 
volume that he put into my hands : and 
when my reply was that I had not, he 
always rejoined with a look and tone of 
triumphant delight, 'I should have been 
exceedingly sorry if you had ! ' 

" Let me tell you another anecdote, not 
less to the purpose. A thorough-bred fox- 
hunter found himself so much out of health. 
a little before the season for his sport began, 
that he took what was then thought a long 
journey to consult a physician, and get some 
advice which he hoped would put him into a 
condition for taking the field. Upon his 
return his friends asked him what the Doe- 
tor had said. 'Why,' said the Squire, 'he 
told me that I've got a dyspepsy : — I don't 
know what that is : but it's some damn'd 
thing or other 1 suppose!' — My good Sir, 
however much at a loss you may be to guess 



what is coming in the next chapter, you can 
have no apprehension that it may turn out 
anything like what he, with too much rea- 
son, supposed a dyspepsy to be. 

" Lecteur, mon ami, I have given you the 
advantage of a motto from Sophocles, and 
were it as apposite to me, as it seems appli- 
cable when coming from you, I might con- 
tent myself with replying to it in a couplet 
of the honest old wine-bibbing, Water- 
poet : — 

That man may well be called an idle morae 
That mocks the Cock because he wears a comb. 

But no one who knows a hawk from a hern- 
shaw, or a sheep's head from a carrot, or the 
Lord Chancellor Brougham, in his wig and 
robes, from a GuyVaux on the fifth of Novem- 
ber, can be so mistaken in judgment as to say 
that I make use of many words in making- 
nothing understood ; nor as to think me, 

uvd^trrov ky'ioxoUv, cci/Sadoirreuoy, 

tX°* T ' a^aAivov, kx^ocrl;, cctsXcutov trro/xct. 

i«« iXxX-/;ri)i , xo,u.!TO$xzsXopp7;.uo)ict.* 

" Any subject is inexhaustible if it be 
fully treated of; that is, if it be treated 
doctrinally and practically, analytically 

and synthetically, historically and morally, 
critically, popularly and eloquently, philo- 
sophically, exegetioally and aesthetically, 
logically, ideologically, etymologically, ar- 
chaiologically, Daniologically and Doveo- 
logieally, which is to say, summing up all in 
one, Doctorologically. 

"Now, my good Reader, whether I handle 
my subject in any of these ways, or in any 
other legitimate way, this is certain, that I 
never handle it as a cow does a musket ; and 
that I have never wandered from it, not 
even when you have drawn me into a Tattle- 
dc-Moy." 

"Auctor incoHijtarabilis, what is a Tattle- 
de-Moy ? " 

" Lectcur, mon ami, you shall now know 
what to expect in the next chapter, fori 
will tell you there what a Tattle-de-Moy 



Aristophanes. 



THE DOCTOR. 



213 



CHAPTER XCIV. 

THE AUTHOR DISCOVERS CERTAIN MUSICAL 
CORRESPONDENCIES TO THESE HIS LUCU- 
BRATIONS. 

And music mild I learn'd that tells 
Tune, time, and measure of the song. 

HlGGlNS. 

A Tattle-de-Moy, reader, was " a new- 
fashioned thing" in the year of our Lord 
1676, " much like a Seraband, only it had in 
it more of conceit and of humour : and it 
might supply the place of a seraband at the 
end of a suit of lessons at any time." That 
simple-hearted, and therefore happy old 
man, Thomas Mace, invented it himself, be- 
cause he would be a little modish, he said; 
and he called it a Tattle-de-Moy, " because 
it tattles, and seems to speak those very 
words or syllables. Its humour," said he, 
" is toyish, jocund, harmless and pleasant ; 
and as if it were one playing with, or toss- 
ing, a ball up and down ; yet it seems to 
have a very solemn countenance, and like 
unto one of a sober and innocent condition, 
or disposition ; not antic, apish, or wild." 

If indeed the gift of prophecy were im- 
parted, or imputed to musicians, as it has 
sometimes been to poets, Thomas Mace 
might be thought to have unwittingly fore- 
shown certain characteristics of the unique 
opus which is now before the reader : so 
nearly has he described them, when instruct- 
ing his pupils how to give right and proper 
names to all lessons they might meet with. 

" There are, first, Preludes ; then, second- 
ly, Fancies and Voluntaries ; thirdly, Pa- 
vines ; fourthly, Allmaines ; fifthly, Airs ; 
sixthly, Galliards ; seventhly, Corantoes ; 
eighthly, Serabands; ninthly, Tattle-de- 
Moys ; tenthly, Chichonas ; eleventhly, Toys 
or Jiggs ; twelfthly, Common Tunes ; and, 
lastly, Grounds, with Divisions upon them. 

" The Prelude is commonly a piece of 
confused, wild, shapeless kind of intricate 
play (as most use it), in which no perfect 
form, shape, or uniformity, can be per- 
ceived; but a random business, pottering 



and grooping, up and down, from one stop, 
or key, to another ; and generally so per- 
formed, to make trial, whether the instru- 
ment be well in tune or not ; by which 
doing, after they have completed their 
tuning, they will (if they be masters) fall 
into some kind of voluntary or fancical play 
more intelligible ; which (if he be a master 
able) is a way whereby he may more fully 
and plainly show his excellency and ability, 
than by any other kind of undertaking ; and 
has an unlimited and unbounded liberty, in 
which he may make use of the forms and 
shapes of all the rest." 

Here the quasi- prophetic lutanist may 
seem to have described the ante-initial 
chapters of this opus, and those other pieces 
which precede the beginning thereof, and 
resemble 

A lively prelude, fashioning the way 
In which the voice shall wander.* 

For though a censorious reader will pick 
out such expressions only as may be applied 
with a malign meaning ; yet in what he may 
consider confused and shapeless, and call 
pottering and grooping, the competent ob- 
server will recognise the hand of a master, 
trying his instrument and tuning it ; and 
then passing into a voluntary whereby he 
approves his skill, and foreshows the spirit 
of his performance. 

The Pavines, Master Mace tells us, are 
lessons of two, three, or four strains, very 
grave and solemn ; full of art and pro- 
fundity, but seldom used in " these our light 
days," as in many respects he might well 
call the days of King Charles the Second. 
Here he characterises our graver Chapters, 
which are in strains so deep, so soothing, 
and so solemn withal, that if such a Pavine 
had been played in the hall of the palace at 
Aix, when King Charlemagne asked the 
Archbishop to dance, the invitation could 
not have been deemed indecorous. 

Allmaines are very airy and lively, and 
generally in common or plain time. Airs 
differ from them only in being usually 
shorter, and of a more rapid and nimble 



* Keats. 



214 



THE DOCTOR. 



performance. — With many of these have 
the readers of the Doctor been amused. 

Galliards, being grave and sober, are per- 
formed in a slow and large triple time. 
Some of the chapters relating to the history 
of Doncaster come under this description : 
especially that concerning its Corporation, 
which may be called a Galliard par excel- 
lence. 

The Corantoes are of a shorter cut, and 
of a quicker triple time, full of sprightful- 
ness and vigour, lively, brisk, and cheerful : 
the Serabands of the shortest triple time, 
and more toyish and light than the Coran- 
toes. There are of both kinds in these 
volumes, and skilfully are they alternated 
with the Pavines : 

— Now the musician 
Hovers with nimble stick o'er squeaking crowd 
Tickling the dried guts of a mewing cat* ; 

and anon a strain is heard — 

Not wanting power to mitigate and swage, 
With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase 
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain 
From mortal or immortal minds. f 

And there are Chichonas also, which con- 
sist of a few conceited notes in a grave kind 
of humour ; these are the Chapters which 
the Honourable Fastidious Feeblewit con- 
demns as being in bad taste, and which 
Lord Makemotion Ganderman pronounces 
poor stuff; but at which Yorickson smiles, 
Macswift's countenance brightens, and Fitz- 
rabelais laughs outright. 

No prophecies can be expected to go upon 
all fours ; and nothing in this opus corre- 
sponds to Master Mace's Toys, or Jiggs, 
which are " light, squibbish things, only fit 
for fantastical and easy light-headed peo- 
ple; " nor to his common Tunes. 

Last in his enumeration is the Ground : 
this, he says, is " a set number of slow notes, 
very grave and stately ; which, after it is 
expressed once or twice very plainly, then 
he that hath good brains and a good hand, 
undertakes to play several divisions upon it, 
time after time, till he has shewed his 
bravery, both of invention and execution." 



* Marston. 



t Milton. 



My worthy friend Dr. Dense can need no 
hint to make him perceive how happily this 
applies to the ground of the present work, 
and the manner of treating it. And if Mr. 
Dulman disputes the application, it can only 
be because he is determined not to see it. 
All his family are remarkable for obstinacy. 
And ere taking leave for awhile of the 
good old lutanist, I invite the serious and 
curious to another Pavine amonp: the stars. 



CHAPTER XCV. 

WHEREIN MENTION IS MADE OF LORD BYRON, 
RONSARD, RABBI KAPOL AND CO. IT IS 
SUGGESTED THAT A MODE OF READING 
THE STARS HAS BEEN APPLIED TO THE 
RECOVERY OF OBLITERATED ROMAN IN- 
SCRIPTIONS ; AND IT IS SHOWN THAT A 
MATHEMATICIAN MAY REASON MATHEMA- 
TICALLY, AND YET LIKE A FOOL. 

Tims may ye behold 
This man is very bold, 
And in his learning old 
Intendeth for to sit. 
I blame him not a whit ; 
For it would vex his wit, 
And clean against his earning 
To follow such learning 
As now-a-days is taught. 

Doctour Double-Ale. 

Lord Byron calls the Stars the poetry of 
heaven, having perhaps in mind Ben Jon- 
son's expression concerning bell-ringing. 
Ronsard calls them the characters of the 
sky : 

— Alors que Vesper vient embrunir nos yeux, 
Attache dans le cielje contemple les cieux, 
En qui Dieu nous escrit, en notes non obscures, 
Lcs sorts et les destins de toutes creatures. 
Car luy, en desdaignant (cotnme font lcs humains) 
D 'avoir cncre et papier et plume enlre les mains, 
Par les astres du del, qui sont ses caracteres, 
Les choscs nous predit et bonnes el contr aires. 
Mais les hommes, charge* de terres et du trespas, 
Meprisent lei escrit, et ne le lisent pas. 

The great French poet of his age probably 
did not know that what he thus said was 
actually believed by the Cabalists. Accord- 
ing to them -the ancient Hebrews repre- 
sented the stars, severally and collectively, 
by the letters of their alphabet ; to read the 



THE DOCTOR. 



215 



stars, therefore, was more than a metapho- 
rical expression with them. And an astral 
alphabet for genethliacal purposes was pub- 
lished near the close of the fifteenth century, 
at Cracow, by Rabbi Kapol Ben Samuel, in 
a work entitled " The Profundity of Pro- 
fundities." 

But as this would rest upon an insecure 
foundation, — for who could be assured that 
the alphabet had been accurately made out ? 
— it has been argued that the Heavens are 
repeatedly in the Scriptures called a Book, 
whence it is to be inferred that they contain 
legible characters : that the first verse of the 
first chapter of Genesis ought to be trans- 
lated, " In the beginning God created the 
letter, or character of the Heavens ;" and 
that in the nineteenth Psalm we should read 
" their line," instead of " their sound has 
gone forth into all lands," this referring to 
their arrangement in the firmament like 
letters upon a roll of parchment. Jews, 
Platonists and Fathers of the Church, are 
shown to have believed in this celestial 
writing. And there can be no question but 
that both the language and the characters 
must be Hebrew, that being the original 
speech, and those the original characters, 
and both divinely communicated to man, 
not of human invention. But single stars 
are not to be read as letters, as in the Astral 
Alphabet. This may be a convenient mode 
of noting them in astronomical observa- 
tions ; the elements of this celestial science 
are more recondite in proportion as the 
science itself is more mysterious. An un- 
derstanding eye may distinguish that the 
stars in their groups form Hebrew letters, 
instead of those imaginary shapes which are 
called the signs of the Zodiac. 

But as the Stars appear to us only as dots 
of light, much skill and sagacity are required 
for discovering how they combine into the 
complex forms of the Hebrew alphabet. 
The astral scholar reads them as antiquaries 
have made out inscriptions upon Roman 
buildings by the marks of the nails, when 
the letters themselves had been torn away 
by rapacious hands for the sake of the metal. 
Indeed it is not unlikely that the Abbe Bar- 



thelemi took the hint from the curiously 
credulous work of his countryman, Gaffarel, 
who has given examples of this celestial 
writing from the Rabbis Kapol, Chomer and 
Abiudan. In these examples the stars are 
represented by white spots upon the black 
bines of the Hebrew letter. The Abbe, when 
he writes upon this subject to Count Caylus, 
seems not to have known that Peiresc had 
restored ancient inscriptions by the same 
means ; if, however, he followed the example 
of Peiresc without choosing to mention his 
name, that omni-erudite man himself is likely 
to have seen the books from whence Gaffarel 
derived his knowledge. 

There is yet another difficulty ; even the 
book of Heaven is not stereotyped : its types 
are continually changing with the motion of 
the heavenly bodies, and changes of still 
greater importance are made by the appear- 
ance of new stars. 

One important rule is to be observed in 
perusing this great stelliscript. He who 
desires to learn what good they prefigure, 
must read them from West to East ; but if 
he would be forewarned of evil, he must read 
from North to West ; in either case be- 
ginning with the stars that are most vertical 
to him. For the first part of this rule, no 
better reason has been assigned than the 
conjectural one, that there is a propriety in 
it, the free and natural motion of the stars 
being from West to East ; but for the latter 
part a sufficient cause is found in the words 
of the Prophet Jeremiah : septentrione pan- 
detur malum : " Out of the North evil shall 
break forth." 

Dionyse Settle was persuaded that Martin 
Frobisher, being a Yorkshire-man, had, by 
his voyage in search of a north-west passage, 
repelled the rehearsal of those opprobrious 
words ; not only he, but many worthy sub- 
jects more, as well as the said Dioivvse, who 
was in the voyage himself, being "York- 
shire too." 

But why should evil come from the North ? 
" I conceive," says Gaffarel, " it would stand 
with sound philosophy to answer, by reason 
of the darkness and gloominess of the air of 
those parts, caused by the great distance of 



216 



THE DOCTOR. 



the Sun; and also by reason of the Evil 
Spirits which inhabit dark places." This 
reason becomes stronger when it is con- 
sidered that the word which in the Vulgate 
is rendered pandetur, may also be rendered 
depingetur, so that the verse might be trans- 
lated, " all evils shall be described (or 
written) from the North;" and if written, 
then certainly to be read from that direction. 
This theory of what Southey has called 
" the language of the lights of Heaven," is 
Jewish. Abu Almasar (nominally well 
known as Albumazar, by which name the 
knaves called him who knew nothing of him 
or his history), derived all religions from 
the Planets. The Chaldean, he said, was 
produced by the conjunction of Jupiter with 
Mars; the Egyptian, by Jupiter with the 
Sun ; Judaism, by Jupiter with Saturn ; Chris- 
tianity, by Jupiter with Mercury ; Mahom- 
medanism, by Jupiter with Venus. And in 
the year 1460, when, according to his cal- 
culation, the conjunction of Jupiter and 
Mercury would again occur, he predicted 
that the Christian religion would receive its 
death blow, and the religion of Antichrist 
begin. Pursuing these fancies, others have 
asserted that the reason why the Jewish 
nation always has been miserable, and always 
must be so, is because their religion was 
formed under the influences of Saturn : — 

Spiteful and cold, an old man melancholy, 
With bent and yellow forehead, he is Saturn.* 

A malevolent planet he is, and also an un- 
fortunate one, and it was he that 

With lead-coloured shine lighting it into life,* 

threw a tincture of severity and moroseness 
over the religion of the Jews ; he it was that 
made them obstinate and covetous, and their 
Sabbath accordingly is his day. In like 
manner the character of the Turks and their 
day of rest have been determined by the 
planet Venus, which is the star of their re- 
ligion. And as Christianity began under 
the influence of the Sun, Sunday is the 
Christian Sabbath; and the visible head of 
the Christian Church has his seat in Rome, 



* WAi.r.KNSTEIN. 



which is a solar city, its foundations having 
been laid when the Sun was in Leo, his 
proper House. Farther proof of this in- 
fluence is, that the Cardinals wear red, which 
is a solar colour. 

Dr. Jenkin, in his Discourses upon the 
Reasonableness and Certainty of the Chris- 
tian Religion, takes into his consideration 
the opinion of those persons who thought 
that the stars would shine to little purpose 
unless there were other habitable worlds 
besides this earth whereon we dwell. One of 
the uses for which they serve he supposes to 
be this, that in all ages the wits of many 
men whose curiosity might otherwise be 
very ill employed have been busied in con- 
sidering their end and nature, and calculat- 
ing their distances and motions : — a whim- 
sical argument, in advancing which he seems 
to have forgotten the mischievous purposes 
to which so much of the wit which had taken 
this direction had been applied. 

Yet these fancies of the wildest astrolo- 
gers are not more absurd than the grave 
proposition of John Craig, whose " Theolo- 
gies Christiance Principia Mathematical " 
were published in London at the close of 
the 17th century. He asserted, and pre- 
tended to show by mathematical calculations, 
that the probability of the truth of the 
Gospel history was as strong at that time, as 
it would have been in the days of our 
Saviour himself, to a person who should have 
heard it related by twenty-eight disciples ; 
but that, upon the same mathematical 
grounds, the probability will entirely cease 
by the year 3150 ; there would then be no 
more faith on earth, and, consequently, ac- 
cording to St. Luke, the world would then 
be at an end, and the Son of Man would 
come to judge the quick and the dead. 

Bayle always ridiculed that sort of evi- 
dence which is called mathematical demon- 
stration. 



THE DOCTOR. 



217 



CHAPTER XCYI. 

a musician's wish excited by heeschee's 
telescope. sympathy between petee 
hopkins and his pupie. endipeesentism 
useful in oedtnaby politics, but dan- 
geeous in eeeigion. 

Not inlendiamo parlare alle cose che utili sono alia 
umana via, quanto per nostro inlendimento si potra in 
questa parte comprendere ; e sopra quelle particelle che 
detto avemo di comporre. 

BCSONE DA GUBBIO. 

When Miller talked of Ms friend Herschel's 
good fortune, and of his astronomical disco- 
veries, and of his sister, Miss Caroline Her- 
schel, who, while in his absence she could 
get possession of his twenty-feet reflector, 
amused herself with sweeping the sky, and 
searching for comets in the neighbourhood 
of the sun, the warm-hearted and musical- 
minded man used to wish that the science of 
acoustics had been advanced in the same de- 
gree as that of optics, and that his old friend, 
when he gave up music as a profession, had 
still retained it as a pursuit ; for, had he 
constructed auditory tubes of proportionate 
power and magnitude to his great telescope, 
" who knows," said Miller, " but we might 
have been enabled to hear the music of the 
spheres ! " Pythagoras used to listen to that 
music, when he retired into the depths of 
his own being ; and, according to his dis- 
ciples, to him alone of all mortals has it been 
audible. But philosophers in modern times 
have thought that the existence of this music 
is more than an enthusiast's dream, a poet's 
fiction, or an impostor's fable. They say it 
may be inferred as probable from some of 
Newton's discoveries ; and as a consequence 
of that principle of harmony which in some 
parts of the system of nature is so clearly 
shown, and in others so mysteriously in- 
dicated. 

As for the Doctor, when Miller talked to 
him of Miss Herschel's performances in sky- 
sweeping and comet-hunting, it reminded 
him of the nursery song, and he quoted the 
lines, 

Old woman, old woman, whither so high ? 
I'm goiug to sweep cobwebs oft' the sky, 
And I shall be back again by and by : 



not meaning, however, any disrespect to the 
lady, nor knowing any thing of her age. 

Herschel would have opened no new field 
of speculation for Peter Hopkins, if Hopkins 
had lived till that day ; but he would have 
eradicated the last remains of his lurking 
belief in astrology, by showing how little 
those who pretended to read the stars had 
seen or known of them. The old man would 
have parted with it easily, though he de- 
lighted in obsolete knowledge, and took as 
much interest in making himself acquainted 
with the freaks of the human mind, as with 
the maladies of the human frame. He 
thought that they belonged to the same 
study ; and the affection which he had so 
soon contracted for his pupil was in no small 
degree occasioned by his perceiving in him 
a kindred disposition. Mr. Danby says, 
" there is perhaps more of instinct in our feel- 
ings than we are aware of, even in our esteem 
of each other ; " it is one of the many wise 
remarks of a thoughtful man. 

This intellectual sympathy contributed 
much to the happiness of both, and no little 
to the intellectual progress of the younger 
party. But Hopkins's peculiar humour had 
rendered him indifferent upon some points 
of great moment. It had served as a pro- 
phylactic against all political endemics, and 
this had been a comfortable security for him 
in times when such disorders were frequent 
and violent ; and when, though far less ma- 
lignant than those of the present age, they 
were far more dangerous, in individual cases. 
The reader may perhaps remember (and if 
not, he is now reminded of it,) how, when 
he was first introduced to Peter Hopkins, it 
was said that any king would have had in 
him a quiet subject, and any church a con- 
tented conformist. He troubled himself with 
no disputations in religion, and was troubled 
with no doubts, but believed what he was 
taught to believe, because he had been taught 
to believe it ; and owing to the same facility 
of mind, under any change of dynast v, or 
revolution of government that could have 
befallen, he would have obeyed the ruling 
power. Such would always be the politics 
of the many, if they were let alone ; and 



218 



THE DOCTOR. 



such would always be their religion. As 
regards the civil point this is the best con- 
dition in which a people can be, both for 
themselves and their rulers ; and if the laws 
be good and well administered, the form of 
government is good so far as it is causative 
of those effects, and so far as it is not causa- 
tive, it is a trifle for which none but fools 
would contest. The proper end of all govern- 
ment being the general good, provided that 
good be attained it is infinitesimally insig- 
nificant by what means. That it can be 
equally attained under any form is not 
asserted here. The argument from the ana- 
logy of nature which might seem to favour 
such an assertion cannot be maintained. 
The Bees have their monarchy, and the Ants 
their republic ; but when we are told to go 
to the Ant and the Bee, and consider their 
ways, it is not that we should borrow from 
them formic laws or apiarian policy. Under 
the worst scheme of government the desired 
end would be in a great degree attainable, 
if the people were trained up, as they ought 
to be, in the knowledge of their Christian 
duties ; and unless they are so trained, it 
must ever be very imperfectly attained under 
the best. 

Forms of government alone deserving to 
be so called, of whatever kind, are here in- 
tended, not those of savage or barbarous 
times and countries. Indeed it is only in 
advanced stages of society that men are left 
sufficiently to themselves to become reason- 
ably contented ; and then they may be ex- 
pected, like our friend Peter Hopkins, to 
be better subjects than patriots. It is de- 
sirable that they should be so : for good 
subjects promote the public good at all 
times, and it is only in evil times that pa- 
triots are wanted, — such times as are usually 
brought on by rash, or profligate and wicked 
men, who assume the name. 

From this political plasticity, in his days 
and in his station, no harm could arise either 
to himself or others. But the same tem- 
perament in religion, though doubtless it 
may reach the degree of saving faith, can 
liardly consist with an active and imaginative 
mind. It was fortunate, therefore, for the 



Doctor, that he found a religious friend in 
Mr. Bacon. While he was at Leyden his 
position in this respect had not been favour- 
able. Between the Dutch language and the 
Burgemeester's daughter, St. Peter's Kirk 
had not been a scene of much devotion for 
him. Perhaps many Churches in his own 
Country might have produced no better 
effect upon him at that time of life ; but the 
loose opinions which Bayle had scattered 
were then afloat in Holland, and even these 
were less dangerous to a disposition such as 
his, than the fierce Calvinistic tenets by 
which they were opposed. The former might 
have beguiled him into scepticism, the latter 
might have driven him into unbelief, if the 
necessary attention to his professional stu- 
dies, and an appetite for general knowledge, 
which found full employment for all leisure 
hours, had not happily prevented him from 
entering without a guide upon a field of 
inquiry, where he would either have been 
entangled among thorns, or beset with snares 
and pitfalls. 

True indeed it is that nothing but the 
most injurious and inevitable circumstances 
could have corrupted his natural piety, for 
it had been fostered in him by his father's 
example, and by those domestic lessons 
which make upon us the deepest and most 
enduring impressions. But he was not 
armed, as it behoved him to be, against the 
errors of the age, neither those which like 
the pestilence walked in noon-day, nor those 
which did their work insidiously and in 
darkness. 

Methodism was then in its rampant stage ; 
the founders themselves had not yet sobered 
down ; and their followers, though more de- 
cent than the primitive Quakers, and far 
less offensive in their operations, ran, never- 
theless, into extravagancies which made ill- 
judging magistrates slow in protecting them 
against the insults and outrages of the rab- 
ble. The Dissenters were more engaged in 
controversy amongst themselves than with 
the Establishment ; their old leaven had at 
that time no mass whereon to work, but it 
was carefully preserved. The Nonjurors, of 
all sects (if they may be called a sect), the 



THE DOCTOR. 



219 



most respectable in their origin, were almost 
extinct. The Roman Catholics were quiet, 
in fear of the laws, — no toleration being 
then professed for a Church which pro- 
claimed, and everywhere acted upon, the 
principle of absolute intolerance ; but there 
were few populous parts of the kingdom in 
which there was not some secular priest, or 
some regular, not indeed 

Black, white, and grey, with all their trumpery, 

for neither the uniform nor the trumpery 
were allowed, — but Monk, or Friar, or 
Jesuit, in lay-clothing, employed in secretly 
administering to the then decreasing num- 
bers of their own communion, and recruiting 
them whenever they safely could ; but more 
generally venturing no farther than to in- 
sinuate doubts, and unsettle the belief, of 
unwary and unlearned members of the es- 
tablished religion, for this could always be 
done with impunity. And in this they aided, 
and were aided by, those who in that age 
were known by the name, which they had 
arrogated to themselves, of Free-thinkers. 

There was among the higher classes in 
those days a fashion of infidelity, imported 
from France ; Shaftesbury and " the can- 
kered Bolingbroke " (as Sir Robert Walpole 
used justly to call that profligate statesman) 
were beholden for their reputation more to 
this, than to any solidity of talents, or grace 
of style. It had made much less way in 
middle life than in the higher and lower 
ranks ; for men in middle life, being 
generally trained up when children in the 
way they should go, were less likely to de- 
part from it than those who were either 
above or below them in station ; indeed they 
were not exposed to the same dangers. The 
principles which were veiled, but not dis- 
guised, by Lord Chesterfield and Horace 
Walpole, and exposed in their nakedness by 
Wilkes and his blasphemous associates at 
their orgies, were discussed in the Robin 
Hood Society, by men who were upon the 
same level with the holders-forth at the 
Rotunda in our own times, but who differed 
from them in these respects, that they neither 



made a trading profession of impiety, nor 
ventured into the treason-line. 

Any man may graduate in the schools of 
Irreligion and Mispolicy, if he have a glib 
tongue and a brazen forehead ; with these 
qualities, and a small portion of that talent 
which is produceable on demand, he may 
take a wrangler's degree. Such men were 
often met with in the common walks of so- 
ciety, before they became audacious enough 
to show themselves upon the public theatre, 
and aspire to from a party in the state. 
Peter Hopkins could listen to them just 
with as much indifference as he did to a 
Jacobite, a Nonjuror, or one to whom the 
memory of Oliver and the saints in buff was 
precious. The Doctor, before he happily 
became acquainted with Mr. Bacon, held 
his peace when in the presence of such peo- 
ple, but from a different cause : for though 
his heart rose against their discourse, and 
he had an instinctive assurance that it was 
equally pernicious and false, he had not so 
stored himself with needful knowledge as to 
be able to confute the common-places of an 
infidel propagandist. But it has an ill effect 
upon others, when a person of sounder judg- 
ment and more acquirements than them- 
selves, remains silent in the company of 
such talkers ; for, from whatever motive his 
silence may proceed, it is likely to be consi- 
dered, both by the assailants of the truth, 
and by the listeners, as an admission of his 
inability to maintain the better cause. Great 
evil has arisen to individuals, and to the 
community, from allowing scoffers to go 
unrebuked in private life ; and fallacies and 
falsehoods to pass uncontradicted and un- 
exposed in those channels through which 
poison is conveyed to the public mind. 



220 



THE DOCTOK. 



CHAPTER XCVIL 

mr. bacon's parsonage, christian re- 
signation. TIME AND CHANGE. WIEKIE 
AND THE MONK IN THE ESCURIAL. 

The idea of her life shall sweetly creep 

Into his study of imagination ; 

And every lovely organ of her life 

Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit, 

More moving delicate, and full of life, 

Into the eye and prospect of his soul, 

Than when she lived indeed. 

Shakespeare. 

In a Scotch village the Manse is sometimes 
the only good house, and generally it is the 
best ; almost, indeed, what in old times the 
Mansion used to be in an English one. In 
Mr. Bacon's parish, the vicarage, though 
humble as the benefice itself, was the neatest. 
The cottage in which he and Margaret passed 
their childhood had been remarkable for that 
comfort which is the result and the reward 
of order and neatness : and when the re- 
union which blessed them both rendered 
the remembrance of those years delightful, 
they returned in this respect to the way in 
which they had been trained up, practised 
the economy which they had learned there, 
and loved to think how entirely their course 
of life, in all its circumstances, would be 
after the heart of that person, if she could 
behold it, whose memory they both with 
equal affection cherished. After his bereave- 
ment it was one of the widower's pensive 
pleasures to keep everything in the same 
state as when Margaret was living. Nothing 
was neglected that she used to do, or that 
she would have done. The flowers were 
tended as carefully as if she were still to 
enjoy their fragrance and their beauty ; and 
the birds who came in winter for their 
crumbs were fed as duly for her sake, as 
they had formerly been by her hands. 

There was no superstition in this, nor 
weakness. Immoderate grief, if it does not 
exhaust itself by indulgence, easily assumes 
the one character, or the other, or takes a 
type of insanity. But he had looked for 
consolation, where, when sincerely sought, 
it is always to be found ; and he had expe- 



rienced that religion effects in a true be- 
liever all that philosophy professes, and 
more than all that mere philosophy can per- 
form. The wounds which stoicism would 
cauterise, religion heals. 

There is a resignation with which, it may 
be feared, most of us deceive ourselves. To 
bear what must be borne, and submit to 
what cannot be resisted, is no more than 
what the unregenerate heart is taught by 
the instinct of animal nature; But to ac- 
quiesce in the afflictive dispensations of Pro- 
vidence, — to make one's own will conform 
in all things to that of our Heavenly Father, 
— to say to him in the sincerity of faith, 
when we drink of the bitter cup, " Thy will 
be done!" — to bless the name of the Lord 
as much from the heart when He takes 
away, as when He gives, and with a depth 
of feeling of which, perhaps, none but the 
afflicted heart is capable, — this is the re- 
signation which religion teaches, this the 
sacrifice which it requires. * This sacrifice 
Leonard had made, and he felt that it was 
accepted. 

Severe, therefore, as his loss had been, 
and lasting as its effects were, it produced in 
him nothing like a settled sorrow, nor even 
that melancholy which sorrow leaves behind. 
Gibbon has said of himself, that as a mere 
philosopher he could not agree with the 
Greeks, in thinking that those who die in 
their youth are favoured by the Gods : 

"Ov 01 Seol <pi\ov<Tiv airo6v7](XKet. veos. 

It was because he was " a mere philosopher,"' 
that he failed to perceive a truth which 
the religious heathen acknowledged, and 
which is so trivial, and of such practical value, 
that it may now be seen inscribed upon 
village tombstones. The Christian knows 
that "blessed are the dead which die in 
the Lord ; even so saith the Spirit." And the 



* This passage was written when Southey was bowing 
his head under the sorest and saddest of his many troubles. 
He thus alludes to it in a letter to me, dated October 5. 
1834. 

" On the next leaf is the passage of which I spoke in 
my letter from York. It belongs to an early chapter in 
tlie third volume ; and very remarkable it is that it should 
have been written just at that time." 



THE DOCTOR. 



221 



heart of the Christian mourner, in its deepest 
distress, hath the witness of the Spirit to 
that consolatory assurance. 

In this faith Leonard regarded his be- 
reavement. His loss, he knew, had been 
Margaret's gain. What, if she had been 
summoned in the flower of her years, and 
from a state of connubial happiness which 
there had been nothing to disturb or to 
alloy? How soon might that flower have 
been blighted, — how surely must it have 
faded ! how easily might that happiness have 
been interrupted by some of those evils 
which flesh is heir to ! And as the separa- 
tion was to take place, how mercifully had 
it been appointed that he, who was the 
stronger vessel, should be the survivor! 
Even for their child this was best, greatly 
as she needed, and would need, a mother's 
care. His paternal solicitude would supply 
that care, as far as it was possible to supply 
it ; but had he been removed, mother and 
child must have been left to the mercy of 
Providence, without any earthly protector, 
or any means of support. 

For her to die was gain ; in him, there- 
fore, it were sinful as well as selfish to repine, 
and of such selfishness and sin his heart 
acquitted him. If a wish could have recalled 
her to life, no such wish would ever have by 
him been uttered, nor ever have by him 
been felt ; certain he was that he loved her 
too well to bring her again into this world 
of instability and trial. Upon earth there 
can be no safe happiness. 

Ah ! male Fortune devota est ara manenti ! 
Fallit, et hcec nullas accipit ara preces.* 

All things here are subject to Time and 
Mutability : 

Quod tibi larga dedit Hora dextra, 
Horafuraci rapiet sinistra. f 

We must be in eternity before we can be 
secure against change. " The world," says 
Cowper, " upon which we close our eyes at 
night, is never the same with that on which 
we open them in the morning." 

It was to the perfect Order he should find 



Wallius. 



t Casimir. 



in that state upon which he was about to 
enter, that the judicious Hooker looked for- 
ward at his death with placid and profound 
contentment. Because he had been em- 
ployed in contending against a spirit of in- 
subordination and schism which soon proved 
fatal to his country ; and because his life 
had been passed under the perpetual dis- 
comfort of domestic discord, the happiness 
of Heaven seemed, in his estimation, to 
consist primarily in Order, as, indeed, in all 
human societies this is the first thing need- 
ful. The discipline which Mr. Bacon had 
undergone was very different in kind : what 
he delighted to think, was, that the souls of 
those whom death and redemption have 
made perfect, are in a world where there is 
no change, nor parting, where nothing 
fades, nothing passes away and is no more 
seen, but the good and the beautiful are 
permanent. 

Miser, chi speme in cosa mortal pone ; 
Ma, chi nan ve la pone ? % 

When Wilkie was in the Escurial, looking 
at Titian's famous picture of the Last Sup- 
per, in the Refectory there, an old Jeronimite 
said to him, "I have sat daily in sight of 
that picture for now nearly threescore 
years ; during that time my companions 
have dropped off, one after another, — all who 
were my seniors, all who were my contempo- 
raries, and many, or most of those who were 
younger than myself; more than one gene- 
ration has passed away, and there the figures 
in the picture have remained unchanged ! 
I look at them till I sometimes think that 
they are the realities, and we but shadows !"§ 

I wish I could record the name of the 
Monk by whom that natural feeling was so 
feelingly and strikingly expressed. 

" The shows of things are better than themselves," 

says the author of the Tragedy of Nero, 
whose name also I could wish had been 
forthcoming; and the classical reader will 
remember the lines of Sophocles : — 



% Petrarch. 

§ See the very beautiful lines of Wordsworth in the 
" Yarrow Revisited." The affecting incident is intro- 
duced in " Lines on a Portrait." 



222 



THE DOCTOR. 



'O^eayac^ riftcc? ovhiv ovrcc; a,\\o, teXifll 
E'ihcuX', otroixtz iZfjt.lv, vj xoCtfyiv cratocvJ* 

These are reflections which should make 
us think 

Of that same time when no more change shall be, 
But stedfast rest of all things, firmly stayd 
Upon the pillars of Eternity, 
That is contraire to mutability ; 
For all that moveth doth in change delight : 
But thenceforth all shall rest eternally 
With Him that is the God of Sabaoth night, 
O that great Sabaoth God grant me that sabbath's 
sight.f 



CHAPTER XCVIII. 

CHRISTIAN CONSOLATION. OPINIONS CON- 
CERNING THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. 

The voice which I did more esteem 
Than music in her sweetest key ; 

Those eyes which unto me did seem 
More comfortable than the day 1 

Those now by me, as they have been, 

Shall never more be heard, or seen ; 

But what I once enjoyed in them, 

Shall seem hereafter as a dream. 

All earthly comforts vanish thus ; 

So little hold of them have wc, 
That we from them, or they from us, 

May in a moment ravished be. 
Yet we are neither just nor wise, 
If present mercies we despise ; 
Or mind not how there may be made 
A thankful use of what we had. 

Wither. 

There is a book written in Latin by the 
Flemish Jesuit Sarasa, upon the Art of re- 
joicing always in obedience to the Apostle's 
precept, — ' Ars semper gaudendi, demon- 
strata ex sola consideratione Divince Provi- 
dentiai? Leibnitz and Wolf have com- 
mended it; and a French Protestant mi- 
nister abridged it under the better title of 
I? Art de se tranquiliser dans tons les evene- 
mens de la vie. " I remember," says Cow- 
per, " reading, many years ago, a long 
treatise on the subject of consolation, writ- 
ten in French ; the author's name I have 
forgotten ; but I wrote these words in the 
margin, — ' special consolation ! ' at least for 
a Frenchman, who is a creature the most 



* Sophocles. 



f Spencer. 



easily comforted of any in the world ! " It 
is not likely that this should have been the 
book which Leibnitz praised ; nor would 
Cowper have thus condemned one which re- 
commends the mourner to seek for comfort, 
where alone it is to be found, in resignation 
to God's will, and in the prospect of the life 
to come. The remedy is infallible for those, 
who, like Mr. Bacon, faithfully pursue the 
course that the only true philosophy pre- 
scribes. 

At first, indeed, he had felt like the be- 
reaved maiden in Schiller's tragedy, and 
could almost have prayed like her, for a 
speedy deliverance, — 

Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer, 
Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nicht9 mehr. 
Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zuriick ! 
Ich habe genossen das irdische Gliick, 
Ich habe gelebt und geliebet. 

But even at first the sense of parental 

duty withheld him from such a prayer. The 

grief, though " fine, full, perfect," was not a 

grief that 

— violenteth in a sense as strong 
As that which causeth it,£ 

There was this to compress, as it were, 
and perhaps to mitigate it, that it was 
wholly confined to himself, not multiplied 
among others, and reflected from them. In 
great public calamities, when fortunes are 
wrecked in revolutionary storms, or families 
thinned or swept off by pestilence, there 
may be too many who look upon it as 
Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris ; § 

and this is not so much because 

— fellowship in woe doth woe assuage, H 

and that 

— the mind much sufFenance doth o'erskip 
When grief hath mates and bearing fellowship, |) 

as because the presence of a fellow sufferer 
at such times calls forth condolence, when 
that of one who continues in the sunshine 
of fortune might provoke an envious self- 
comparison, which is the commonest of all 
evil feelings. But it is not so with those 



X Shakespeare. § Incerti Afctoris. 

|| Shakespeare. 



THE DOCTOR. 



223 



keener griefs which affect us in our domestic 
relations. The heart-wounds which are 
inflicted by our fellow -creatures are apt to 
fester : those which we receive in the dis- 
pensations of Almighty wisdom and the 
course of nature are remedial and sanative. 
There are some fruits which must be punc- 
tured before they can ripen kindly ; and 
there are some hearts which require an ana- 
logous process. 

He and Margaret had been all in all to 
each other, and the child was too young to 
understand her loss, and happily just too 
old to feel it as an infant would have felt it. 
In the sort of comfort which he derived 
from this sense of loneliness, there was no- 
thing that resembled the pride of stoicism ; 
it was a consideration that tempered his 
feelings and assisted in enabling him to 
control them, but it concentrated and per- 
petuated them. 

Whether the souls of the departed are 
cognizant of what passes on earth, is a ques- 
tion which has been variously determined 
by those who have reasoned concerning the 
state of the dead. Thomas Burnet was 
of opinion that they are not, because they 
" rest from their labours." And South 
says, " it is clear that God sometimes takes 
his Saints out of the world for this very 
cause, that they may not see and know what 
happens in it. For so says God to King 
Josiah, ' Behold, I will gather thee to thy 
fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy 
grave in peace ; neither shall thy eyes see 
all the evil that I will bring upon this place, 
and the inhabitants thereof.' " This he ad- 
duces as a conclusive argument against the 
invocation of Saints, saying, the " discourse 
would have been hugely absurd and incon- 
sequent, if so be the saints' separation from 
the body gave them a fuller and a clearer 
prospect into all the particular affairs and 
occurrences that happen here upon earth." 

Aristotle came to an opposite conclusion ; 
he thought not only that the works of the 
deceased follow them, but that the dead are 
sensible of the earthly consequences of those 
works, and are affected in the other world 
by the honour or the reproach which is 



justly ascribed to their memory in this. So 
Pindar represents it as one of the enjoy- 
ments of the blessed, that they behold and 
rejoice in the virtues of their posterity : 

"Eifri §£ *«/ 77 6av6vntro-iv [Ai^os 

K0C.w6fX.0V 1^0/jt.lVOV, 

Kc&ToexgvfrTU S' oil nivts 
^vyyovcov xihvocv £«£/>>.* 

So Sextus, or Sextius, the Pythagorean, 
taught ; immortales crede te manere in ju- 
dicio honores et pcenas. And Bishop Ken 
deemed it would be an addition to his hap- 
piness in Paradise, if he should know that 
his devotional poems were answering on 
earth the purpose for which he had piously 
composed them : 

— should the well-meant songs 1 leave behind 
With Jesus' lovers an acceptance find, 
'Twill heighten even the joys of Heaven to know 
That in my verse the Saints hymn God below. 

The consensus gentium universalis is with 
Ijjie Philosophers and the Bishop, against 
South and Burnet : it affords an argument 
which South would not have disregarded, 
and to which Burnet has, on another occa- 
sion, triumphantly appealed. 

All sacrifices to the dead, and all comme- 
morations of them, have arisen from this 
opinion, and the Romish Church established 
upon it the most lucrative of all its deceitful 
practices. Indeed the belief in apparitions 
could not prevail without it ; and that 
belief, which was all but universal a cen- 
tury ago, is still, and ever will be held by 
the great majority of mankind. Call it a 
prejudice if you will ; " what is an universal 
prejudice," says Reginald Heber, "but the 
voice of human nature ? " — And Shake- 
speare seems to express his own opinion 
when he writes, " They say miracles are 
past ; and we have our philosophical persons, 
to make modern and familiar, things super- 
natural and causeless. Hence it is that we 
make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves 
into seeming knowledge, when we should 
submit ourselves to an unknown fear." f 



* Pindar, 01. viii. 101, &c. See also Pyth. v. 133. &c. 
t All's Well that Ends Well, Act ii. Sc. iii. 



224 



THE DOCTOR. 



That the spirits of the departed are per- 
mitted to appear only for special purposes 
is what the most credulous believer in such 
appearances would probably admit, if he 
reasoned at all upon the subject. On the 
other hand, they who are most incredulous 
on this point would hardly deny that to 
witness the consequences of our actions may 
be a natural and just part of our reward or 
punishment in the intermediate state. We 
may well believe that they whom faith has 
sanctified, and who upon their departure 
join the spirits of the "just made perfect," 
may at once be removed from all concern 
with this world of probation, except so far 
as might add to their own happiness, and be 
made conducive to the good of others, in 
the ways of Providence. But by parity of 
reason, it may be concluded that the sordid 
and the sensual, they whose affections have 
been set upon worldly things, and who are 
of the earth earthy, will be as unable to rise 
above this earth, as they would be incapable 
of any pure and spiritual enjoyment. " He 
that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh 
reap corruption." When life is extin- 
guished, it is too late for them to struggle 
for deliverance from the body of that death, 
to which, while the choice was in their 
power, they wilfully and inseparably bound 
themselves. The popular belief that places 
are haunted where money has been con- 
cealed (as if where the treasure was, and 
the heart had been, there would the miser- 
able soul be also), or where some great and 
undiscovered crime has been committed, 
shows how consistent this is with our na- 
tural sense of likelihood and fitness. 

There is a tale in the Nigaristan of 
Kemal-Pascha-zade, that one of the Sultans 
of Khorassan saw in a dream, Mahmoud a 
hundred years after his death, wandering 
about his palace, — his flesh rotten, his 
bones carious, but his eyes full, anxious, and 
restless. A dervise who interpreted the 
dream, said that the eyes of Mahmoud were 
thus troubled, because the kingdom, his 
beautiful spouse, was now in the embrace of 
another. 

This w:i:s that great Mahmoud the Gaz- 



nevide, who was the first Mohammedan 
conqueror that entered India, and the first 
who dropped the title of Malek and assumed 
that of Sultan in its stead. He it was, who 
after having broken to pieces with his own 
hands the gigantic idol of Soumenat, put to 
death fifty thousand of its worshippers, as a 
further proof of his holy Mohammedan in- 
dignation. In the last days of his life, when 
a mortal disease was consuming him, and he 
himself knew that no human means could 
arrest its course, he ordered all his costliest 
apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, 
and his pearls and precious stones, the ines- 
timable spoils of the East, to be displayed 
before him, — the latter were so numerous 
that they were arranged in separate cabinets 
according to their colour and size. It was 
in the royal residence which he had built 
for himself in Gazna, and which he called the 
Palace of Felicity, that he took from this 
display, wherewith he had formerly gratified 
the pride of his eye, a mournful lesson ; and 
in the then heartfelt conviction that all is 
vanity, he wept like a child. " What toils," 
said he, "what dangers, what fatigues of 
body and mind have I endured for the sake 
of acquiring these treasures, and what cares 
in preserving them, and now I am about to 
die and leave them ! " In this same palace 
he was interred, and there it was that his 
unhappy ghost, a century afterwards, was 
believed to wander. 



CHAPTER XCIX. 

A COUNTRY PARISH. SOME WHOLESOME EX- 
TRACTS, SOME TRUE ANECDOTES, AND SOME 
USEFUL HINTS, WHICH WILL NOT BE TAKEN 
BY THOSE WHO NEED THEM MOST. 

Non e inconvenienle, die dclle cose delettabili alcune nc 
sieno uiili, cosi come dell' vtili molte nc sono delettabili, el 
in tulte due alcune si truovano honeste. 

Leone Medico (Hebkeo). 

Mr. Bacon's parsonage was as humble a 
dwelling in all respects as the cottage in 
which his friend Daniel was born. A best 



THE DOCTOR, 



225 



kitchen was its best room, and in its furniture 
an Observantine Friar would have seen no- 
thing that he could have condemned as 
superfluous. His college and later school 
books, with a few volumes which had been 
presented to him by the more grateful of 
his pupils, composed his scanty library : 
they were either books of needful reference, 
or such as upon every fresh perusal might 
afford new delight. But he had obtained 
the use of the Church Library at Doncaster, 
by a payment of twenty shillings, according 
to the terms of the foundation. Folios from 
that collection might be kept three months, 
smaller volumes, one or two, according to 
their size ; and as there were many works 
in it of solid contents as well as sterling 
value, he was in no such want of intellectual 
food, as too many of his brethren are, even 
at this time. How much good might have 
been done, and how much evil might pro- 
bably have been prevented, if Dr. Bray's 
design for the formation of parochial li- 
braries had been everywhere carried into 
effect ! 

The parish contained between five and 
six hundred souls. There was no one of 
higher rank among them than entitled him, 
according to the custom of those days, to be 
styled gentleman upon his tombstone. They 
were plain people, who had neither manu- 
factories to corrupt, ale-houses to brutalise, 
nor newspapers to mislead them. At first 
coming among them he had won their good- 
will by his affability and benign conduct, 
and he had afterwards gained their respect 
and affection in an equal degree. 

There were two services at his church, 
but only one sermon, which never fell short 
of fifteen minutes in length, and seldom 
extended to half-an-hour. It was generally 
abridged from some good old divine. His 
own compositions were few, and only upon 
points on which he wished carefully to ex- 
amine and digest his own thoughts, or which 
were peculiarly suited to some or other of 
his hearers. His whole stock might be 
deemed scanty in these days ; but there was 
not one in it which would not well bear 
repetition, and the more observant of his 



congregation liked that they should be re- 
peated. 

Young ministers are earnestly advised 
long to refrain from preaching their own 
productions, in an excellent little book ad- 
dressed by a Father to his Son, preparatory 
to his receiving holy orders. Its title is a 
" Monitor for Young Ministers," and eyery 
parent who has a son so circumstanced 
would do well to put it into his hands. " It 
is not possible," says this judicious writer, 
" that a young minister can at first be com- 
petent to preach his sermons with effect, 
even if his abilities should qualify him to 
write well. His very youth and youthful 
manner, both in his style of writing and in 
his delivery, will preclude him from being 
effective. Unquestionably it is very rare 
indeed for a man of his age to have his 
mental abilities sufficiently chastened, or 
his method sufficiently settled, to be equal 
to the composition of a sermon fit for public 
use, even if it should receive the advantage 
of chaste and good delivery. On every 
account, therefore, it is wise and prudent to 
be slow and backward in venturing to pro- 
duce his own efforts, or in thinking that 
they are fit for the public ear. There is an 
abundant field of the works of others open 
to him, from the wisest and the best of men, 
the weight of whose little fingers, in argu- 
ment or instruction, will be greater than his 
own loins, even at his highest maturity. 
There is clearly no want of new compositions, 
excepting on some new or occasional emer- 
gencies : for there is not an open subject in 
the Christian religion, which has not been 
discussed by men of the greatest learning 
and piety, who have left behind them nu- 
merous works for our assistance and edifica- 
tion. Many of these are so neglected, that 
they are become almost new ground for our 
generation. To these he may freely resort, 
— till experience and a rational and chas- 
tened confidence shall warrant him in be- 
lieving himself qualified to work upon his 
own resources." 

" He that learns of young men," says 
Rabbi Jose Bar Jehudah, " is like a man 
that eats unripe grapes, or that drinks wine 



226 



THE DOCTOR. 



out of the wine-press ; but lie that learneth 
of the ancient, is like a man that eateth ripe 
grapes, and drinketh wine that is old." * 

It was not in pursuance of any judicious 
advice like this that Mr. Bacon followed the 
course here pointed out, but from his own 
good sense and natural humility. His only 
ambition was to be useful ; if a desire may 
be called ambitious which originated in the 
sincere sense of duty. To think of dis- 
tinguishing himself in any other way, would 
for him, he well knew, have been worse than 
an idle dream. The time expended in com- 
posing a sermon as a perfunctory official 
business, would have been worse than wasted 
for himself, and the time employed in de- 
livering it, no better than wasted upon his 
congregation. He was especially careful 
never to weary them, and, therefore, never 
to preach anything which was not likely to 
engage their attention, and make at least 
some present impression. His own sermons 
effected this, because they were always com- 
posed with some immediate view, or under 
the influence of some deepandstrong feeling: 
and in his adopted ones, th« different man- 
ner of the different authors produced an 
awakening effect. Good sense is as often to 
be found among the illiterate, as among 
those who have enjoyed the opportunities of 
education. Many of his hearers who knew 
but one meaning of the word stile, and had 
never heard it used in any other, perceived 
a difference in the manner of Bishops Hall, 
and Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor, of Bar- 
row, and South and Scott, without troubling 
themselves about the cause, or being in the 
slightest degree aware of it. 

Mr. Bacon neither undervalued his parish- 
ioners, nor overvalued the good which could 
be wrought among them by direct instruction 
of this kind. While he used perspicuous 
language, he knew that they who listened to 
it would be able to follow the argument; 
and as lie drew always from the wells of 
English undefined, he was safe on that point. 
But that all even of the adults would listen, 
and that all even of those who did, would 



* LlGIITFOOT. 



do anything more than hear, ha,, was too 
well acquainted with human nature to 
expect. 

A woman in humble life was asked one 
day on the way back from church, whether 
she had understood the sermon ; a stranger 
had preached, and his discourse resembled 
one of Mr. Bacon's neither in length nor 
depth. " Wud I hae the persumption ? " 
was her simple and contented answer. The 
quality of the discourse signified nothing to 
her ; she had done her duty, as well as she 
could, in hearing it; and she went to her<- 
house justified rather -than some of those" 
who had attended to it critically ; or who 
had turned to the text in their Bibles when 
it was given out. 

" Well, Master Jackson," said his Minister, 
walking homeward after service, with an 
industrious labourer, who was a constant 
attendant; "well, Master Jackson, Sunday 
must be a blessed day of rest for you, who 
work so hard all the week ! And you make 
a good use of the day, for you are always to 
be seen at Church ! " " Ay, Sir," replied 
Jackson, " it is indeed a blessed day ; I 
works hard enough all the week, and then 
I comes to Church o' Sundays, and sets me 
down, and lays my legs up, and thinks 
o' nothing." 

" Let my candle go out in a stink, when 
I refuse to confess from whom I have lighted 
it." f The author to whose little book j I 
am beholden for this true anecdote, after 
saying " Such was the religion of this worthy 
man," justly adds, " and such must be the 
religion of most men of his station. Doubt- 
less, it is a wise dispensation that it is so. 
For so it has been from the beginning of the 
world, and there is no visible reason to sup- 
pose that it can ever be otherwise." 

" In spite," says this judicious writer, " of 
all the zealous wishes and efforts of the most 
pious and laborious teachers, the religion of 
the bulk of the people must and will ever be 
little more than mere habit, and confidence 
in others. This must of necessity be the 
case with all men, who, from defect of 



t FuLLi.n. 



% Few Words on many Subjects. 



THE DOCTOR. 



227 



nature ov^ education, or from other worldly 
causes, have not the power or the disposition 
to think ; and it cannot be disputed that the 
far greater number of mankind are of this 
class. These facts give peculiar force to 
those lessons which teach the importance 
and efficac)' of good example from those 
who are blessed with higher qualifications ; 
and they strongly demonstrate the necessity 
that the zeal of those who wish to impress 
the people with the deep and awful mys- 
teries of religion should be tempered by 
wisdom and discretion, no less than by 
patience, forbearance, and a great latitude of 
indulgence for uncontrollable circumstances. 
They also call upon us most powerfully to 
do all we can to provide such teachers, and 
imbue them with such principles as shall not 
endanger the good cause by over earnest 
efforts to effect more than, in the nature of 
things, can be done ; or disturb the existing 
good by attempting more than will be borne, 
or Joy producing hypocritical pretences of 
more than can be really felt." 



CHAPTER C. 

SHOWING HOW THE VICAR DEALT WITH THE 
JUVENILE PART OF HIS ELOCK ; AND HOW 
HE WAS OF OPINION THAT THE MORE 
PLEASANT THE WAT IN WHICH CHILDREN 
ARE TRAINED UP TO GO CAN BE MADE 
FOR THEM, THE LESS LIKELY THEY WILL 
BE TO DEPART FROM IT. 

Sweet were the sauce would please each kind of taste, 
The life, likewise, were pure that never swerved ; 

For spiteful tongues, in cankered stomachs placed, 
Deem worst of things which best, percase, deserved. 

But what for that ? This medicine may suffice, 

To scorn the rest, and seek to please the wise. 

Sir Walter Raleigh. 

The first thing which JNLr. Bacon had done 
after taking possession of his vicarage, and 
obtaining such information about his parish- 
ioners as the more considerate of them could 
impart, was to inquire into the state of the 
children in every household. He knew that 
to win the mother's good will was the surest 
way to win that of the family, and to win 



the children was a good step toward gaining 
that of the mother. In those days reading 
and writing were thought as little necessary 
for the lower class, as the art of spelling for 
the class above them, or indeed for any ex- 
cept the learned. Their ignorance in this 
respect was sometimes found to be incon- 
venient, but by none, perhaps, except here 
and there by a conscientious and thoughtful 
clergyman, was it felt to be an evil, — an 
impediment in the way of that moral and 
religious instruction, without which men are 
in danger of becoming as the beasts that 
perish. Yet the common wish of advancing 
their children in the world made most 
parents in this station desire to obtain the 
advantage of what they called book-learning 
for any son who was supposed to manifest a 
disposition likely to profit by it. To make 
him a scholar was to raise him a step above 
themselves. 

Qui ha les lettres, ha Vadresse 
Au double d'un qui ri'en ha point.* 

Partly for this reason, and still more that 
industrious mothers might be relieved from 
the care of looking after their children, there 
were few villages in which, as in Mr. Bacon's 
parish, some poor woman in the decline of 
life and of fortune did not obtain day- 
scholars enough to eke out her scanty means 
of subsistence. 

The village Schoolmistress, such as Shen- 
stone describes in his admirable poem, and 
such as Kirke "White drew from the life, is 
no longer a living character. The new 
system of education has taken from this 
class of women the staff of their declining- 
age, as the spinning jennies have silenced 
the domestic music of the spinning wheel. 
Both changes have come on unavoidably in 
the progress of human affairs. It is well 
when any change brings with it nothing 
worse than some temporary and incidental 
evil; but if the moral machinery can coun- 
teract the great and growing evils of the 
manufacturing system, it will be the greatest 
moral miracle that has ever been wrought. 

Sunday schools "j", which make Sunday a 



* Baif. 



t See suprk, p. 146. 



Q2 



228 



THE DOCTOR. 



day of toil to the teachers, and the most 
irksome day of the week to the children, had 
not at that time been devised as a palliative 
for the profligacy of large towns, and the 
worsened and worsening condition of the 
poor. Mr. Bacon endeavoured to make the 
parents perform their religious duty toward 
their children, either by teaching them what 
they could themselves teach, or by sending 
them where their own want of knowledge 
might be supplied. Whether the children 
went to school or not, it was his wish that 
they should be taught their prayers, the 
Creed, and the Commandments, at home. 
These he thought were better learned at the 
mother's knees than from any other teacher ; 
and he knew also how wholesome for the 
mother it was that the child should receive 
from her its first spiritual food, the milk of 
sound doctrine. In a purely agricultural 
parish, there were at that time no parents 
in a state of such brutal ignorance as to be 
unable to teach these, though they might 
never have been taught to read. When the 
father or mother could read, he expected 
that they should also teach their children 
the catechism ; in other cases this was left to 
his humble co-adjutrix the schoolmistress. 

During the summer and part of the au- 
tumn, he followed the good old usage of 
catechising the children, after the second 
lesson in the evening service. His method 
was to ask a few questions in succession, and 
only from those who he knew were able to 
answer them ; and after each answer he 
entered into a brief exposition suited to 
their capacity. His manner was so bene- 
volent, and he had made himself so familiar 
in his visits, which were at once pastoral 
and friendly, that no child felt alarmed at 
being singled out; they regarded it as a 
mark of distinction, and the parents were 
proud of seeing them thus distinguished. 
This practice was discontinued in winter ; 
because he knew that to keep a congregation 
in the cold is not the way either to quicken 
or cherish devotional feeling. Once a week 
during Lent he examined all the children, 
on a week day ; the last examination was in 
Easter week, after which each was sent home 



happy with a homely cake, the gift of a 
wealthy parishioner, who by this means con- 
tributed not a little to the good effect of the 
pastor's diligence. 

The foundation was thus laid by teaching 
the rising generation their duty towards God 
and towards their neighbour, and so far 
training them in the way that they should 
go. In the course of a few years every 
household, from the highest to the lowest, — 
(the degrees were neither great nor many,) — 
had learned to look upon him as their friend. 
There was only one in the parish whose 
members were upon a parity with him in 
manners, none in literary culture ; but in 
good will, and in human sympathy, he was 
upon a level with them all. Never inter- 
fering in the concerns of any family, unless 
his interference was solicited, he was con- 
sulted upon all occasions of trouble or im- 
portance. Incipient disputes, which would 
otherwise have afforded grist for the lawyer's 
mill, were adjusted by his mediation ; and 
anxious parents, when they had cause to 
apprehend that their children were going 
wrong, knew no better course than to com- 
municate their fears to him, and request 
that he would administer some timely admo- 
nition. Whenever he was thus called on, or 
had of himself perceived that reproof or 
warning was required, it was given in pri- 
vate, or only in presence of the parents, 
and always with a gentleness which none 
but an obdurate disposition could resist. 
His influence over the younger part of his 
flock was the greater because he was no 
enemy to any innocent sports, but, on the 
contrary, was pleased to see them dance 
round the may-pole, encouraged them to 
dress their doors with oaken boughs on the 
day of King Charles's happy restoration, and 
to wear an oaken garland in the hat, or an 
oak-apple on its sprig in the button hole; 
went to see their bonfire on the fifth of No- 
vember, and entertained the morris-dancers 
when they called upon him in their Christ- 
mas rounds. 

Mr. Bacon was in his parish what a 
moralising old poet wished himself to be, in 
these pleasing stanzas : — 



THE DOCTOR. 



229 



I would I were an excellent divine, 
That had the Bible at my fingers' ends, 

That men might hear out of this mouth of mine 
How God doth make his enemies his friends ; 

Rather than with a thundering and long prayer 

Be led into presumption, or despair. 

This would I be, and would none other be 

Eut a religious servant of my God : 
And know there is none other God but He, 

And willingly to suffer Mercy's rod, 
Joy in his grace and live but in his love, 
And seek my bliss but in the world above. 

And I would frame a kind of faithful prayer 
For all estates within the state of grace ; 

That careful love might never know despair, 
Nor servile fear might faithful love deface ; 

And this would I both day and night devise 

To make my humble spirits exercise. 

And I would read the rules of sacred life, 
Persuade the troubled soul to patience, 

The husband care, and comfort to the wife, 
To child and servant due obedience, 

Faith to the friend and to the neighbour peace, 

That love might live, and quarrels all might cease ; 

Pray for the health of all that are diseased, 
Confession unto all that are convicted, 

And patience unto all that are displeased, 
And comfort unto all that are afflicted, 

And mercy unto all that have offended, 

And grace to all, that all may be amended.* 



CHAPTER CI. 

SOME ACCOUNT OF A RETIRED TOBACCOXIST 
A>"D HIS FAMIEY. 

Nonfumum exfulgore, sed exfumo dare lucem. 

Horace. 

In all Mr. Bacon's views he was fortunate 
enough to have the hearty concurrence of 
the wealthiest person in the parish. This 
was a good man, Allison by name, who 
having realised a respectable fortune in the 
metropolis as a tobacconist, and put out his 
sons in life according to their respective 
inclinations, had retired from business at 
the age of threescore, and established him- 
self with an unmarried daughter, and a 
maiden sister some ten years younger than 
himself, in his native village, that he might 
there, when his hour should come, be 
gathered to his fathers. 



* N. B., supposed to be Nicholas Breton. 



" The providence of God," says South, 
"has so ordered the course of things, that 
there is no action the usefulness of which 
has made it the matter of duty and of a 
profession, but a man may bear the con- 
tinual pursuit of it, without loathing or 
satiety. The same shop and trade that 
employs a man in his youth employs him 
also in his age. Every morning he rises 
fresh to his hammer and his anvil : custom 
has naturalised his labour to him ; his shop 
is his element, and he cannot, with any 
enjoyment of himself, live out of it." The 
great preacher contrasts this with the 
wearisomeness of an idle life, and the 
misery of a continual round of what the 
world calls pleasure. " But now," says he, 
"if God has interwoven such a content- 
ment with the works of our ordinary call- 
ing, how much superior and more refined 
must that be that arises from the survey of 
a pious and well-governed life ? " 

This passage bears upon Mr. Allison's 
case, partly in the consolatory fact which it 
states, and wholly in the application which 
South has made of it. At the age of four- 
teen he had been apprenticed to an Uncle 
in Bishopsgate Street-within ; and twenty 
years after, on that, Uncle's death, had suc- 
ceeded to his old and well-established busi- 
ness. But though he had lived there 
prosperously and happily six and twenty 
years longer, he had contracted no such 
love for it as to overcome the recollections 
of his childhood. Grateful as the smell of 
snuff and" tobacco had become to him, he 
still remembered that cowslips and violets 
were sweeter ; and that the breath of a 
May morning was more exhilarating than 
the air of his own shop, impregnated as it 
was with the odour of the best Virginia. 
So having buried his wife, who was a Lon- 
doner, and made over the business to his 
eldest son, he returned to his native place, 
with the intention of dying there ; but he 
was in sound health of body and mind, and 
his green old age seemed to promise,— as 
far as any thing can promise, — length of 
days. 

Of his two other sons, one had chosen to 



230 



THE DOCTOR. 



be a clergyman, and approved his choice 
both by his parts and diligence, for he had 
gone off from Merchant- Taylors' School to 
St. Johns, Oxford, and was then a fellow of 
that college. The other was a Mate in the 
Merchants' service, and would soon have 
the command of a ship in it. The desire of 
seeing the world led him to this way of life ; 
and that desire had been unintentionally 
implanted by his father, who, in making 
himself acquainted with everything relating 
to the herb out of which his own fortune 
was raised, had become fond of reading 
voyages and travels. His conversation in- 
duced the lad to read these books, and the 
books confirmed the inclination which had 
already been excited ; and as the boy was 
of an adventurous temper, he thought it best 
to let him follow the pursuit on which his 
mind was bent. 

The change to a Yorkshire -village was not 
too great for Mr. Allison, even after residing 
nearly half a century in Bishopsgate Street- 
within. The change in his own household 
indeed rendered, it expedient for him to 
begin, in this sense, a new life. He had 
lost his mate; the young birds were full- 
fledged and had taken flight; and it was 
time that he should look out a retreat for 
himself and the single nestling that remained 
under his wing, now that his son and suc- 
cessor had brought home a wife. The 
marriage had been altogether with his ap- 
probation ; but it altered his position in the 
house, arid in a still greater degree his 
sister's ; moreover, the nest would soon be 
wanted for another brood. Circumstances 
thus compelled him to put in effect what had 
been the dream of his youth, and the still 
remote intention of his middle age. 

Miss Allison, like her brother, regarded 
this removal as a great and serious change, 
preparatory to the only greater one in this 
world that now remained for both ; but like 
him she regarded it rather seriously than 
sadly, or sadly only in the old sober meaning 
of the word ; and there was a soft, sweet, 
evening sunshine in their .prospect, which 
both partook, because both had retained a 
deep affection for the scenes of their child- 



i hood. To Betsey, her niece, nothing could 
be more delightful than the expectation of 
such a removal. She, who was then only 
entering her teens, had nothing to regret in 
leaving London ; and the place to which she 
was going was the very spot which, of all 
others in this wide world, from the time in 
which she was conscious of forming a wish, 
she had wished most to see. Her brother, 
the sailor, was not more taken with the 
story of Pocahontas and Captain Smith, or 
Dampier's Voyages, than she was with her 
aunt's details of the farm and the dairy at 
Thaxted Grange, the May-games and the 
Christmas gambols, the days that were gone, 
and the elders who were departed. To one 
born and bred in the heart of London, who 
had scarcely ever seen a flock of sheep, 
except when they were driven through the 
streets, to or from Smithfield, no fairy tale 
could present more for the imagination than 
a description of green fields and rural life. 
The charm of truth heightened it, and the 
stronger charm of natural piety; for the 
personages of the tale were her near kin, 
whose names she had learned to love, and 
whose living memory she revered, but whose 
countenances she never could behold till she 
should be welcomed by them in the ever- 
lasting mansions of the righteous. 

None of the party were disappointed 
when they had established themselves at the 
Grange. Mr. Allison found full occupation 
at first in improving the house, and after- 
wards in his fields and garden. Mr. Bacon 
was just such a clergyman as he would have 
chosen for his parish priest, if it had been 
in his power to choose, only he would have 
had him provided with a better benefice. 
The single thing on which there was a want 
of agreement between them, was, that the 
Vicar neither smoked nor took snuff; he 
was not the worse company on this account, 
for he had no dislike to the fragrance of a 
pipe ; but his neighbour lost the pleasure 
which he would have had in supplying him 
with the best pig-tail, and with Strasburg 
or Rappee. Miss Allison fell into the habits 
of her new station the more easily, because 
they were those which she had witnessed in 



THE DOCTOR. 



231 



! her early youth ; she distilled waters, dried 

I herbs, and prepared conserves, — which were 

j at the service of all who needed them in 

I sickness. Betsey attached herself at first 

sight to Deborah, who was about five years 

elder, and soon became to her as a sister. 

The Aunt rejoiced in finding so suitable a 

friend and companion for her niece ; and 

as this connexion was a pleasure and an 

advantage to the Allisons, so was it of the 

st benefit to Deborah. 

— What of her ensues 
I list not prophecy, but let Time's news 
Be known, when 'tis brought forth. Of this allow 
If ever you have spent time worse ere now ; 
If never yet, the Author then doth say 
He wishes earnestly you never may.* 



INTERCHAPTER XI. 

ADVICE TO CERTAIN READERS INTENDED 
TO ASSIST THEIR DIGESTION OF THESE 
VOLUMES. 

Take this in good part, whosoever thou be, 
And wish me no worse than I wish unto thee. 

TCSSER. 

The wisest of men hath told us that there is 
a time for everything. I have been con- 
sidering what time is fittest for studying 
this elaborate opus, so as best to profit by 
its recondite stores of instruction, as the 
great chronicler of Garagantua says, avec 
espoir certain d'acquerrir moult prudence et 
preucChommie a la ditte lecture, la quelle vous 
relevera de tres-hauts sacrements et mys- 
teres horrifiques. 

The judicious reader must ere this have 
perceived that this work, to use the happy 
expression of the Demoiselle de Gournay, is 
edine de telle sort que les mots et la mailer e 
sont consubstantiels. In one sense indeed it is 

Meet for all hours and every mood of man ; f 

i but all hours are not equally meet for it. 

; For it is not like Sir Walter Scott's novels, 
fit for men, women and children, at morn- 
ing, noon, or night, summer and winter. 



-A IKESPEAI 



t Dr. Bi-tt. 



and every day, among all sorts of people, — 
Sundays excepted with the religious public. 
Equally sweet in the mouth it may be to 
some ; but it will not be found equally light 
of digestion. 

Whether it should be taken upon an 
empty stomach, must depend upon the con- 
stitution of the reader. If he is of that 
happy complexion that he awakes in the 
morning with his spirits elastic as the air, 
fresh as the dawn, and joyous as the sky- 
lark, let him by all means read a chapter 
before breakfast. It will be a carminative, 
a cordial for the day. If, on the contrary, 
his faculties continue to feel the influence of 
the leaden sceptre till breakfast has resusci- 
tated them, I advise him not to open the 
book before the stomach has been propitiated 
by a morning offering. 

Breakfast will be the best time for bache- 
lors, and especially for lawyers. They will 
find it excellent to prime with. 

I do not recommend it at night. Rather, 
indeed, I caution the reader against indulg- 
ing in it at that time. Its effect might be 
injurious, for it would counteract the genial 
tendency to repose which ought then to be 
encouraged. Therefore when the hour of 
sleep approaches, lay this book aside, and 
read four pages upon political economy, — 
it matters not in what author, though the 
Scotch are to be preferred. 

Except at night, it may be perused at any 
time by those who have the mens sana in 
corpore sano ; those who fear God, honour 
the King, love their country and their kind, 
do their duty to their neighbours, and live 
in the performance and enjoyment of the 
domestic charities. 

It will be an excellent Saturday book for 
Rowland Hill ; his sermon will be pleasanter 
for it next day. 

The book is good for valetudinarians, and 
may even be recommended in aid of Aber- 
nethy's blue-pill. But I do not advise it 
with water-gruel nor sago ; hardly with 
chicken-broth, calfs-foot-jelly, or beef-tea. 
It accords well with a course of tonics. But 
a convalescent will find it best with his first 
beef-steak and glass of wine. 



232 



THE DOCTOR. 



The case is different for those who have 
either a twist in the head or a morbid affec- 
tion about the pericardium. 

If Grey Bennet will read it, — (from 
which I dehort him), — he should prepare 
by taking the following medicine to purge 
choler : — 

]?c. Extract : Colocynth : Comp : gr. x. 
Calomel : gr. v. 

Syr: q.s.f. Massa in pilulas iij divi« 
dencla. — Sumat pilulas iij hord somni. 

It will do Lord Holland no harm. 

Lord John Russell is recommended to use 
sage tea with it. If this operate as an altera- 
tive, it may save him from taking oil of rue 
hereafter in powerful doses. 

For Mr. Brougham a strong decoction 
of the herb lunaria will be needful, — a 
plant " elegantly so named by the elder 
botanists, and by all succeeding ones, 
from luna, the moon, on account of the 
silvery semi-transparent aspect, and broad 
circular shape of its seed-vessels." Honesty, 
or satin-flower, are its trivial names. It is 
recommended in this case not so much for 
the cephalic properties which its Linnean 
appellation might seem to denote, as for its 
emollient and purifying virtue. 

The Lord Chancellor must never read it 
in his wig. Dr. Parr, never without it. 

Mr. Wilberforce may dip into it when he 
will. At all times it will find him in good 
humour, and in charity with all men. Nay, 
if I whisper to him that it will be no sin to 
allow himself a few pages on a Sunday, and 
that if the preacher, under whom he has 
been sitting, should have given his dis- 
course a strong spice of Calvinism, it may 
then be useful to have recourse to it ; — 
though he should be shocked at the whole- 
some hint, the worst thing he will say of the 
incognisable incognito from whom it comes, 
will be Poo-oo-oo-r cree-ee-eature ! shaking 
his head, and lowering it at the same time, 
till his forehead almost touches the table, 
and his voice, gradually quickening in speed 
and sinking in tone, dies away to a whisper, 
in a manner which may thus be represented 
in types ; 



Pooo-oo-oo-oo-r Creeeature 

Poo-oo-oo-oo-r Creeature 

Poo-oo-oo-r Creature 

P5o-oo-r Creature 

Poooor Creature 

Pooor Creature 

Poor Creature 

Poor Creture 

Poor Cietur 

Poor Crtur 

Poo Crtr 

Poo Crt 



CHAPTER CII. 

MORE CONCERNING THE AFORESAID 
TOBACCONIST. 

I doubt nothing at all but that you shall like the man 
every day better than other ; for verily I think he lacketh 
not of those qualities which should become any honest 
man to have, over and besides the gift of nature where- 
with God hath above the common rate endued him. 

Archbishop Chanmer. 

Mr. Allison was as quiet a subject as Peter 
Hopkins, but he was not like him a political 
quietist from indifference, for he had a warm 
sense of loyalty, and a well-rooted attach- 
ment to the constitution of his country in 
church and state. His ancestors had suffered 
in the Great Rebellion, and much the greater 
part of their never large estates had been 
alienated to raise the fines imposed upon 
them as delinquents. The uncle, whom he 
succeeded in Bishopsgate Street, had, in his 
early apprenticeship, assisted at burning the 
Rump, and in maturer years had joined as 
heartily in the rejoicings, when the Seven 
Bishops were released from the Tower : he 
subscribed to Walker's "Account of the 
Sufferings of the Clergy," and had heard 
sermons preached by the famous Dr. Scott, 
(which were afterwards incorporated in his 
great work upon the Christian Life,) in the 
church of St. Peter-le-Poor (oddly so called, 
seeing that there are few districts within 
the City of London so rich, insomuch that 



THE DOCTOR. 



233 



the last historian of the metropolis believed 
the parish to have scarcely a poor family in 
it), — and in All-hallows, Lombard Street, 
•where, during the reign of the Godly, the 
puritanical vestry passed a resolution that 
if any persons should come to the church 
"on the day called Christ's birth-day," they 
should be compelled to leave it. 

In these principles Mr. Allison had grown 
up ; and without any profession of extra- 
religion, or ever wearing a sanctified face, 
he had in the evening of his life attained 
" the end of the commandment, which is 
charity, proceeding from a pure heart, and 
a good conscience, and a faith unfeigned." 
London in his days was a better school for 
young men in trade than it ever was before, 
or has been since. The civic power had 
quietly and imperceptibly put an end to that 
club-law which once made the apprentices 
a turbulent and formidable body, at any 
moment armed as well as ready for a riot ; and 
masters exercised a sort of parental control 
over the youth entrusted to them, which in 
later times it may be feared has not been so 
conscientiously exerted, because it is not 
likely to be so patiently endured. Trade 
itself had not then been corrupted by that 
ruinous spirit of competition, which, more 
than any other of the evils now pressing 
upon us, deserves to be called the curse of 
England in the present age. At all times 
men have been to be found, who engaged in 
hazardous speculations, gamester-like, ac- 
cording to their opportunities, or who, mis- 
taking the means for the end, devoted them- 
selves with miserable fidelity to the service 
of Mammon. But " Live and let live," had 
not yet become a maxim of obsolete morality. 
We had our monarchy, our hierarchy, and our 
aristocracy, — God be praised for the bene- 
fits which have been derived from all three, 
and God in his mercy continue them to us ! 
but we had no plutarchy, no millionaires, no 
great capitalists to break down the honest 
and industrious trader with the weight of 
their overbearing and overwhelming wealth. 
They who had enriched themselves in the 
course of regular and honourable commerce 
withdrew from business, and left the field 



to others. Feudal tyranny had passed away, 
and moneyed tyranny had not yet arisen in 
its stead — a tyranny baser in its origin, not 
more merciful in its operations, and with 
less in its appendages to redeem it. 

Trade in Mr. Allison's days was a school 
of thrift and probity, as much as of profit 
and loss ; such his shop had been when he 
succeeded to it upon his uncle's decease, and 
such it continued to be when he transmitted 
it to his son. Old Mr. Strahan the printer 
(the founder of his typarchical dynasty) said 
to Dr. Johnson, that " there are few ways 
in which a man can be more innocently em- 
ployed than in getting money ; " and he 
added, that " the more one thinks of this 
the juster it will appear." Johnson agreed 
with him ; and though it was a money- 
maker's observation, and though the more 
it is considered now, the more fallacious it 
will be found, the general system of trade 
might have justified it at that time. The 
entrance of an Exciseman never occasioned 
any alarm or apprehension at No. 113. 
Bishopsgate- Street- Within, nor any uncom- 
fortable feeling, unless the officer happened 
to be one, who, by giving unnecessary 
trouble, and by gratuitous incivility in the 
exercise of authority, made an equitable law 
odious in its execution. They never there 
mixed weeds with their tobacco, nor adul- 
terated it in any worse way ; and their snuff 
was never rendered more pungent by stir- 
ring into it a certain proportion of pounded 
glass. The duties were honestly paid, with 
a clear perception that the impost fell lightly 
upon all, whom it affected, and affected those 
only who chose to indulge themselves in a 
pleasure which was still cheap, and which, 
without any injurioiis privation, they might 
forego. Nay, when our good man expatiated 
upon the uses of tobacco, which Mr. Bacon 
demurred at, and the Doctor sometimes play- 
fully disputed, he ventured an opinion that 
among the final causes for which so excellent 
an herb had been created, the facilities 
afforded by it toward raising the revenue in 
a well-governed country like our own might 
be one. 

There was a strong family likeness be- 



234 



THE DOCTOR. 



tween him and his sister, both in countenance 
and disposition. Elizabeth Allison was a 
person for whom the best and wisest man 
might have thanked Providence, if she had 
been allotted to him for help-mate. But 
though she had, in Shakespeare's language, 
" withered on the virgin thorn," hers had 
not been a life of single blessedness : she 
had been a blessing first to her parents ; then 
to her brother and her brother s family, 
where she relieved an amiable, but sickly 
sister-in-law, from those domestic offices 
which require activity and forethought ; 
lastly, after the dispersion of his sons, the 
transfer of the business to the eldest, and the 
breaking-up of his old establishment, to the 
widower and his daughter, the only child 
who cleaved to him, — not like Ruth to 
Naomi, by a meritorious act of duty, for in 
her case it was in the ordinary course of 
things, without either sacrifice or choice ; 
but the effect in endearing her to him was 
the same. 

In advanced stages of society and no- 
where more than in England at this time, the 
tendency of all things is to weaken the re- 
lations between parent and child, and fre- 
quently to destroy them, reducing human 
nature in this respect nearer to the level of 
animal life. Perhaps the greater number 
of male children who are " born into the 
world" in our part of it, are put out at as 
early an age, proportionately as the young 
bird is driven from its nest, or the young 
beast turned off by its dam as being capable 
of feeding and protecting itself; and in 
many instances they are as totally lost to the 
parent, though, not in like manner forgotten. 
Mr. Allison never saw all his children together 
after his removal from London. The only 
time when his three sons met at the Grange 
was when they came there to attend their 
father's funeral; nor would they then have 
been assembled, if the Captain's ship had not 
happened to have recently arrived in port. 

This is a state of things more favourable 
to the wealth than to the happiness of na- 
tions. It was a natural and pious custom 
in patriarchal times that the dead should be 
gathered unto their people. "Bury me," 



said Jacob, when he gave his dying charge 
to his sons, — " bury me with my fathers, in 
the cave that is in the field of Maehpelah, 
which is before Mamre in the land of Ca- 
naan, which Abraham bought with the field 
of Ephron the Hittite, for a possession of a 
burying place. There they buried Abraham 
and Sarah his wife ; there they buried Isaac 
and Rebecca his wife ; and there I buried 
Leah." Llad such a passage occurred in 
Homer, or in Dante, all critics would have 
concurred in admiring the truth and beauty 
of the sentiment. He had buried his be- 
loved Rachel by the way where she died ; 
but although he remembered this at his 
death, the orders which he gave were that 
his own remains should be laid in the sepul- 
chre of his fathers. The same feeling pre- 
vails among many, or most of those savage 
tribes who are not utterly degraded. With 
them the tree is not left to lie where it falls. 
The body of one who dies on an expedition 
is interred on the spot, if distance or other 
circumstances render it inconvenient to 
transport the corpse ; but, however long the 
journey, it is considered as a sacred duty 
that the bones should at some time or other 
be brought home. In Scotland, where the 
common rites of sepulture are performed 
with less decency than in any other Chris- 
tian country, the care with which family 
burial-grounds in the remoter parts are pre- 
served, may be referred as much to natural 
feeling as to hereditary pride. 

But as indigenous flowers are eradicated 
by the spade and plough, so this feeling is 
destroyed in the stirring and bustling inter- 
course of commercial life. No room is left 
for it : as little of it at this time remains in 
wide America as in thickly-peopled En- 
gland. That to which soldiers and sailors 
are reconciled by the spirit of their profes- 
sion and the chances of war and of the seas, 
the love of adventure and the desire of 
advancement cause others to regard with 
the same indifference ; and these motives are 
so prevalent, that the dispersion of families 
and the consequent disruption of natural 
ties, if not occasioned by necessity, would 
now in most instances be the effect of 



THE DOCTOR. 



235 



choice. Even those to whom it is an inevi- 
table evil, and who feel it deeply as such, 
look upon it as something in the appointed 
course of things, as much as infirmity and 
age and death. 

It is well for us that in early life we never 
think of the vicissitudes which lie before us ; 
or look to them only with pleasurable anti- 
cipations as they approach. 

Youth 
Knows nought of changes : Age hath traced them oft, 
Expects and can interpret them.* 

The thought of them, when it comes across 
us in middle life, brings with it only a tran- 
sient sadness, like the shadow of a passing 
cloud. We turn our eyes from them while 
they are in prospect, but when they are in 
retrospect many a longing lingering look is 
cast behind. So long as Mr. Allison was in 
business he looked to Thaxted Grange as 
the place where he hoped one day to enjoy 
the blessings of retirement, — that otium cum 
dignitate, which in a certain sense the pru- 
dent citizen is more likely to attain than the 
successful statesman. It was the pleasure 
of recollection that gave this hope its zest 
and its strength. But after the object which 
during so many years he had held in view 
had been obtained, his day-dreams, if he 
had allowed them to take their course, would 
have recurred more frequently to Bishops- 
gate-Street than they had ever wandered 
from thence to the scenes of his boyhood. 
They recurred thither oftener than he 
wished, although few men have been more 
masters of themselves ; and then the remem- 
brance of his wife, whom he had lost by a 
lingering disease in middle age ; and of the 
children, those who had died during their 
childhood, and those Avho in reality were 
almost as much lost to him in the ways of 
the world, made him alway turn for comfort 
to the prospect of that better state of exist- 
ence in which they should once more all be 
gathered together, and where there would 
be neither change nor parting. His thoughts 
often fell into this train, when on summer 
evenings he was taking a solitary pipe in his 



ISAAC^COMMENUS. 



arbour, with the church in sight, and the 
churchyard wherein at no distant time he 
was to be laid in his last abode. Such 
musings induced a sense of sober piety, — 
of thankfulness for former blessings, con- 
tentment with the present, and humble yet 
sure and certain hope for futurity, which 
might vainly have been sought at prayer- 
meetings, or evening lectures, where indeed 
little good can ever be obtained without 
some deleterious admixture, or alloy of 
baser feelings. 

The happiness which he had found in re- 
tirement was of a different kind from what 
he had contemplated : for the shades of 
evening were gathering when he reached 
the place of his long-wished-for rest, and 
the picture of it which had imprinted itself 
on his imagination was a morning view. 
But he had been prepared for this by that 
slow change of which we are not aware 
during its progress till we see it reflected in 
others, and are thus made conscious of it in 
ourselves ; and he found a satisfaction in the 
station which he occupied there, too worthy 
in its nature to be called pride, and which 
had not entered into his anticipations. It is 
said to have been a saying of George the 
Third, that the happiest condition in which 
an Englishman could be placed, was just 
below that wherein it would have been 
necessary for him to act as a Justice of the 
Peace, and above that which would have 
rendered him liable to parochial duties. 
This was just Mr. Allison's position : there 
was nothing which brought him into rivalry 
or competition with the surrounding Squir- 
archy, and the yeomen and peasantry re- 
spected him for his own character, as well as 
for his name's-sake. He gave employment 
to more persons than when he was engaged 
in trade, and his indirect influence over 
them was greater ; that of his sister was still 
more. The elders of the village remem- 
bered her in her youth, and loved her for 
what she then had been as well as for what 
she now was ; the young looked up to her 
as the Lady Bountiful, to whom no one that 
needed advice or assistance ever applied in 
vain. She it was who provided those much- 



236 



THE DOCTOR. 



approved plum cakes, not the less savoury 
for being both homely and wholesome, the 
thought of which induced the children to 
look on to their Lent examination with hope, 
and prepare for it with alacrity. Those 
offices in a parish which are the province 
of the Clergyman's wife, when he has made 
choice of one who knows her duty and has 
both will and ability to discharge it, Miss 
Allison performed; and she rendered Mr. 
Bacon the farther, and to him individually 
the greater, service of imparting to his 
daughter those instructions which she had 
no mother to impart. Deborah could not 
have had a better teacher ; but as the pre- 
sent chapter has extended to a sufficient 
length, 

Diremo il resto in quel che vien dipoi, 
Per non venire a noja a me e voi.* 



CHAPTER CHI. 

A TEW PARTICULARS CONCERNING NO. 113. 
BISHOPSGATE-STREET-WITHIN ; AND OF 
THE FAMILY AT THAXTED GRANGE. 

Opinion is the rate of things, 
From hence our peace doth flow ; 

I have a better fate than kings, 
Because I think it so. 

Katharine Philips. 

The house wherein Mr. Allison realised by 
fair dealing and frugality the modest fortune 
which enabled him to repurchase the home- 
stead of his fathers, is still a Tobacconist's, 
and has continued to be so from " the palmy 
days " of that trade, when King James vainly 
endeavoured by the expression of bis royal 
dislike, to discountenance the newly-im- 
ported practice of smoking ; and Joshua 
Sylvester thundered from Mount Helicon 
a Volley of Holy Shot, thinking that thereby 
" Tobacco " should be " battered, and the 
Pipes shattered, about their ears that idly 
idolize so base and barbarous a weed, or at 
least-wise overlove so loathsome vanity." \ 
For he said, 

* Orlando Innamorato. 

t Old Burton's was a modified opinion. See Anatomie 
of Melancholy, part ii. § 2. mem. 2. subs. 2. 



If there be any Herb in any place 

Most opposite to God's good Herb of Grace, 

'Tis doubtless this ; and this doth plainly prove it, 

That for the most, most graceless men do love it. 

Yet it was not long before the dead and 
unsavoury odour of that weed, to which a 
Parisian was made to say that "sea-coal 
smoke seemed a very Portugal perfume," 
prevailed as much in the raiment of the 
more coarsely-clad part of the community, 
as the scent of lavender among those who 
were clothed in fine linen, and fared sump- 
tuously every day : and it had grown so 
much in fashion, that it was said children 
" began to play with broken pipes, instead 
of corals, to make way for their teeth." 

Louis XIV. endeavoured just as ineffec- 
tually to discourage the use of snuff-taking. 
His valets de chambre were obliged to re- 
nounce it when they were appointed to their 
office ; and the Duke of Harcourt was sup- 
posed to have died of apoplexy in conse- 
quence of having, to please his Majesty, left 
off at once a habit which he had carried to 
excess. 

I know not through what intermediate 
hands the business at No. 113. has passed, 
since the name of Allison was withdrawn 
from the firm ; nor whether Mr. Evans, by 
whom it is now carried on there, is in any 
way related by descent with that family. 
Matters of no greater importance to most 
men have been made the subject of much 
antiquarian investigation ; and they who 
busy themselves in such investigations must 
not be said to be ill-employed, for they find 
harmless amusement in the pursuit, and 
sometimes put up a chance truth of which 
others, soon or late, discover the application. 
The house has at this time a more antiquated 
appearance than any other in that part of 
the street, though it was modernised some 
forty or fifty years after Mr. Bacon's friend 
left it. The first floor then projected several 
feet farther over the street than at present, 
and the second several feet farther over the 
first ; and the windows, which still extend the 
whole breadth of the front, were then com- 
posed of small casement panes. But in the 
progress of those improvements which are 
now carrying on in tl^e city with as much 



THE DOCTOR. 



237 



spirit as at the western end of the metro- 
polis, and which have almost reached Mr. 
Evans's door, it cannot be long before the 
house will be either wholly removed, or so 
altered as no longer to be recognised. 

The present race of Londoners little know 
what the appearance of the city was a cen- 
tury ago; — their own city, I was about to 
have said ; but it was the city of their great 
grandfathers, not theirs, from which the 
elder Allisons retired in the year 1746. At 
that time the kennels (as in Paris) were in 
the middle of the street, and there were no 
foot-paths ; spouts projected the rain-water 
in streams against which umbrellas, if um- 
brellas had been then in use, could have 
afforded no defence ; and large signs, such 
as are now only to be seen at country inns, 
were suspended before every shop * , from 
posts which impeded the way, or from iron 
supports strongly fixed into the front of the 
house. The swinging of one of these broad 
signs, in a high wind, and the weight of the 
iron on which it acted, sometimes brought 
the wall down ; and it is recorded that one 
front-fall of this kind in Fleet Street maimed 
several persons, and killed " two young- 
ladies, a cobler, and the King's Jeweller." 

The sign at No. 113. was an Indian Chief, 
smoking the calumet. Mr. Allison had found 
it there ; and when it became necessary that 
a new one should be substituted, he retained 
the same figure, — though, if he had been to 
choose, he would have greatly preferred the 
head of Sir Walter Raleigh, by whom, ac- 
cording to the common belief, he supposed 
tobacco had been introduced into this coun- 
try. The Water-Poet imputed it to the 
Devil himself, and published 

A Proclamation, 

Or Approbation, 

From the King of Execration 

To every Nation, 

For Tobacco's propagation. 

Mr. Allison used to shake his head at such 
libellous aspersions. Raleigh was a great 
favourite with him, and held, indeed, in es- 



* The counting of these signs " from Temple Bar to 
the furthest Conduit in Cheapside," &c, is quoted as a 
remarkable instance of Fuller's Memory. Life, &c. p. 76. 
Ed. 1G62. 



pecial respect, though not as the Patron of 
his old trade, as St. Crispin is of the Gentle 
Craft, yet as the founder of his fortune. He 
thought it proper, therefore, that he should 
possess Sir Walter's History of the World, 
though he had never found inclination, or 
summoned up resolution, to undertake its 
perusal. 

Common sense has been defined by Sir 
Egerton Brydges, " to mean nothing more 
than an uneducated judgement, arising from 
a plain and coarse understanding, exercised 
upon common concerns, and rendered effec- 
tive rather by experience, than by any re- 
gular process of the intellectual powers. If 
this," he adds, " be the proper meaning of 
that quality, we cannot wonder that books 
are little fitted for its cultivation." Except 
that there was no coarseness in his nature, 
this would apply to Mr. Allison. He had 
been bred up with the notion that it be- 
hoved him to attend to his business, and 
that reading formed no part of it. Never- 
theless he had acquired some liking for 
books by looking casually now and then 
over the leaves of those unfortunate volumes 
with which the shop was continually sup- 
plied for its daily consumption. 

Many a load of criticism, 

Elaborate products of the midnight toil 
Of Belgian brains,* 

went there ; and many a tome of old law, 
old physic, and old divinity ; old history as 
well ; books of which many were at all times 
rubbish ; some, which though little better, 
would now sell for more shillings by the 
page than they then cost pence by the 
pound ; and others, the real value of which 
is perhaps as little known now, as it was 
then. Such of these as in latter years 
caught his attention, he now and then res- 
cued from the remorseless use to which 
they had been condemned. They made a 
curious assortment with his wife's books of 
devotion or amusement, wherewith she had 
sometimes beguiled, and sometimes soothed 
the weary hours of long and frequent illness. 
Among: the former were Scott's " Christian 



Akenside. 



238 



THE DOCTOK. 



Life," Bishop Bayly's " Practice of Piety," 
Bishop Taylor's " Holy Living and Dying," 
Drelincourt on Death, with De Foe's lying 
story of Mrs. Veal's ghost as a puff pre- 
liminary, and the Night Thoughts. Among 
the latter were Cassandra, the Guardian and 
Spectator, Mrs. Rowe's Letters, Richard- 
son's Novels and Pomfret's Poems. 

Mrs. Allison had been able to do little 
for her daughter of that little, which, if her 
state of health and spirits had permitted, she 
might have done ; this, therefore, as well as 
the more active duties of the household, 
devolved upon Elizabeth, who was of a 
better constitution in mind as well as body. 
Elizabeth, before she went to reside with 
her brother, had acquired all the accom- 
plishments which a domestic education in 
the country could in those days impart. 
Her book of receipts, culinary and medical, 
might have vied with the " Queen's 
Cabinet Unlocked." The spelling indeed 
was such as ladies used in the reign of Queen 
Anne, and in the old time before her, when 
every one spelt as she thought fit ; but it 
was written in a well-proportioned Italian 
hand, with fine down-strokes and broad up- 
ones, equally distinct and beautiful. Her 
speech was good Yorkshire, that is to say, 
good provincial English, not the worse for 
being provincial, and a little softened by 
five-and-twenty years' residence in London. 
Some sisters, who in those days kept a 
boarding-school, of the first repute, in one 
of the midland counties, used to say, when 
they spoke of an old pupil, '•''her went to 
school to we" Miss Allison's language was 
not of this kind, — it savoured of rusticity, 
not of ignorance ; and where it was peculiar, 
as in the metropolis, it gave a raciness to 
the conversation of an agreeable woman. 

She had been well instructed in orna- 
mental work as well as ornamental pen- 
manship. Unlike most fashions, this had 
continued to be in fashion because it con- 
tinued to be of use; though no doubt some 
of the varieties which Taylor, the Water- 
Poet, enumerates in his praise of the Needle, 
might have been then as little understood 
as now : — 



Tent-work, Raised-work, Laid-work, Prest-work, Net- 
work, 
Most curious Pearl, or rare Italian Cut-work, 
Fine Fern-stitch, Finny-stitch, New-stitch and Chain- 
stitch, 
Brave Bred-stitch, Fisher-stitch, Irish-stitch and Queen- 
stitch, 
The Spanish-stitch, Rosemary- stitch and Maw-stich, 
The smarting "Whip-stitch, Back-stitch and the Cross- 
stitch. 

AH these are good, and these we must allow ; 
And these are every where in practice now. 

There was a book published in the Water 
Poet's days, with the title of " School House 
for the Needle ;" it consisted of two volumes 
in oblong quarto, that form being suited to 
its plates " of sundry sorts of patterns and 
examples ;" and it contained a " Dialogue 
in Verse between Diligence and Sloth." If 
Betsey Allison had studied in this " School 
House," she could not have been a greater 
proficient with the needle than she became 
under her Aunt's teaching : nor would she 
have been more 

versed in the arts 

Of pies, puddings, and tarts,* 

if she had gone through a course of practical 
lessons in one of the Pastry Schools which 
are common in Scotland, but were tried 
without success in London, about the middle 
of the last century. Deborah partook of 
these instructions at her father's desire. In 
all that related to the delicacies of a country 
table, she was glad to be instructed, because 
it enabled her to assist her friend ; but it 
appeared strange to her that Mr. Bacon 
should wish her to learn ornamental work, 
for which she neither had, nor could foresee 
any use. But if the employment had been 
less agreeable than she found it in such com- 
pany, she would never have disputed, nor 
questioned his will. 

For so small a household, a more active 
or cheerful one could nowhere have been 
found than at the Grange. Ben Jonson 
reckoned among the happinesses of Sir 
Robert Wroth, that of being " with un- 
bought provision blest." This blessing Mr. 
Allison enjoyed in as great a degree as his 
position in life permitted ; he neither killed 
his own meat nor grew his own corn ; but 
he had his poultry yard, his garden and his 






THE DOCTOK. 



239 



orchard ; he baked his own bread, brewed 
his own beer, and was supplied with milk, 
cream and butter from his own dairy. It is 
a fact not unworthy of notice, that the most 
intelligent farmers in the neighbourhood of 
London are persons who have taken to 
farming as a business, because of their strong 
inclination for rural employments ; one of 
the very best in Middlesex, when the Survey 
of that County was published by the Board 
of Agriculture, had been a Tailor. Mr. 
Allison did not attempt to manage the land 
which he kept in his own hands ; but he had 
a trusty bailiff, and soon acquired knowledge 
enough for superintending what was done. 
When he retired from trade he gave over all 
desire for gain, which indeed he had never 
desired for its own sake ; he sought now only 
wholesome occupation, and those comforts 
which may be said to have a moral zest. 
They might be called luxuries, if that word 
could be used in a virtuous sense without 
something so to qualify it. It is a curious 
instance of the modification which words 
undergo in different countries, that luxury 
has always a sinful acceptation in the southern 
languages of Europe, and lust an innocent 
one in the northern ; the harmless meaning 
of the latter word, we have retained in the 
verb to list. 

Every one who looks back upon the scenes 
of his youth has one spot upon which the 
last light of the evening sunshine rests. 
The Grange was that spot in Deborah's re- 
trospect. 



CHAPTER CIY. 

A REMARKABLE EXAMPLE, SHOWING THAT A 
WISE MAN, WHEN HE RISES IN THE MORN- 
ING, LITTLE KNOWS WHAT HE MAY DO 
BEFORE NIGHT. 

Now I love, 

And so as in so short a time I may ; 
Yet so as time shall never break that so, 
And therefore so accept of Elinor. 

Robert Greene. 

One summer evening the Doctor on his way 
back from a visit in that direction, stopped, as 
on such opportunities he usually did, at Mr. 



Bacon's wicket, and looked in at the open 
casement to see if his friends were within. 
Mr. Bacon was sitting there alone, with a 
book open on the table before him ; and 
looking round when he heard the horse stop, 
" Come in Doctor," said he, " if you have a 
few minutes to spare. You were never more 
welcome." 

The Doctor replied, " I hope nothing ails 
either Deborah or yourself?" "]STo," said 
Mr. Bacon, " God be thanked ! but some- 
thing has occurred which concerns both." 

When the Doctor entered the room, he 
perceived that the wonted serenity of his 
friend's countenance was overcast by a shade 
of melancholy thought ; " Nothing," said 
he, " I hope has happened to distress you ? " 
— " Only to disturb us," was the reply. 
" Most people would probably think that we 
ought to consider it a piece of good fortune. 
One who would be thought a good match 
for her, has proposed to marry Deborah." 

"Indeed!" said the Doctor; "and who 
is he?" feeling, as he asked the question, an 
unusual warmth in his face. 

" Joseph Hebblethwaite, of the Willows. 
He broke his mind to me this morning, say- 
ing that he thought it best to speak with me 
before he made any advances himself to the 
young woman : indeed he had had no oppor- 
tunity of so doing, for he had seen little of 
her ; but he had heard enough of her cha- 
racter to believe that she would make him a 
good wife ; and this, he said, was all he 
looked for, for he was well to do in the 
world." 

" And what answer did you make to this 
matter-of-fact way of proceeding ?" 

"I told him that I commended the very 
proper course he had taken, and that I was 
obliged to him for the good opinion of my 
daughter which he was pleased to entertain : 
that marriage was an affair in which I should 
never attempt to direct her inclinations, 
being confident that she would never give 
me cause to oppose them ; and that I would 
talk with her upon the proposal, and let him 
know the result. As soon as I mentioned it 
to Deborah, she coloured up to her eyes ; 
and with an angry look, of which I did not 



240 



THE DOCTOR. 



think those eyes had been capable, she de- 
sired me to tell him that he had better lose 
no time in looking elsewhere, for his thinking 
of her was of no use. ' Do you know any ill 
of him ? ' said I ; ' No,' she replied, ' but I 
never heard any good, and that's ill enough. 
And I do not like his looks.' " 

"Well said, Deborah!" cried the Doctor : 
clapping his hands so as to produce a sono- 
rous token of satisfaction. 

" 'Surely, my child,' said I, 'he is not an 
ill -looking person ? ' 'Father,' she replied, 
'you know he looks as if he had not one idea 
in his head to keep company with another.' " 

" Well said, Deborah ! " repeated the 
Doctor. 

" Why Doctor, do you know any ill of 
him?" 

" None. But as Deborah says, I know 
no good ; and if there had been any good to 
be known, it must have come within my 
knowledge. I cannot help knowing who the 
persons are to whom the peasantry in my 
rounds look with respect and good will, and 
whom they consider their friends as well as 
their betters. And in like manner, I know 
who they are from whom they never expect 
either courtesy or kindness." 

" You are right, my friend ; and Deborah 
is right. Her answer came from a wise 
heart ; and I was not sorry that her deter- 
mination was so promptly made, and so re- 
solutely pronounced. But I wish, if it had 
pleased God, the offer had been one which 
she could have accepted with her own willing 
consent, and with my full approbation." 

" Yet," said the Doctor, " I have often 
thought how sad a thing it would be for 
you ever to part with her." 

" Far more sad will it be for me to leave 
her unprotected, as it is but too likely that, 
in the ordinary course of nature, I one day 
shall ; and as any day in that same ordinary 
course, I so possibly may ! Our best inten- 
tions, even when they have been most pru- 
dentially formed, fail often in their issue. I 
meant to train up Deborah in the way she 
should go, by fitting her for that state of 
life in which it had pleased God to place 
her, so that she might have made a good 



wife for some honest man in the humbler 
walks of life, and have been happy with 
him." 

"And how was it possible," replied the 
Doctor, "that you could have succeeded 
better ? Is she not qualified to be a good 
man's wife in any rank? Her manner 
would not do discredit to a mansion ; her 
management would make a farm prosperous, 
or a cottage comfortable ; and for her prin- 
ciples, and temper and cheerfulness, they 
would render any home a happy one." 

" You have not spoken too highly in her 
praise, Doctor. But as she has from her 
childhood been all in all to me, there is a 
danger that I may have become too much 
so to her ; and that while her habits have 
properly been made conformable to our poor 
means, and her poor prospects, she has been 
accustomed to a way of thinking, and a kind 
of conversation, which have given her a dis- 
taste for those whose talk is only of sheep 
and of oxen, and whose thoughts never get 
beyond the range of their every day em- 
ployments. In her present circle, I do not 
think there is one man with whom she 
might otherwise have had a chance of set- 
tling in life, to whom she would not have 
the same intellectual objections as to Joseph 
Hebblethwaite : though I am glad that the 
moral objection was that which first in- 
stinctively occurred to her. 

" I wish it were otherwise, both for her 
sake and my own ; for hers, because the 
present separation would have more than 
enough to compensate it, and would in its 
consequences mitigate the evil of the final 
one, whenever that may be ; for my own, 
because I should then have no cause what- 
ever to render the prospect of dissolution 
otherwise than welcome, but be as willing 
to die as to sleep. It is not owing to any 
distrust in Providence, that I am not thus 
willing now, — God forbid! But if I gave 
heed to my own feelings, I should think 
that I am not long for this world ; and 
surely it were wise to remove, if possible,- 
the only cause that makes me fear to think 
so." 

" Are you sensible of any symptoms that 



THE DOCTOR. 



241 



can lead to such an apprehension ? " said the 
Doctor. 

" Of nothing that can be called a symptom. 
I am to all appearance in good health, of 
sound body and mind ; and you know how 
unlikely my habits are to occasion any dis- 
turbance in either. But I have indefinable 
impressions, — sensations they might almost 
be called, — which as I cannot but feel them, 
so I cannot but regard them." 

" Can you not describe these sensations ? " 

" No better than by saying, that they 
hardly amount to sensations, and are inde- 
scribable." 

" Do not," said the Doctor, " I entreat 
you, give way to any feelings of this kind. 
They may lead to consequences, which, 
without shortening or endangering life, 
would render it anxious and burthensome, 
and destroy both your usefulness and your 
comfort." 

" I have this feeling, Doctor ; and you 
shall prescribe for it, if you think it requires 
either regimen or physic. But at present 
you will do me more good by assisting me 
to procure for Deborah such a situation as 
she must necessarily look for on the event 
of my death. What I have laid by, even if 
it should be most advantageously disposed 
of, would afford her only a bare subsistence ; 
it is a resource in case of sickness, but while 
in health, it would never be her wish to eat 
the bread of idleness. You may have oppor- 
tunities of learning whether any lady within 
the circle of your practice wants a young 
person in whom she might confide, either as 
an attendant upon herself, or to assist in the 
management of her children, or her house- 
hold. You may be sure this is not the first 
time that I have thought upon the subject ; 
but the circumstance which has this day 
occurred, and the feeling of which I have 
spoken, have pressed it upon my considera- 
tion. And the inquiry may better be made 
and the step taken while it is a matter of 
foresight, than when it has become one of 
necessity." 

" Let me feel your pulse ! " 

" You will detect no other disorder there," 
said Mr. Bacon, holding out his arm as he 



spake, " than what has been caused by this 
conversation, and the declaration of a pur- 
pose, which though for some time perpended, 
I had never till now fully acknowledged to 
myself." , 

" You have never then mentioned it to 
Deborah?" 

" In no other way than by sometimes in- 
cidentally speaking of the way of life which 
would be open to her, in case of her being 
unmarried at my death." 

" And you have made up your mind to 
part with her ? " 

" Upon a clear conviction that I ought to 
do so ; that it is best for herself and me." 

" Well then, you will allow me to con- 
verse with her first, upon a different sub- 
ject. — You will permit me to see whether 
I can speak more successfully for myself, 
than you have done for Joseph Hebble- 
thwaite. — Have I your consent ?" 

Mr. Bacon rose in great emotion, and 
taking his friend's hand pressed it fervently 
and tremulously. Presently they heard the 
wicket open, and Deborah came in. 

" I dare say, Deborah," said her father, 
composing himself, " you have been telling- 
Betsy Allison of the advantageous offer that 
you have this day refused." 

' 4 Yes," replied Deborah ; " and what do 
you think she said? That little as she 
likes him, rather than that I should be 
thrown away upon such a man, she could 
almost make up her mind to marry him 
herself." 

" And I," said the Doctor, " rather than 
such a man should have you would marry 
you myself." 

"Was not I right in refusing him, 
Doctor?" 

" So right, that you never pleased me so 
well before ; and never can please me bet- 
ter, — unless you will accept of me in his 
stead." 

She gave a little start, and looked at him 
half incredulously, and half angrily withal ; 
as if what he had said was too light in its 
manner to be serious, and yet too serious in 
its import to be spoken in jest. But when 
he took her by the hand, and said, " Will 



242 



THE DOCTOR. 



you, dear Deborah?" with a pressure, and 
in a tone that left no doubt of his earnest 
meaning, she cried, " Father, what am I to 
say ? speak for me!" — " Take her, my 
friend ! " said Mr. Bacon ; " My blessing be 
upon you both. And if it be not pre- 
sumptuous to use the words, — let me say 
for myself, ' Lord, now lettest thou thy 
servant depart in peace ! ' " 



CHAPTER CV. 

A WORD OF NOBS, AND AN ALLUSION TO 
CJESAR. SOME CIRCUMSTANCES RELATING 
TO THE DOCTOR'S SECOND LOVE, WHEREBY 
THOSE OF HIS THIRD AND LAST ARE AC- 
COUNTED FOR. 

Un mal que se entra por medio los ojos, 
Y va se derecho hnsta el corazon ; 
Alii en ser llegado se torna aficion, 
Y da mil pesares, plazeres y enojos : 
Causa alcgrias, tristezas, antojos j 
Haze llorar, y haze reir, 
Haze cantar, y haze planir, 
Da pensamientos dus mil a manojos. 

Question de Amor. 

" Nobs," said the Doctor, as he mounted 
and rode away from Mr. Bacon's garden 
gate, " when I alighted and fastened thee to 
that wicket, I thought as little of what was 
to befal me then, and what I was about to 
do, as thou knowest of it now." 

Man has an inward voice as well as an 
"inward eye,"* a voice distinct from that 
of conscience. It is the companion, if not 
" the bliss of solitude ; " * and though he 
sometimes employs it to deceive himself, it 
gives him good counsel perhaps quite as 
often, calls him to account, reproves him 
for having left unsaid what he ought to 
have said, or for having said what he ought 
not to have said, reprehends or approves, 
admonishes or encourages. On this occa- 
sion it was a joyful and gratulatory voice, 
with which the Doctor spake mentally, first 
to Nobs and afterwards 
rode back to Doncaster. 



* WORDSVVOIU'H. 



By this unuttered address the reader 
would perceive, if he should haply have 
forgotten what was intimated in some of the 
ante-initial chapters, and in the first post- 
initial one, that the Doctor had a horse, 
named Nobs ; and the question Who was 
Nobs, would not be necessary, if this were 
all that was to be said concerning him. 
There is much to be said ; the tongue that 
could worthily express his merits had need 
be like the pen of a ready writer ; though I 
will not say of him as Berni or Boiardo has 
said of 

— quel valeroso e bel deslriero, 

Argalia's horse, Rubicano, that 

Un che volesse dir lodando il vero, 
Bisogno aria diparlar piu ch'umano. 

At present, however, I shall only say this in 
his praise, he was altogether unlike the 
horse of whom it was said he had only two 
faults, that of being hard to catch, and that 
of being good for nothing when he was 
caught. For whether in stable or in field, 
Nobs would come like a dog to his master's 
call. There was not a better horse for the 
Doctor's purpose in all England ; no, nor in 
all Christendom ; no, nor in all Houyhn- 
hnmdom, if that country had been searched 
to find one. 

Ccesarem vehis, said Cassar to the Egyp- 
tian boatman. But what was that which the 
Egyptian boat carried, compared to what 
Nobs bore upon that saddle to which con- 
stant use had given its polish bright and 
brown ? 

Virtutem solidi pectoris hospilam 
Idem portal equus, qui dominum.\ 

Nobs therefore carried — all that is in these 
volumes ; yea, and as all future generations 
were, according to Madame Bourignon, 
actually as well as potentially, contained 
in Adam, — all editions and translations of 
them, however numerous. 

But on that evening he carried something 
of more importance ; for on the life and 
weal of his rider there depended from that 
hour, as far as its dependence was upon any- 



t Casimir. 



THE DOCTOR. 



243 



thing earthly, the happiness of one of the 
best men in the world, and of a daughter 
who was not unworthy of such a father. If 
the Doctor had been thrown from his horse 
and killed, an hour or two earlier, the same 
day, it would have been a dreadful shock 
both to Deborah and Mr. Bacon ; and they 
would always have regretted the loss of one 
whose company they enjoyed, whose cha- 
racter they respected, and for whom they 
entertained a feeling of more than ordinary 
regard. But had such a casualty occurred 
now, it would have been the severest afflic- 
tion that could have befallen them. 

Yet till that hour Deborah had never 
thought of Dove as a husband, nor Dove of 
Deborah as a wife — that is, neither had 
ever looked at the possibility of their being 
one day united to each other in that rela- 
tion. Deborah liked him, and he liked her ; 
and beyond this sincere liking neither of 
them for a moment dreamed that the inclina- 
tion would ever proceed. They had not 
fallen in love with each other ; nor had they 
run in love, nor walked into it, nor been led 
into it, nor entrapped into it ; nor had they 
caught it. 

How then came they to be in love at last ? 
The question may be answered by an inci- 
dent which Mr. John Davis relates in his 
Travels of Four Years and a Half in the 
United States of America. The traveller 
was making his way "faint and wearily" 
on foot to a place called by the strange name 
of Frying Pan, — for the Americans have 
given all sorts of names, except fitting ones, 
to the places which they have settled, or 
discovered, and their Australian kinsmen 
seem to be following the same absurd and 
inconvenient course. It will occasion, here- 
after, as much confusion as the sameness of 
Mahommedan proper names, in all ages and 
countries, causes in the history of all Mahom- 
medan nations. Mr. Davis had walked till 
he was tired without seeing any sign of the 
place at which he expected long before to 
have arrived. At length he met a lad in the 
wilderness, and asked him, "how far, my 
boy, is it to Frying Pan ? " The boy re- 
plied, " you be in the Pan now." 



So it was with the Doctor and with De- 
borah ; — they found themselves in love, as 
much to their surprise as it was to the 
traveller when he found himself in the Pan, 
and much more to their satisfaction. And 
upon a little after reflection they both per- 
ceived how they came to be so. 

There's a chain of causes 
Link'd to effects, — invincible necessity 
That whate'er is, could not but so have been.* 

Into such questions, however, I enter not. 
" Nolo alhim sapere" they be matters above 
my capacity : the Cobler's check shall never 
light on my head, " Ne sutor ultra crepi- 
dam." f Opportunity, which makes thieves j, 
makes lovers also, and is the greatest of all 
match-makers. And when opportunity came, 
the Doctor, 

Por ubbidir chi sempre ubbidir debbe 
La mente, § 

acted promptly. Accustomed as he was to 
weigh things of moment in the balance, and 
hold it with as even and as nice a hand, as 
if he were compounding a prescription on 
which the life of a patient might depend, he 
was no shillishallier, nor ever wasted a pre- 
cious minute in pro-and-conning, when it 
was necessary at once to decide and act. 

Chi ha tempo, e tempo aspetta, il tempo perde.\\ 

His first love, as the reader will remember, 
came by inoculation, and was taken at first 
sight. This third and last, he used to say, 
came by inoculation also ; but it was a more 
remarkable case, for eleven years elapsed 
before there was an appearance of his having 
taken the infection. How it happened that 
an acquaintance of so many years, and which 
at its very commencement had led to confi- 
dence, and esteem, and familiarity, and friend- 
ship, should have led no farther, may easily 
be explained. Dove, when he first saw 
Deborah, was in love with another person. 

He had attended poor Lucy Bevan from 
the eighteenth year of her age, when a ten- 



* Dryden. t Thomas Lodge. 

J Tilfald gjb'r Tju/en. Swedish Proverb. 
§ Pulci. || Serafino da L'Aquila. 



244 



THE DOCTOR. 



dency to consumption first manifested itself 
in her, till the twenty-fifth, when she sunk 
under that slow and insidious malady. She, 
who for five of those seven years, fancied 
herself during every interval, or mitigation 
of the disease, restored to health, or in the 
way of recovery, had fixed her affections 
upon him. And he who had gained those 
affections by his kind and careful attend- 
ance upon a case of which he soon saw cause 
to apprehend the fatal termination, becom- 
ing aware of her attachment as he became 
more and more mournfully convinced that 
no human skill could save her, found himself 
unawares engaged in a second passion, as 
hopeless as his first. That had been wilful ; 
this was equally against his will and his 
judgment : that had been a folly, this was 
an affliction. And the only consolation 
which he found in it was, that the conscious- 
ness of loving and of being beloved, which 
made him miserable, was a happiness to her 
as long as she retained a hope of life, or was 
capable of feeling satisfaction in anything 
relating to this world. Caroline Bowles, 
whom no authoress or author has ever sur- 
passed in truth, and tenderness, and sanctity 
of feeling, could relate such a story as it 
ought to be related, — if stories which in 
themselves are purely painful ought ever to 
be told. I will not attempt to tell it : — for 
I wish not to draw upon the reader's tears, 
and have none to spare for it myself. 

This unhappy attachment, though he never 
spoke of it, being always but too certain in 
what it must end, was no secret to Mr. 
Bacon and his daughter : and when death 
had dissolved the earthly tie, it seemed to 
them, as it did to himself, that his affections 
were wedded to the dead. It was likely that 
the widower should think so, judging of his 
friend's heart by his own. 

Sorrow and Time will ever paint too well 

The lost when hopeless, all things loved in vain,* 

I lis feelings upon such a point had been ex- 
pressed for him by a most prolific and un- 
equal writer, whose poems, more perhaps 



L 



* ROBERT LaNDOR. 



than those of any other English author, de- 
serve to be carefully winnowed, the grain, 
which is of the best quality, being now lost 
amid the heap of chaff. 

Lord keep me faithful to the trust 
Which my dear spouse reposed in me : 

To her now dead, preserve me just 
In all that should performed be. 

For tho' our being man and wife 

Extendeth only to this life, 

Yet neither life nor death should end 

The being of a faithful friend.f 

The knowledge that the Doctor's heart was 
thus engaged at the time of their first ac- 
quaintance, had given to Deborah's inter- 
course with him an easy frankness which 
otherwise might perhaps not have been felt, 
and could not have been assumed ; and the 
sister-like feeling into which this had grown 
underwent no change after Lucy Bevan's 
death. He meantime saw that she was so 
happy with her father, and supposed her 
father's happiness so much depended upon 
her, that to have entertained a thought of 
separating them (even if the suitableness of 
such a marriage in other respects had ever 
entered into his imagination), would have 
seemed to him like a breach of friendship. 
Yet, if Mr. Bacon had died before he opened 
his mind to the Doctor upon occasion of 
Joseph Hebblethwaite's proposal, it is pro- 
bable that one of the first means of consola- 
tion which would have occurred to him, 
would have been to offer the desolate daughter 
a home, together with his hand ; so well was 
he acquainted with her domestic merits, so 
highly did he esteem her character, and so 
truly did he admire the gifts with which 
Nature had endowed her,— 

— her sweet humour 
That was as easy as a calm, and peaceful ; 
All her affections, like the dews on roses, 
Fair as the flowers themselves, as sweet and gentle.t 



t Wither. 



% Beaumont and Fletcher. 



THE DOCTOR. 



245 



INTERCHAPTER XII. 

THE AUTHOR REGRETS THAT HE CANNOT 
MAKE HIMSELF KNOWN TO CERTAIN 
READERS ; STATES THE POSSIBLE REASONS 
FOR HIS SECRECY; MAKES NO USE IN SO 
DOING OE THE LICENCE WHICH HE SEEMS 
TO TAKE OUT IN HIS MOTTO ; AND STATING 
THE PRETENCES WHICH HE ADVANCES TOR 
HIS WORK, DISCLAIMING THE WHILE ALL 
MERIT FOR HIMSELF, MODESTLY PRESENTS 
THEM UNDER A GRECIAN VEIL. 

Ev0<* yi.s, Tt h-7'^-Zdo; Xiyitrteu kiyi<r8tu. 

Herodotus. 

There is more gratitude in the world than 
the worldly believe, or than the ungrateful 
are capable of believing. And knowing this, 
I consequently know how great a sacrifice I 
make in remaining incognito. 

Reputation is a bubble upon the rapid 
stream of time ; popularity, a splash in the 
great pool of oblivion ; fame itself but a full- 
blown bladder, or at best a balloon. There 
is no sacrifice in declining them ; for in es- 
caping these you escape the impertinences 
and the intrusions which never fail to follow 
in their train. But that this book will find 
some readers after the Author's own heart 
is certain ; they will lose something in not 
knowing who the individual is with whom 
they would delight to form a personal, as 
they have already formed a moral and intel- 
lectual friendship ; 

For in this world, to reckon every thing, 
Pleasure to man there is none comparable 

As is to read with understanding 

In books of wisdom, they ben so delectable 
Which sound to virtue, aud ben profitable.* 

And though my loss is not of this kind, yet 
it is great also, for in each of these unknown 
admirers I lose the present advantage of a 
well-wisher, and the possible, or even pro- 
bable benefit of a future friend. 

Eugenius ! Eusebius ! Sophron ! how 
gladly would ye become acquainted with my 
outward man, and commune with me face 
to face ! How gladly would ye, Sophronia! 
Eusebia ! Eugenia ! 



* With how radiant a countenance and how 
light a step would Euphrosyne advance to 
greet me ! with how benign an aspect would 
Amanda silently thank me for having held 
up a mirror in which she has unexpectedly 
seen herself ! 

Letitia's eyes would sparkle at the sight 
of one whose writings had given her new 
joy. Penserosa would requite me with a 
gentle look for cheering her solitary hours, 
and moving her sometimes to a placid smile, 
sometimes to quiet and pleasurable tears. 

And you, Marcellus, from whom your 
friends, your country, and your kind have 
everything to hope, how great a pleasure 
do I forego by rendering it impossible for 
you to seek me, and commence an acquaint- 
ance with the sure presentiment that it 
would ripen into confidence and friendship ! 

There is another and more immediate 
gratification which this resolution compels 
me to forego, that of gratifying those per- 
sons who, if they knew from whom the book 
proceeded, would peruse it with heightened 
zest for its author's sake ; — old acquaint- 
ance who would perceive in some of those 
secondary meanings which will be under- 
stood only by those for whom they were 
intended, that though we have long been 
widely separated, and probably are never 
again to meet in this world, they are not 
forgotten ; and old friends, who would take 
a livelier interest in the reputation which 
the work obtains, than it would now be pos- 
sible for me to feel in it myself. 

" And why, Sir," says an obliging and in- 
quisitive reader, " should you deprive your 
friends and acquaintance of that pleasure, 
though you are willing to sacrifice it your- 
self? " 

"Why, Sir, — do you ask ? n 

Ah that is the mystery 
Of this wonderful history, 
And you wish that you couJd tell ! t 

" A question not to be asked," said an 
odder person than I shall ever pretend to 
be, " is a question not to be answered." 

Nevertheless, gentle reader, in courtesy I 

t SOUTHBY. 



246 



THE DOCTOR. 



will give sundry answers to your interroga- 
tion, and leave you to fix upon which of 
them you may think likely to be the true 
one. 

The Author may be of opinion that his 
name, not being heretofore known to the 
public, could be of no advantage to his 
book. 

Or, on the other hand, if his name were 
already well known, he might think the 
book stands in no need of it, and may safely 
be trusted to its own merits. He may wish 
to secure for it a fairer trial than it could 
otherwise obtain, and intend to profit by the 
unbiassed opinions which will thus reach his 
ear ; thinking complacently with Benedict, 
that " happy are they that hear their de- 
tractions, and can put them to mending." 
In one of Metastasio's dramatic epithala- 
miums, Minerva says, 

— Vonore, a cut 
Venni proposta cinch' to 
Piu meritar, eke conseguir desio ; 

and he might say this with the Goddess of 
Wisdom. 

He may be so circumstanced that it would 
be inconvenient as well as unpleasant for 
him to offend certain persons, — Sir Andrew 
Agnewites for example, — whose conscien- 
tious but very mischievous notions he never- 
theless thinks it his duty to oppose, when 
he can do so consistently with discretion. 

He may have wagers dependent upon the 
guesses that will be made concerning him. 

Peradventure it might injure him in his 
professional pursuits, were he to be known 
as an author, and that he had neglected 
" some sober calling for this idle trade." 

He may be a very modest man, who can 
muster courage enough for publication, and 
yet dares not encounter any farther pub- 
licity. 

Unknown, perhaps his reputation 
Escapes the tax of defamation, 
And wrapt in darkness, laughs unhurt, 
While critic blockheads throw their dirt ; 
But he who madly prints his name, 
Invites his foe to take sure aim.* 

He may be so shy, that if his book were 
* Lloyd. 



praised he would shrink from the notoriety 
into which it would bring him ; or so sensi- 
tive, that his mortification would be extreme 
if it were known among his neighbours that 
he had been made the subject of sarcastic 
and contemptuous criticism. 

Or if he ever possessed this diffidence he 
may have got completely rid of it in his 
intercourse with the world, and have acquired 
that easy habit of simulation without which 
no one can take his degree as Master of 
Arts in that great University. To hear the 
various opinions concerning the book and 
the various surmises concerning the author, 
take part in the conversation, mystifying 
some of his acquaintance and assist others 
in mystifying themselves, may be more amus- 
ing to him than any amusement of which he 
could partake in his own character. There 
are some secrets which it is a misery to 
know, and some which the tongue itches to 
communicate ; but this is one which it is a 
pleasure to know and to keep. It gives to 
the possessor, quasically speaking, a double 
existence : the exoteric person mingles, as 
usual, in society, while the esoteric is like 
John the Giganticide in his coat of darkness, 
or that knight who in the days of King 
Arthur used to walk invisible. 

The best or the worst performer at a 
masquerade may have less delight in the 
consciousness or conceit of their own talents, 
than he may take in conversing with an air 
of perfect unconcern about his own dear 
book. It may be sport for him to hear it 
scornfully condemned by a friend, and plea- 
sure to find it thoroughly relished by an 
enemy. 

The secrets of nature 
Have not more gift in taciturnity. t 

Peradventure he praises it himself with a 
sincerity for which every reader will give 
him full credit ; or peradventure he con- 
demns it, for the sake of provoking others 
to applaud it more warmly in defence of 
their own favourable and pre-expressed opin- 
ion. Whether of these courses, thinkest 
thou, gentle reader, is he most likely to pur- 

t Troilus and Cuessida. 



THE DOCTOK. 



247 



sue ? I will only tell thee that either would 
to him be equally easy and equally enter- 
taining. "Ye shall know that we may 
dissemble in earnest as well as in sport, under 
covert and dark terms, and in learned and 
apparent speeches, in short sentences, and 
by long ambage and circumstance of words, 
and finally, as well when we lie, as when we 
tell truth." * 

In any one of the supposed cases suffi- 
cient reason is shown for his keeping, and 
continuing to keep his own secret. 

En nous for mant, nature a ses caprices, 
Divers penchans en nous ellefait observer. 
Les uns, a s'exposer, trouvent mille delicesj 

Moi,fen trouve a me conserver.^ 

And if there be any persons who are not 
satisfied with this explanation, I say to them, 
in the words of Jupiter, 

— STET PRO RATIONE VOLUNTAS. 

Moreover, resting my claim to the grati- 
tude of this generation, and of those which 
are to come, upon the matter of these 
volumes, and disclaiming for myself all merit 
except that of fidelity to the lessons of my 
philosopher and friend, I shalj. not fear to 
appropriate, mutatis mutandis, and having 
thus qualified them, the proud words of 
Arrian : 

'AAA' ixitvo a,vu.y%a.0a>, on 1/m) xctTgis n, zou yivo;, xou 
u.gx.v-ti o'idz ol Xoyoi u<ri ts — xoc) It) t£> 5s oux atros^ta 
IfAotvTOv ra» t^utmv \v T?i QGivvi tyi ' AyyXixn, liTlg o'vv y.a.) 
A<x.vir,\ o largo; ifAo; tSjv in ro7s <p<x.£fjt,ot,>iOi; . 



IJSTTERCHAPTER XIII. 

A PEEP FROM BEHIND THE CURTAIN. 

Ha, ha, ha, now ye will make me to smile, 

To see if I can all men beguile. 

Ha, my name, my name would ye so fain know ? 

Yea, I wis, shall ye, and that with all speed. 
I have forgot it, therefore I cannot show. 

A, a, now I have it ! I have it indeed ! 
My name is Ambidexter, I signify one 

That with both hands finely can play. 

King Cambyses. 

But the question has been mooted in the 
literary and cerulean circles of the metro- 



* Puttenham. 



t MOLIERE. 



polis, whether this book be not the joint 
work of two or more authors. And this 
duality or plurality of persons in one author- 
ship has been so confidently maintained, 
that if it were possible to yield upon such a 
point to any display of evidence and weight 
of authority, I must have been argued out 
of my own indivisible individuality. 

Fort bien ! Je le soutiens par la grande raison 
Qu'ainsi V a fait des Dieux la puissance supreme; 
Et qu'il n 'est pas en tnoi de pouvoir dire non, 
Et d'etre un autre que moi-meme.% 

Sometimes I have been supposed to be 
the unknown Beaumont of some equally 
unknown Fletcher, — the moiety of a Siamese 
duplicate ; or the third part of a Geryonite 
triplicity; the fourth of a quaternion of 
partners, or a fifth of a Smectymnuan as- 
sociation. Nay, I know not whether they 
have not cut me clown to the dimensions of 
a tailor, and dwindled me into the ninth 
part of an author ! 

Me to be thus served ! me, who am an 
integral, to be thus split into fractions ! me, 
a poor unit of humanity, to be treated like a 
polypus under the scissors of an experimental 
naturalist, or unnaturalist. 

The reasons assigned in support of this 
pluri-personal hypothesis are, first, the sup- 
posed discrepancy of humour and taste ap- 
parent in the different parts of the book. 
Oh men ignorant of humorology ! more 
ignorant of psychology ! and most ignorant 
of Pantagruelism ! 

Secondly, the prodigal expenditure of 
mottoes and quotations, which they think 
could only have been supported by means 
of a pic-nic contribution. Oh men whose 
diligence is little, whose reading less, and 
whose sagacity least of all ! 

Yet looking at this fancy of the Public, — 
a creature entertained with many fancies, 
beset with many tormenting spirits, and 
provided with more than the four legs and 
two voices which were hastily attributed to 
the son of Sycorax ; — a creature which, 
though it be the fashion of the times to seek 
for shelter under its gaberdine, is by this 



% MOLIERE. 



248 



THE DOCTOR. 



good light, "a very shallow monster," "a 
most poor credulous monster ! " — I say- 
looking at this fancy of the Public in that 
temper with which it is my wish to regard 
everything, methinks I should be flattered 
by it, and pleased (if anything flattering 
could please me) by having it supposed upon 
such grounds, that this book, like the Satyre 
MeJiippee, is the composition of several bons 
et gentils esprits du terns, — dans lequel souz 
paroles et allegations pleines de raillerie, Us 
boufonnerent, comnie en riant le way se peut 
dire ; and which Us firent, selon leurs 
humeurs, caprices et intelligences, en telle 
sorte quHl se peut dire qu'ils riont rien 
oublie de ce qui se peut dire pour servir de 
perfection a cet ouvrage, qui bien entendu 
sera grandement estime par la posterite* 

The same thing occurred in the case of 
Gulliver's Travels, and in that case Arbuth- 
not thought reasonably ; for, said he, " if 
this Book were to be decyphered, merely 
from a view of it, without any hints, or 
secret history, this would be a very natural 
conclusion : we should be apt to fancy it 
the production of two or three persons, who 
want neither wit nor humour ; but who are 
very full of themselves, and hold the rest of 
mankind in great contempt ; who think suf- 
ficient regard is not paid to their merit by 
those in power, for which reason they rail at 
them ; who have written some pieces with 
success and applause, and therefore pre- 
sume that whatever comes from them must 
be implicitly received by the public. In 
this last particular they are certainly right ; 
for the superficial people of the Town, who 
have no judgment of their own, are pre- 
sently amused by a great name : tell them, 
by way of a secret, that such a thing is 
Dr. Swift's, Mr. Pope's, or any other per- 
son's of note and genius, and immediately it 
flies about like wildfire."f 

If the Book of the Doctor, instead of con- 
tinuing to appear, as it originally went 
forth, simplex munditiis, with its own pithy, 
comprehensive, and well-considered title, 
were to have a name constructed for it of 



* Cheverny. 



t Gulliver decyphered. 



composite initials, like the joint-stock 
volume of the five puritanical ministers 
above referred to, once so well known, but 
now preserved from utter oblivion by no- 
thing but that name, — vox et proeterea 
nihil; — if, I say, the Book of the Doctor 
were in like manner to be denominated, 
according to one or other of the various 
schemes of bibliogony which have been de- 
vised for explaining its phenomena, the 
reader might be expected in good earnest 
to exclaim, 

— Bless us ! what a word on 
A title page is this ! — 

For among other varieties, the following 
present themselves for choice; — 

Isdis. 

Roso. 

Heta. 

Harco. 

Samro. 

Grobe. 

Theho. 

Heneco. 

Thojama. 

Johofre. 

Reverne. 

Hetaroso. 

Walaroso. 

Rosogrobe. 

Venarchly. 

Satacoroso. 

Samrothomo. 

Verevfrawra. 

Isdisbendis. 

Harcoheneco. 

Henecosaheco. 

Thehojowicro. 

Rosohenecoharco. 

Thehoj o wicrogecro . 

Harcohenecosaheco. 

Satacoharcojotacohenecosaheco. 

And thus, my monster of the Isle, while I 
have listened and looked on like a spectator 
at a game of blind-man's-buff, or at a blind- 
fold boat-race, have you, with your erra- 
bund guesses, veering to all points of the 
literary compass, amused the many-hu- 



THE DOCTOK. 



249 



moured yet single-minded Pantagruelist, 
the quotationipotent mottocrat, the entire 
unit, the single and whole homo, who sub- 
scribes himself, 

with all sincerity and good will, 
Most delicate Monster, 
and with just as much respect as you deserve, 

not yours, or any body's humble Servant 
(saving always that he is the king's dutiful 

subject), 
and not yours, but his own, to command, 
Kewint-heka-werner. 



CHAPTER CVL 

THE AUTHOR APOSTROPHIZES SOME OF HIS 
FAIR READERS ; LOOKS FARTHER TnAN 
THEY ARE LIKELY TO DO, AND GIVES 
-EHEM A JUST THOUGH MELANCHOLY EX- 
HORTATION TO BE CHEERFUL WHILE THEY 
MAY. 

Hark how the birds do sing, 

And woods do ring ! 
All creatures have their joy, and Man hath his : 

Yet, if we rightly measure, 

Man's joy and pleasure 
Rather hereafter, than in present is. 

Herbert. 

Bertha, Arabella, Sarah, Mary, Caroline, 
Dorothea, Elizabeth, Kate, Susan, — how 
many answer to these names, each thinking 
that peradventure she may be the individual 
especially addressed — 

Jlcun' e che risponde a chi nol chiama * ; 

you are looking with impatience for De- 
borah's wedding-day, and are ready to 
inveigh against me for not immediately pro- 
ceeding to that part of my story. Well has 
Sir "William Davenant said, 

Slow seems their speed whose thoughts before them run ; 

but it is true in one sense as applied to you, 
and in another as applied to myself. To 
you my progress appears slow, because you 
are eager to arrive at what, rightly consider- 
ing it the most important point upon the 
whole journey of life, you may, perhaps, 



Petrarch. 



expect to prove the most interesting in this 
volume. Your thoughts have sped forward 
to that point and no farther. Mine travel 
beyond it, and this, were there no other 
motive, would retard me now. You are 
thinking of the bride and bridegroom, and 
the bridesmaid, and the breakfast at the 
vicarage, and the wedding dinner at the 
Grange, and the Doncaster bells which rung 
that day to the Doctor's ears the happiest 
peal that ever saluted them, from St. 
George's tower. My thoughts are of a dif- 
ferent complexion ; for where now are the 
joys and the sorrows of that day, and where 
are all those by whom they were partaken ! 
The elder Allisons have long since been 
gathered to their fathers. Betsey and her 
husband (whom at that day she had never 
seen) are inhabitants of a distant church- 
yard. Mr. Bacon's mortal part has mould- 
ered in the same grave with Margaret's. 
The Doctor has been laid beside them ; and 
thither his aged widow Deborah was long 
ago brought home, earth to earth, ashes to 
ashes, dust to dust. 

" The deaths of some, and the marriages 
of others," says Cowper, " make a new world 
of it every thirty years. Within that space 
of time the majority are displaced, and a 
new generation has succeeded. Here and 
there one is permitted to stay longer, that 
there may not be wanting a fevr grave Dons 
like myself to make the observation." 

Man is a self-survivor every year 
Man like a stream is in perpetual flow. 
Death's a destroyer of quotidian prey: 
• My youth, my noontide his, my yesterday ; 
The bold invader shares the present hour, 
Each moment on the former shuts the grave. 
While man is growing, life is' in decrease, 
And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb. 
Our birth is nothing but our death begun, 
As tapers waste that instant they take fire.f 

Yet infinitely short as the term of human 
life is when compared with time to come, it 
is not so in relation to time past. An hun- 
dred and forty of our own generations carry 
us back to the Deluge, and nine more of 
antediluvian measure to the Creation, — 
which to us is the beginning of time ; for 

t Young. 



250 



THE DOCTOR. 



" time itself is but a novelty, a late and up- 
start thing in respect of the Ancient of 
Days."* They who remem'ber their grand- 
father and see their grandchildren, have 
seen persons belonging to five out of that 
number ; and he who attains the age of 
threescore has seen two generations pass 
away. "The created world," says Sir 
Thomas Browne, " is but a small parenthesis 
in eternity, and a short interposition for a 
time, between such a state of duration as 
was before it, and may be after it." There 
is no time of life after we become capable of 
reflection, in which the world to come must 
not to any considerate mind appear of more 
importance to us than this ; — no time in 
which we have not a greater stake there. 
When we reach the threshold of old age all 
objects of our early affections have gone 
before us, and in the common course of 
mortality a great proportion of the later. 
Not without reason did the wise compilers 
of our admirable Liturgy place next in order 
after the form of Matrimony, the services 
for the Visitation and Communion of the 
Sick, and for the Burial of the Dead. 

I would not impress such considerations 
too deeply upon the young and happy. Far 
be it from me to infuse bitters into the cup 
of hope ! 

Dumfata sinunt 
Vivite Iceti : properat cursu 
Vita citato, volucrique die 
Rota prcecipitis vertilur anni. 
Dura peragunt pensa sorores, 
Nee sua retro Jila revolvunt. t 

What the Spaniards call desengano (which 
our dictionaries render " discovery of deceit, 
the act of undeceiving, or freeing from 
error," — and for which, if our language has 
an equivalent word, it is not in my voca- 
bulary,) — that state of mind in which we 
understand feelingly the vanity of human 
wishes, and the instability of earthly joys, 
— that sad wisdom comes to all in time; 
but if it came too soon, it would unfit us for 
this world's business and the common inter- 
course of life. When it comes in due season, 
it fits us for a higher intercourse and for a 
happier state of existence. 



*Samuel Johnson the elder. 



t Seneca. 



CHAPTER CVII. 

THE AUTHOR INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO 
A RETIRED DUCHESS, AND SUGGESTS A 
PARALLEL BETWEEN HER GRACE AND THE 
RETIRED TOBACCONIST. 

In midst of plenty only to embrace 
Calm patience, is not worthy of your praise ; 

But he that can look sorrow in the face 
And not be daunted, he deserves the bays. 

This is prosperity, where'er we find 

A heavenly solace in an earthly mind. 

Hugh Crompton. 

There is a very pleasing passage in a letter 
of the Duchess of Somerset's, written in 
the unreserved intimacy of perfect friend- 
ship, without the slightest suspicion that it 
would ever find its way to the press. "'Tis 
true, my dear Lady Luxborough," she says, 
" times are changed with us, since no walk 
was long enough, or exercise painful enough, 
to hurt us as we childishly imagined ; yet 
after a ball, or a masquerade, have we not 
come home very well contented to pull off 
our ornaments and fine clothes, in order to 
go to rest ? Such, methinks, is the recep- 
tion we naturally give to the warnings of 
our bodily decays ; they seem to undress us 
by degrees, to prepare us for a rest that 
will refresh us far more powerfully than any 
night's sleep could do. We shall then find 
no weariness from the fatigues which either 
our bodies or our minds have undergone ; 
but all tears shall be wiped from our eyes, 
and sorrow and crying and pain shall be no 
more : we shall then without weariness move 
in our new vehicles, and transport ourselves 
from one part of the skies to another, with 
much more ease and velocity than we could 
have done in the prime of our strength, 
upon the fleetest horses, the distance of a 
mile. This cheerful prospect enables us to 
see our strength fail, and await the tokens 
of our approaching dissolution with a kind 
of awful pleasure. I will ingenuously own 
to you, dear Madam, that I experience more 
true happiness in the retired manner of life 
that I have embraced, than I ever knew 
from all the splendour or flatteries of the 
world. There was always a void ; they could 



THE DOCTOR. 



251 



not satisfy a rational mind : and at the 
most heedless time of my youth I well re- 
member that I always looked forward with 
a kind of joy to a decent retreat when the 
evening of life should make it practicable." 

" If one only anticipates far enough, one 
is sure to find comfort," said a young 
moraliser, who was then for the first time 
experiencing some of the real evils of life. 
A sense of its vanities taught the Duchess 
that wisdom, before she was visited with 
affliction. Frances, wife and widow of Al- 
gernon seventh Duke of Somerset, was a 
woman who might perhaps have been hap- 
pier in a humbler station, but could not 
have been more uncorrupted by the world. 
Her husband inherited from his father the 
honours of the Seymour, from his mother 
those of the Percy family ; but Lord Beau- 
champ, — 

Born with as much nob ; lity as would, 

Divided, serve to make ten noblemen 

Without a herald ; but with so much spirit 

And height of soul, as well might furnish twenty,—* 

Lord Beauchamp I say, the son thus en- 
dowed, who should have succeeded to these 
accumulated honours, died on his travels at 
Bologna of the small-pox, in the flower of 
his youth. His afflicted mother in reply to 
a letter of consolation expressed herself 
thus : " The dear lamented son I have lost 
was the pride and joy of my heart : but I 
hope I may be the more easily excused for 
having looked on him in this light, since he 
was not so from the outward advantages he 
possessed, but from the virtues and recti- 
tude of his mind. The prospects which 
flattered me in regard to him, were not 
drawn from his distinguished rank, or from 
the beauty of his person ; but from the 
hopes that his example would have been 
serviceable to the cause of virtue, and 
would have shown the younger part of the 
world that it was possible to be cheerful 
without being foolish or vicious, and to be 
religious without severity or melancholy. 
His whole life was one uninterrupted course 
of duty and affection to his parents, and 



when he found the hand of death upon him, 
his only regret was to think on the agonies 
which must rend their hearts : for he was 
perfectly contented to leave the world, as 
his conscience did not reproach him with 
any presumptuous sins, and he hoped his 
errors would be forgiven. Thus he resigned 
his innocent soul into the hands of his mer- 
ciful Creator on the evening of his birthday, 
which completed him nineteen." 

In another letter she says, " when I lost 
my dear, and by me ever-lamented son, 
every faculty to please (if ever I were pos- 
sessed of any such) died with him. I have 
no longer any cheerful thoughts to com- 
municate to my friends ; but as the joy and 
pride of my heart withers in his grave, my 
mind is continually haunting those mansions 
of the dead, and is but too inattentive to 
what passes in a world where I have still 
duties and attachments which I ought to be, 
and I hope I may truly say I am, thankful 
for. But I enjoy all these blessings with 
trembling and anxiety; for after my dear 
Beauchamp, what human things can appear 
permanent ? Youth, beauty, virtue, health, 
were not sufficient to save him from the 
hand of death, and who then can think 
themselves secure ? These are the melan- 
choly considerations which generally enter- 
tain my waking hours ; though sometimes I 
am able to view the bright side of my fate, 
and ask myself for whom I grieve ? only for 
myself? how narrow an affection does this 
imply ! Could he have lived long as my 
fondest wish desired, what could I have 
asked at the end of that term more than the 
assurance that he should be placed where I 
humbly hope, and confidently trust, he is, 
beyond the reach of sorrow, sin, or sick- 
ness?" 

I have said that this Duchess, the Eusebia 
of Dr. Watts' Miscellanies, and once more 
known as the Cleora of her then famous 
friend Mrs. Howe's Letters, might perhaps 
have been happier in a humbler station ; 
but she could not have been more meek and 
more amiable, nor have possessed in a greater 
degree the Christian virtue of humility. She 
was one of the daughters and coheiresses of 



252 



THE DOCTOR. 



the Honourable Henry Thynne, and was of 
the bed-chamber to the Princess of Wales, 
in which office she continued after that 
Princess became Queen Caroline. It was 
through her intercession that Savage's life 
was spared. When the Queen being pre- 
judiced against that wretched man had re- 
fused to hear any application in his behalf, 
" she engaged in it," says Johnson, " with all 
the tenderness that is excited by pity, and all 
the zeal that is kindled by generosity; an 
advocate," he calls her, " of rank too great 
to be rejected unheard, and of virtue too 
eminent to be heard without being believed." 
Her husband's father was commonly called 
the proud Duke of Somerset, — an odious 
designation, which could not have been ob- 
tained unless it had been richly deserved : 
but there are some evil examples which in- 
cidentally produce a good effect, and Lord 
Beauchamp, whose affability and amiable 
disposition endeared him to all by whom he 
was known, was perhaps more carefully 
instructed in the principles of Christian 
humility, and more sensible of their import- 
ance and their truth, because there was in 
his own family so glaring an instance of the 
folly and hatefulness of this preposterous 
and ridiculous sin. " It is a most terrible 
thing for his parents," says Horace Walpole, 
" Lord Beauchamp's death ; if they were out 
of the question, one could not be sorry for 
such a mortification to the pride of old 
Somerset. He has written the most shock- 
ing letter imaginable to poor Lord Hartford, 
telling him that it is a judgment upon him 
for all his undutifulness, and that he must 
always look upon himself as the cause of his 
son's death. Lord Hartford is as good a 
man as lives, and has always been most un- 
reasonably ill-treated by that old tyrant." 
The Duke was brute enough to say that his 
mother had sent him abroad to kill him. It 
was not his mother's fault that he had not 
been secured, as far as human precautions 
avail against the formidable disease of which 
he died. Three years before that event she 
said in one of her letters, " Inoculation is at 
present more in fashion than ever ; half my 
acquaintance are shut up to nurse their 



children, grandchildren, nephews, or nieces. 
I could be content notwithstanding the fine 
weather to stay in town upon the same 
account, if I were happy enough to see my 
son desire it ; but that is not the case, and 
at his age it must either be a voluntary act 
or left undone." 

The proud Duke lived to the great age of 
eighty-six, and his son died little more than 
twelvemonths after him, leaving an irre- 
proachable name. The Duchess survived 
her son ten years, and her husband four. 
Upon the Duke's death the Seymour honours 
were divided between two distant branches 
of that great and ancient house ; those of 
the Percys devolved to his only daughter 
and heiress the Lady Elizabeth, then wife 
of Sir Hugh Smithson, in whom the Duke- 
dom of Northumberland was afterwards re- 
vived. The widow passed the remainder of 
her days at a seat near Colnbrook, which 
her husband had purchased from Lord 
Bathurst, and had named Percy Lodge: 
Richkings was its former appellation. Pope 
in one of his letters calls it " Lord Bathurst's 
extravagante bergerie" in allusion to the 
title of an old mock-romance. " The en- 
virons," says the Duchess, " perfectly an- 
swer to that title, and come nearer to my 
idea of a scene in Arcadia than any place I 
ever saw. The house is old but convenient ; 
and when you are got within the little pad- 
dock it stands on, you would believe your- 
self an hundred miles from London, which I 
think a great addition to its beauty." Moses 
Brown wrote a poem upon it, the Duke and 
Duchess having appointed him their laureate 
for the nonce ; but though written by their 
command, it was not published till after the 
death of both, and was then inscribed to 
her daughter, at that time Countess of 
Northumberland. If Olney had not a far 
greater poet to boast of, it might perhaps 
have boasted of Moses Brown. Shenstone's 
Ode on Rural Elegance, which is one of his 
latest productions, related especially to this 
place. He inscribed it to the Duchess, 
and communicated it to her in manuscript 
through their mutual friend Lady Lux- 
borough, sister to Bolingbroke, who pos- 



THE DOCTOR. 



253 



sessed much of her brothers talents, but 
nothing of his cankered nature. 

The Duchess was a great admirer of Shen- 
stone's poetry, but though pleased with the 
poem, and gratified by the compliment, she 
told him that it had given her some pain, 
and requested that wherever her name or 
that of Percy Lodge occurred, he would 
oblige her by leaving a blank, without sus- 
pecting her of an affected or false modesty, 
for to that accusation she could honestly 
plead not guilty. The idea he had formed 
of her character, he had taken, she said, 
from a partial friend, whose good nature had 
warped her judgment. The world in gene- 
ral, since they could find no fault in his 
poem, would blame the choice of the per- 
son to whom it was inscribed, and draw 
mortifying comparisons between the ideal 
lady, and the real one. " But I," said she, 
" have a more impartial judge to produce 
than either my friend or the world, — and 
that is my own heart, which, though it may 
natter me, I am not quite so faulty as the 
world would represent, at the same time 
loudly admonishes me that I am still further 
from the valuable person Lady Luxborough 
has drawn you in to suppose me. I hope 
you will accept these reasons as the genuine 
and most sincere sentiments of my mind, 
which indeed they are, though accompanied 
with the most grateful sense of the honour 
you designed me." 

I have said something, and have yet more 
to say of a retired Tobacconist ; and I will 
here describe the life of a retired Duchess, 
of the same time and country, drawn from 
her own letters. Some of Plutarch's pa- 
rallels are less apposite, and none of them 
in like manner equally applicable to those of 
high station and those of low degree. 

The duchess had acquired that taste for 
landscape gardening, the honour of introduc- 
ing which belongs more to Shenstone than 
to any other individual, and has been pro- 
perly awarded to him by DTsraeli, one of 
the most just and generous of critical au- 
thors. Thus she described the place of her 
retreat, when it came into their possession : 
"It stands in a little paddock of about a 



mile and a half round, which is laid out in 
the manner of a French park, interspersed 
with woods and lawns. There is a canal in 
it about twelve hundred yards long, and pro- 
portionably broad, which has a stream con- 
tinually running through it, and is deep 
enough to carry a pleasure-boat. It is well 
stocked with carp and tench ; and at its 
upper end there is a green-house, contain- 
ing a good collection of orange, myrtle, gera- 
nium, and oleander trees. This is a very 
agreeable room, either to drink tea, play at 
cards, or sit in with a book on a summer's 
evening. In one of the woods (through all 
which there are winding paths), there is a 
cave, which, though little more than a rude 
heap of stones, is not without charms for 
me. A spring gushes out at the back of it ; 
which, falling into a basin (whose brim it 
overflows), passes along a channel in the 
pavement where it loses itself. The entrance 
to this recess is overhung with periwinkle, 
and its top is shaded with beeches, large 
elms, and birch. There are several covered 
benches, and little arbours interwoven with 
lilacs, woodbines, seringas and laurels ; and 
seats under shady trees, disposed all over 
the park. One great addition to the plea- 
sure of living here, is the gravelly soil, 
which, after a day of rain (if it holds up 
only for two or three hours), one may walk 
over without being wet through one's shoes : 
and there is one gravel walk that encom- 
passes the whole. We propose to make 
an improvement, by adding to the present 
ground a little pasture farm, which is just 
without the pale, because there is a very 
pretty brook of clear water which runs 
through the meadows to supply our canal, 
and whose course winds in such a manner 
that it is almost naturally a serpentine river. 
I am afraid I shall have tired you with the 
description of what appear to me beauties 
in our little possession ; yet I cannot help 
adding one convenience that attends it, — 
this is, the cheap manner in which we keep 
it, since it only requires a flock of sheep, 
who graze the lawns fine ; and whilst these 
are feeding, their shepherd cleans away any 
weeds that spring up in the gravel, and re- 



254 



THE DOCTOR. 



moves dry leaves or broken branches that 
would litter the walks. 

" On the spot where the green-house now 
stands, there was formerly a chapel, dedi- 
cated to St. Leonard, who was certainly 
esteemed as a tutelar saint of Windsor 
Forest and its purlieus, for the place we left 
was originally a hermitage founded in honour 
of him. We have no relics of the saint ; but 
we have an old covered bench with many re- 
mains of the wit of my lord Bathurst's visit- 
ors, who inscribed verses upon it. Here is 
the writing of Addison, Pope, Prior, Con- 
greve, Gay, and what he esteemed no less, 
of several fine ladies. I cannot say that 
the verses answered my expectation from 
such authors ; we have, however, all resolved 
to follow the fashion, and to add some of 
our own to the collection. That you may 
not be surprised at our courage for daring 
to write after such great names, I will trans- 
cribe one of the old ones, which I think as 
good as any of them : 

Who set the trees shall he remember 
That is in haste to fell the timber ? 
What then shall of thy woods remain, 
Except the box that threw the main ? 

There has been only one added as yet by 
our company, which is tolerably numerous 
at present. I scarcely know whether it is 
worth reading or not : 

By Bathurst planted, first these shades arose ; 
Prior and Pope have sung beneath these boughs : 
Here Addison his moral theme pursued, 
And social Gay has cheer'd the solitude. 

There is one walk that I am extremely par- 
tial to, and which is rightly called the Abbey- 
walk, since it is composed of prodigiously 
high beech-trees, that form an arch through 
the whole length, exactly resembling a clois- 
ter. At the end is a statue ; and about the 
middle a tolerably large circle, with Windsor 
chairs round it : and I think, for a person of 
contemplative disposition, one would scarcely 
find a more venerable shade in any poetical 
description." 

She had amused herself with improving 
the grounds of Percy Lodge before her 
husband's death, as much for his delight as 
her own. 



Those shady elms, my favourite trees, 
Which near my Percy's window grew, 

(Studious his leisure hours to please) 
I decked last year for smell and shew ; 

To each a fragrant woodbine bound, 

And edged with pinks the verdant mound. 

Nor yet the areas left ungraced 
Betwixt the borders and each tree ; 

But on them damask roses placed, 
Which rising in a just degree, 

Their glowing lustre through the green 

Might add fresh beauties to the scene. 

Afterwards when it became her own by the 
Duke's bequest, and her home was thereby 
fixed upon the spot of earth which she 
would have chosen for herself, the satis- 
faction which she took in adding to it either 
beauty or convenience was enhanced by the 
reflection that in adorning it she was at the 
same time showing her value for the gift, 
and her gratitude to the lamented giver. 
" Every thing," said she, " both within 
and without the house reminds me of my 
obligations to him ; and I cannot turn my 
eyes upon any object which is not an object 
of his goodness to me. — And as I think it a 
duty, while it pleases God to continue us 
here, not to let ourselves sink into a stupid 
and unthankful melancholy, I endeavour 
to find out such entertainments as my re- 
tirement, and my dear Lord's unmerited 
bounty will admit of." 

And oh the transport, most allied to song, 

In some fair villa's peaceful bound, 
To catch soft hints from nature's tongue 

And bid Arcadia bloom around : 
Whether we fringe the sloping hill, 

Or smooth below the verdant mead ; 
Whether we break the falling rill, 

Or through meandering mazes lead; 
Or in the horrid bramble's room 
Bid careless groups of roses bloom ; 

Or let some sheltered lake serene 
Reflect flowers, woods, and spires, and brighten all the 
scene. 

O sweet disposal of the rural hour ! 
O beauties never known to cloy ! 
While worth and genius haunt the favour'd bower, 

And every gentle breast partakes the joy. 
While Charity at eve surveys the swain, 
Enabled by these toils to cheer 
A train of helpless infants dear, 
Speed whistling home across the plain ; 
Sees vagrant Luxury, her handmaid grown, 
For half her graceless deeds atone, 
And hails the bounteous work, and ranks it with her own.* 



THE DOCTOR. 



'255 



The Duchess was too far advanced in life 
to find any of that enjoyment in her occu- 
pations, which her own poet described in 
these stanzas, and which he felt himself only 
by an effort of reflection. But if there was 
not the excitement of hope, there was the 
satisfaction of giving useful employment to 
honest industry. " When one comes," said 
she, "to the last broken arches ofMirza's 
bridge, rest from pain must bound our am- 
bition, for pleasure is not to be expected in 
this world. I have no more notion of laying 
schemes to be executed six months, than I 
have six years hence ; and this I believe 
helps to keep my spirits in an even state of 
cheerfulness, to enjoy the satisfactions that 
present themselves, without anxious solici- 
tude about their duration. As our journey 
seems approaching towards the verge of life, 
is it not more natural to cast our eyes to 
the prospect beyond it, than by a retrospec- 
tive view to recall the troublesome trifles 
that ever made our road difficult or danger- 
ous ? Methinks it would be imitating Lot's 
wife (whose history is not recorded as an 
example for us to follow) to want to look 
back upon the miserable scene we are so 
near escaping from." 

In another letter to the same old friend 
she says, " I have a regular, and I hope a 
religious, family. My woman, though she 
has not lived with me quite three years, had 
before lived twenty-three, betwixt Lord 
Grantham's and Lady Cowper's : my house- 
keeper has been a servant as long : the per- 
son who takes in my accounts, pays my 
bills, and overlooks the men within doors, 
has been in the family thirteen years ; and 
the other, who has lived ten, has the care 
of the stables, and every thing without. I 
rise at seven, but do not go down till nine, 
when the bell rings, and my whole family 
meet me at chapel. After prayers we go to 
breakfast ; any friend who happens to be 
there, myself, and my chaplain, have ours in 
the little library; the others in their respec- 
tive eating-rooms. About eleven, if the 
weather permits, we go to walk in the park, 
or take the air in the coach ; but if it be too 
bad for either, we return to our various 



occupations. At three we dine, sit perhaps 
near an hour afterwards, then separate till 
we meet at eight for prayers ; after which 
we adjourn again to the library, where 
somebody reads aloud (unless some stranger 
comes who chooses cards), until half past 
nine, when we sup, and always part before 
eleven. This to the fine would sound a 
melancholy monastic life ; and I cannot be 
supposed to have chosen it from ignorance 
of the splendour and gaiety of a court, but 
from a thorough experience that they can 
give no solid happiness ; and I find myself 
more calmly pleased in my present way of 
living, and more truly contented, than I 
ever was in the bloom and pomp of my 
youth. I am no longer dubious what point 
to pursue. There is but one proper for the 
decline of life, and indeed the only one 
worth the anxiety of a rational creature at 
any age : but how do the fire of youth, and 
flattery of the world, blind our eyes, and 
mislead our fancies, after a thousand 
imaginary pleasures which are sure to dis- 
appoint us in the end ! " 

The Duchess was a person whose moral 
constitution had not been injured by the 
atmosphere of a court. But though she 
kept aloof from its intrigues, and had ac- 
quired even a distaste for its vanities, she 
retained always an affectionate regard for 
Queen Caroline's memory. " I should have 
been glad," she says to Lady Pomfret, " to 
have shared your reverence, and have in- 
dulged my own at Blansfelden, whilst you 
were overlooking the fields and the shades 
where our late mistress had passed the first 
scenes of her life, before the cares of royalty 
had clouded the natural vivacity of her tem- 
per, or the disguise which greatness is often 
forced to wear had veiled any of her native 
goodness ; and certainly she had a greater 
stock of both than is often found in any 
rank. She could never think of her with- 
out a sigh," she said. " The most amiable 
mistress," she calls her, " that ever adorned 
a court, and so fitted to charm in society, 
that it was impossible not to grudge her to 
that life which involved her in cares and 
encompassed her with such a cloud of dif- 



256 



THE DOCTOK. 



ferent people, that her real lustre could not 
always reach those who parhaps had the 
most pleasure in it." 

Before the loss of her son (from which the 
Duchess never entirely recovered), her 
spirits had been affected by the state of her 
husband's health. " The many solitary hours 
I pass in a day," she says, " and the melan- 
choly employment of attending a person in 
his sufferings, to whom I owe every happi- 
ness I enjoy, cannot furnish me with many 
smiling ideas relating to this world." The 
country in its wintry appearances accorded 
with her feelings, " where," said she, " every 
thing around instructs me that decay is the 
lot of all created beings ; where every tree 
spreads out its naked arms to testify the 
solemn truth, which I thank heaven I feel 
no pain in assenting to. It has long been 
my fixed opinion, that in the latter part of 
life, when the duties owing to a family no 
longer call upon us to act on the public 
stage of life, it is not only more decent, but 
infinitely more eligible, to live in an absolute 
retirement. However this is not the general 
opinion of the world, and therefore I con- 
clude that it is better it is not so, since 
Providence undoubtedly orders better for 
us than we are able to do for ourselves." 

During the latter years of her life, how- 
ever, she enjoyed that absolute retirement 
which was her heart's desire. But the peace- 
ful mansion in which this wise and amiable 
woman passed her latter years was, after her 
decease, inhabited by one of those men who 
insulted public decency by the open and 
ostentatious profligacy of their lives. Mrs. 
Carter writing from the Castle Inn at Marl- 
borough, which had not long before been 
one of the residences of the Seymour family, 
says, " this house I consider with great re- 
spect and veneration, not without a strong 
mixture of regret, that what was once the 
elegant abode of virtue and genius, and 
honoured by the conversation of the Duchess 
of Somerset and Mrs. Rowe, should now re- 
sound with all the disorderly and riotous 
clamour of an inn. And yet its fate is more 
eligible than that of Percy Lodge, as it 
stands the chance of receiving indifferently 



good and bad people, and is not destined to 
be the constant reception of shocking profli- 
gate vice." 



CHAPTER CYIII. 

PERCY LODGE. THAXTED GRANGE. RAPIN 
THE JESUIT AND SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 

It seems that you take pleasure in these walks, 
Sir. 
Cleanthes. Contemplative content I do, my Lord. 

They bring into my mind oft meditations 
So sweetly precious, that in the parting 
I find a shower of grace upon my cheeks, 
They take their leave so feelingly. 

Massingbr. 

The difference was very great between 
Thaxted Grange and Percy Lodge, though 
somewhat less than that between North- 
umberland House and the Tobacconist's at 
No. 113. Bishopsgate Street. Yet if a 
landscape painter who could have embodied 
the spirit of the scene had painted both, the 
Grange might have made the more attrac- 
tive picture, though much had been done 
to embellish the Lodge by consulting pic- 
turesque effect, while the Allisons had 
aimed at little beyond comfort and con- 
venience in their humble precincts. 

From a thatched seat in the grounds of 
the Lodge, open on three sides and con- 
structed like a shepherd's hut, there was a 
direct view of Windsor Castle, seen under 
the boughs of some old oaks and beeches. 
Sweet Williams, narcissuses, rose-campions, 
and such other flowers as the hares would 
not eat, had been sown in borders round the 
foot of every tree. There was a hermitage, 
absurdly so called, in the wood, with a 
thatched covering, and sides of straw ; and 
there was a rosary, which though appro- 
priately named, might sound as oddly to the 
ears of a Roman Catholic. A porter's lodge 
had been built at the entrance ; and after 
the Duke's death the long drawing-room 
had been converted into a chapel, in Gothic 
taste, with three painted windows, which, 
having been bespoken for Northumberland 
House, but not suiting the intended altera- 
tions in that mansion, were put up here. 



THE DOCTOR. 



257 



The Duchess and her servant had worked 
cross-stitch chairs for this chapel in fine 
crimson, the pattern was a Gothic mosaic, 
and they were in Gothic frames. 

Se o mundo nos nao anda a' vontade 
Nao he per a estranhar, pois he hum sanho 
Que nunca con ninguem tratou verdude. 

Se quando se nos most r a mais risonho, 
Ifais brands, mais ainigo, o desprezemos, 
He grao virtude, e a sua conta o pouho. 

Mais se, (o que he mais certo) o desprexamos 
Depots que nos engeita e nos despreza, 
Que pretnio, ou que louvor disso esperamos ? * 

All here, however, was as it should be : Percy 
Lodge was the becoming retreat of a lady of 
high rank, who having in the natural course 
of time and things outlived all inclination for 
the pomps and vanities of the world, and all 
necessity for conforming to them, remem- 
bered what was still due to her station ; and 
doing nothing to be seen of men, had retired 
thither to pass the remainder of her clays in 
privacy and religious peace. 

All too was as it should be at Thaxted 
Grange. Picturesque was a term which had 
never been heard there ; and taste was as 
little thought of as pretended to ; but the 
right old English word comfort, in its good 
old English meaning, was nowhere more 
thoroughly understood. Nor anywhere could 
more evident indications of it be seen both 
within and without. 

A tradesman retiring from business in 
these days with a fortune equivalent to what 
Mr. Allison had made, would begin his im- 
provements upon such a house as the Grange 
by pulling it down. Mr. Allison contented 
himself with thoroughly repairing it. He 
had no dislike to low rooms, and casement 
windows. The whole furniture of his house 
cost less than would now be expended by a 
person of equal circumstances in fitting up 
a drawing-room- Everything was for use, 
and nothing fir display, unless it were two 
fowling pieces, which were kept in good 
order over the fireplace in the best kitchen, 
and never used but when a kite threatened 
the poultry, or an owl was observed to fre- 
quent the dove-cote in preference to the 
barn. 

* Diogo Beknardes. 



But out of doors as much regard was 
shown to beauty as to utility. Miss Allison 
and Betsey claimed the little garden in front 
of the house for themselves. It was in so 
neglected a state when they took possession, 
that between children and poultry and stray 
pigs, not a garden flower was left there to 
grow wild : and the gravel walk from the 
gate to the porch was overgrown with 
weeds and grass, except a path in the 
middle which had been kept bare by use. 
On each side of the gate were three yew 
trees, at equal distances. In the old days of 
the Grange they had been squared in three 
lessening stages, the uppermost tapering 
pyramidally to a point. While the house 
had been shorn of its honours, the yews 
remained unshorn ; but when it was once 
more occupied by a wealthy habitant, and a 
new gate had been set up and the pillars 
and their stone-balls cleaned from moss and 
lichen and, short ferns, the unfortunate 
evergreens were again reduced to the formal 
shape in which Mr. Allison and his sister 
remembered them in their childhood. This 
was with them a matter of feeling, which is 
a better thing than taste. And indeed the 
yews must either have been trimmed, or 
cut down, because they intercepted sunshine 
from the garden and the prospect from the 
upper windows. The garden would Lave 
been better without them, for they were 
bad neighbours ; but they belonged to old 
times, and it would have seemed a sort of 
sacrilege to destroy them. 

Flower-beds used, like beds in the kitchen 
garden, to be raised a little above the path, 
with nothing to divide them from it, till 
about the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the fashion of bordering them was 
introduced either by the Italians or the 
French. Daisies, periwinkles, feverfew, hys- 
sop, lavender, rosemary, rue, sage, worm- 
wood, camomile, thyme, and box, were used 
for this purpose : a German horticulturist 
observes that hyssop was preferred as the 
most convenient; box, however, gradually 
obtained the preference. The Jesuit Rapin 
claims for the French the merit of bringing 
this plant into use, and embellishes his 



258 



THE DOCTOR. 



account of it by one of those school-boy 
fictions which passed for poetry in his days, 
and may still pass for it in his country. He 
describes a feast of the rural gods : 

Adfuit et Cybele, Phrygias cclebrata per urbes ; 
Ipsaque cum reliquis Flora invitata deabus 
T'enit, inornate, ut erat neglecta, capillis ; 
Sivefuit fastus, seu forsfiducia forma. 
Xon illipubes ridendi prompta pepercit, 
Neglectam risere. Deam Berecynthia mater 
Semotam a turba, casum miserata puelhe, 
Exornat, certaque comam sub lege reponit, 
Et viridi imprimis buxo {nam buxifer omnis 
Undique campus erat) velavit tempora nympha. 
Reddidit is speciem cultus, co?pitque videri 
Formosa, et meruit : novus fiinc decor additm ori. 

Ex illo, ut Floram decuit cultura, per ariem 
Floribus ille decor posthac qu&situs, et hortis : 
Quern tamen Ausanii cultores, quemque Pelasgi 
Nescivere, suos nulla qui lege per hortos 
Plantabant flores, nee eos componere nor ant 
Areolis, tonsaque vias describere buxo. 
Culta super reliquas Francis topiaria gentes, 
Ingeuium seu mite soli ccelique benigni 
Temperies tantam per sese adjuverit artem j 
Sive Mam egregice solers industria genii's 
Extudcrit, sen's seu venerit usus ab annis. 

The fashion which this buxom Flora in- 
troduced had at one time the effect of 
banishing flowers from what should have 
been the flower garden : the ground was set 
with box in their stead, disposed in patterns 
more or less formal, some intricate as a 
labyrinth and not a little resembling those 
of Turkey carpets, where Mahommedan laws 
interdict the likeness of any living thing, 
and the taste of Turkish weavers excludes 
any combination of graceful forms. One 
sense at least was gratified when fragrant 
herbs were used in these " rare figures of 
composures," or knots as they were called, 
hyssop being mixed in them with thyme, as 
aiders the one to the other, the one being 
dry, the other moist. Box had the dis- 
advantage of a disagreeable odour ; but it 
was greener in winter and more compact in 
all seasons. To lay out these knots and 
tread them required the skill of a master- 
gardener : much labour was thus expended 
without producing any beauty. The walks 
between them were sometimes of different 
colours, some would be of lighter or darker 
gravel, red or yellow sand ; and when such 
materials were at hand, pulverised coal and 
pulverised shells. 



Such a garden Mr. Cradock saw at Bor- 
deaux no longer ago than the year 1785 ; it 
belonged to Monsieur Eabi, a very rich Jew 
merchant, and was surrounded by a bank of 
earth, on which there stood about two hun- 
dred blue and white flower-pots ; the garden 
itself was a scroll work cut very narrow, and 
the interstices filled with sand of different 
colours to imitate embroidery ; it required 
repairing after every shower, and if the wind 
rose the eyes were sure to suffer. Yet the 
French admired this and exclaimed, sujjci'be ! 
magnijique ! 

Neither Miss Allison nor her niece would 
have taken any pleasure in gardens of this 
kind, which had nothing of a garden but the 
name. They both delighted in flowers ; the 
aunt because flowers to her were " redolent 
of youth," and never failed to awaken tender 
recollections ; Betsey for an opposite reason ; 
having been born and bred in London, a 
nosegay there had seemed always to bring 
her a foretaste of those enjoyments for which 
she was looking forward with eager hope. 
They had stocked their front garden there- 
fore with the gayest and the sweetest flowers 
that were cultivated in those days ; lark- 
spurs both of the giant and dwarf species, 
and of all colours ; sweet-williams of the 
richest hues ; monk's-hood for its stately 
growth ; Betsey called it the dumbledore's 
delight, and was not aware that the plant 
in whose helmet- rather than cowl -shaped 
flowers that busy and best-natured .of all 
insects appears to revel more than in any 
other, is the deadly aconite of which she 
read in poetry: the while lily, and the 
fleur-de-lis; paeonies, which are still the 
glory of the English garden ; stocks and 
gillyflowers which make the air sweet as 
the gales of Arabia; wall -flowers, which for 
a while are little less fragrant, and not less 
beautiful ; pinks and carnations added their 
spicy odours ; roses red and white peeped 
at the lower casements, and the jessamine 
climbed to those of the chambers above. 
You must nurse your own flowers if you 
would have them flourish, unless you happen 
to have a gardener who is as fond of them as 
yourself. Eve was not busier with her's in 



THE DOCTOR. 



259 



Paradise, her " pleasant task injoined," than 
Betsey Allison and her aunt, from the time 
that early spring invited them to their 
cheerful employment, till late and monitory 
autumn closed it for the year. 

" Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed 
like one of these;" and Solomon in all his 
wisdom never taught more wholesome les- 
sons than these silent monitors convey to a 
thoughtful mind and an " understanding 
heart." " There are two books," says Sir 
Thomas Browne, " from whence I collect my 
divinity; besides that written one of God, 
another of his servant Nature, that uni- 
versal and public manuscript that lies ex- 
pansed unto the eyes of all. Those that 
never saw him in the one have discovered 
him in the other. This was the scripture 
and theology of the heathens : the natural 
motion of the sun made them more admire 
him than its supernatural station did the 
children of Israel; the ordinary effects of 
nature wrought more admiration in them, 
than in the other all his miracles. Surely 
the heathens knew better how to join and 
read these mystical letters, than we Christians 
who cast a more careless eye on these com- 
mon hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divi- 
nity from the flowers of nature." 



INTERCHAPTER XIV. 

CONCERNING INTERCHAPTERS. 

If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be ex- 
cused, because the whole world is become a hodge-podge. 

Lyly. 

It occurs to me that some of my readers 
may perhaps desire to be informed in what 
consists the difference between a Chapter 
and an Inter Chapter ; for that there is a 
difference no considerate person would be 
disposed to deny, though he may not be able 
to discover it. Gentle readers, — readers 
after my own heart, you for whom this opus 
was designed long before it was an opus, 
when as Dryden has said concerning one of 
his own plays, " it was only a confused mass" ' 



of thoughts, tumbling over one another in 
the dark; when the fancy was yet in its 
first work, moving the sleeping images of 
things towards the light, there to be distin- 
guished, and then either chosen or rejected 
by the judgment," — good-natured readers, 
you who are willing to be pleased, and 
whom therefore it is worth pleasing, — for 
your sakes, 

And for because you shall not think that I 
Do use the same without a reason why, * 

I will explain the distinction. 

It is not like the difference between a 
Baptist and an Anabaptist, which Sir John 
Danvers said, is much the same as that be- 
tween a Whiskey and a Tim-Whiskey, that 
is to say, no difference at all. Nor is it like 
that between Dryads and Hamadryads, 
which Benserade once explained to the 
satisfaction of a^ learned lady, by saying, 
quil avait autant de difference quentre 
les Eveques et les Arclieveques. Nor 
is it like the distinction taken by him who 
divided bread into white bread, brown bread, 
and French rolls. 

A panegyrical poet said of the aforesaid 
Benserade that he possessed three talents, 
which posterity would hardly be persuaded 
to believe ; 

De plaisanter les Grands il ne fit point scrupule, 

Sans qu'ils le prissent de travers ; 
Ilfut vieux et galant sans etre ridicule, 

Et s'enrickit a composer des vers. 

He used to say, that he was descended 
and derived his name from the Abencer- 
rages. Upon a similar presumption of ety- 
mological genealogy, it has been said that 
Aulus Gellius was the progenitor of all the 
Gells. An Englishman may doubt this, a 
Welshman would disbelieve, and a Jew 
might despise it. So might a Mahomme- 
dan, because it is a special prerogative of 
his prophet to be perfectly acquainted with 
his whole pedigree ; the Mussulmen hold 
that no other human being ever possessed 
the same knowledge, and that after the 
resurrection, when all other pedigrees will 
be utterly destroyed, this alone will be pre- 
served in the archives of Eternity. 



* Robert Green. 



260 



THE DOCTOR. 



Leaving, however, Sir William Gell to 
genealogise, if he pleases, as elaborately as 
he has topographised, and to maintain the 
authenticity and dignity of his Roman 
descent against all who may impugn it, 
whether Turk, Jew, or Christian, I proceed 
with my promised explanation. 

The Hebrews call chapters and sections, 
and other essential or convenient divisions, 
the bones of a book. The Latins called 
them nodi, knots or links ; and every philo- 
logist knows that articles, whether gram- 
matical, conventional, or of faith, are so 
denominated as being the joints of language, 
covenants, and creeds. 

Now, reader, the chapters of this book 
are the bones wherewith its body is com- 
pacted ; the knots or links whereby its 
thread ' or chain of thoughts is connected ; 
the articulations, without which it would be 
stiff, lame, and disjointed. Every chapter 
has a natural dependence upon that which 
precedes, and in like manner a relation to 
that which follows it. Each grows out of 
the other. They follow in direct genealogy ; 
and each could no more have been pro- 
duced without relation to its predecessor, 
than Isaac could have begotten Jacob un- 
less Abraham had begotten Isaac. 

Sometimes, indeed, it must of necessity 
happen that a new chapter opens with a 
new part of the subject, but this is because 
we are arrived at that part in the natural 
prosecution of our argument. The disrup- 
tion causes no discontinuance ; it is (to 
pursue the former illustration) as when the 
direct line in a family is run out, and the suc- 
cession is continued by a collateral branch; 
or as in the mineral world, in which one 
formation begins where another breaks off. 

In my chapters, however, where there is 
no such natural division of the subject 
matter, I have ever observed that " one most 
necessary piece of mastership, which is ever 
performed by those of good skill in music, 
when they end a suit of lessons in any one 
key, and do intend presently to begin an- 
other in a differing key." Upon which piece 
of mastership, the worthy old " Remem- 
brancer of the best practical music, both 



divine and civil, that has ever been known 
to have been in the world," thus instructs 
his readers. 

" They do not abruptly and suddenly 
begin such new lessons, without some neat 
and handsome interluding-voluntary-like 
playing ; which may by degrees (as it were) 
steal into that new and intended key. 

" Now that you may be able to do it hand- 
somely, and without blemish or incomplete- 
ness (for you must know it is a piece of 
quaintness so to do), you must take notice, 
that always, when you have made an end of 
playing upon any one key (if discourse or 
some other occasion do not cause a cessation 
of play for some pretty time, so as the re- 
membrance of that former key may, in a 
manner, be forgotten), it will be very need- 
ful that some care be taken that you leave 
that key handsomely, and come into that 
other you intend next to play upon without 
impertinency. 

" For such impertinencies will seem to be 
very like such a thing as this, which I shall 
name — to wit — 

" That when two or more persons have 
been soberly and very intently discoursing 
upon some particular solid matter, musing 
and very ponderously considering thereof, 
all on the sudden, some one of them shall 
abruptly (without any pause) begin to talk 
of a thing quite of another nature, nothing 
relating to the aforesaid business. 

" Now those by-standers (who have judg- 
ment), will presently apprehend that, although 
his matter might be good, yet his manner 
and his wit might have been better approved 
of in staying some certain convenient time, 
in which he might have found out some 
pretty interluding discourse, and have taken 
a handsome occasion to have brought in his 
new matter. 

" Just so is it in music, and more parti- 
cularly in this last-recited matter ; as to 
chop different things of different natures, 
and of different keys, one upon the neck of 
another, impertinently. 

"For I would have it taken notice of, 
that music is (at least) as a language, if it 
will not be allowed a perfect one, because 



THE DOCTOR. 



261 



it is not so well understood as it might 
be.— 

" Having thus far prepared you with an 
apprehension of the needfulness of the thing, 
I will now show you how it is to be done 
without abruption and absurdness. 

" First, (as abovesaid) it may be that dis- 
course may take off the remembrance of the 
last key in which you played, or some occa- 
sion of a leaving off for some pretty time, 
by a string breaking or the like ; or if not, 
then (as commonly it happens) there may 
be a need of examining the tuning of your 
lute, for the strings will alter a little in the 
playing of one lesson, although they have 
been well stretched. But if lately put on, 
or have been slacked down by any mis- 
chance of pegs slipping, then they will need 
mending, most certainly. 

"I say some such occasion may sometimes 
give you an opportunity of coming hand- 
somely to your new intended key ; but if 
none of these shall happen, then you ought, 
in a judicious and masterly way, to work 
from your last key which you played upon, 
in some voluntary way till you have brought 
your matter so to pass that your auditors 
may be captivated with a new attention, 
yet so insinuatingly, that they may have lost 
the remembrance of the foregoing key they 
know not how ; nor are they at all concerned 
for the loss of it, but rather taken with a 
new content and delight at your so cunning 
and complete artifice." 

With strict propriety then may it be said 
of these my chapters, as Wordsworth has said 
of certain sonnets during his tour in Scot- 
land and on the English border, that they 

Have moved in order, to each other bound 
By a continuous and acknowledged tie 
Though unapparent, like those shapes distinct 
That yet survive ensculptured on the walls 
Of Palace, or of Temple, 'mid the wreck 
Of famed Persepolis ; each following each, 
As might beseem a stately embassy 
In set array ; these bearing in their hands 
Ensign of civil power, weapon of war, 
Or gift to be presented at the Throne 
Of the Great King; and others as they go 
In priestly vest, with holy offerings charged, 
Or leading victims dressed for sacrifice. 

For an ordinary book then the ordinary 
division into chapters might very well have 



sufficed. But this is an extraordinary book. 
Hath not the Quarterly Review — that Re- 
view which among all Reviews is properly 
accounted facile Princeps, — hath not that 
great critical authority referred to it kclt 
Qoxty as "the extraordinary book called 
the Doctor" ? Yes, reader — 

All things within it 
Are so digested, fitted and composed 
As it shows Wit had married Order.* 

And as the exceptions in grammar prove 
the rule, so the occasional interruptions of 
order here are proofs of that order, and in 
reality belong to it. 

Lord Bacon (then Sir Francis) said in a 
letter to the Bishop of Ely upon sending him 
his writing intitled Cogitata et Visa, " I am 
forced to respect as well my times, as the 
matter. For with me it is thus, and I think 
with all men in my case : if I bind myself 
to an argument, it loadeth my mind ; but if 
I rid my mind of the present cogitation, it 
is rather a recreation. This hath put me 
into these miscellanies, which I purpose to 
suppress if God give me leave to write a 
just and perfect volume of philosophy." 

That I am full of cogitations, like Lord 
Bacon, the judicious reader must ere this 
time have perceived, though he may perhaps 
think me not more worthy on that score 
to be associated with Bacon, than beans or 
cabbage, or eggs at best. Like him, how- 
ever, in this respect I am, however unlike 
in others ; and it is for the reader's recrea- 
tion as well as mine, and for our mutual 
benefit, that my mind should be delivered 
of some of its cogitations as soon as they 
are ripe for birth. 

I know not whence thought comes ; who 
indeed can tell ? But this we know, that 
like the wind it cometh as it listeth. Hap- 
pily there is no cause for me to say with Sir 
Philip Sydney, 

If I could think how these my thoughts to leave ; 

Or thinking still, my thoughts might have good end ; 
If rebel Sense would Reason's law receive, 

Or Reason foiled would not in vain contend ; 
Theu might I think what thoughts were best to think, 
Then might I wisely swim, or gladly sink. 



* B. Jonson. 



262 



THE DOCTOR. 



Nor with Des-Portes, 

O pensers trop pensez, que rebellez rhon ame ! 
O debile raison ! lacqs ! trails ! 

thanks to that kind Providence which has 
hitherto enabled me, through good and evil 
fortune, to maintain an even and well-regu- 
lated mind. Neither need I say with the 
pleasant authors of the "Rejected Ad- 
dresses" in their harmless imitation of a most 
pernicious author, 

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought, 

And nought is every thing and every thing is nought. 

I have never worked in an intellectual tread- 
mill, which, as it had nothing to act on, was 
grinding the wind. 

" He that thinks ill," says Dean Young, 
(the poet's father,) "prevents the Tempter, 
and does the Devil's business for him ; he 
that thinks nothing, tempts the Tempter, and 
offers him possession of an empty room ; but 
he that thinks religiously, defeats the Temp- 
ter, and is proof and secure against all his 
assaults." I know not whether there be 
any later example where the word prevent 
is used, as in the Collect, in its Latin sense. 

It is a man's own fault if he excogitate 
vain thoughts, and still more if he enunciate 
and embody them ; but it is not always in 
his power to prevent their influx. Even the 
preventive which George Tubervile recom- 
mends in his monitory rhymes, is not infal- 
lible : 

Eschew the idle life ! 

Flee, flee from doing nought ! 
For never was there idle brain 

But bred an idle thought. 

Into the busiest brain they will sometimes 
intrude ; and the brain that is over-busy 
breeds them. But the thoughts which are 
not of our own growth or purchase, and 
which we receive not from books, society, 
or visible objects, but from some undis- 
covered influence, are of all kinds. 

Who has a breast so pure, 
But some uncleanly apprehensions 
Keep leets and law days, and in session sit 
With meditations lawful ?* 



I dare not affirm that some are suggestions 
of the enemy ; neither dare I deny it ; from 
all such tela ignea and tela venenata, what- 
ever be their origin, or whencesoever they 
come, God preserve us ! But there are 
holy inspirations, which philosophy may 
teach us to expect, and faith to pray for. 

My present business is not with these, 
but it is with those conceptions which float 
into the solitary mind, and which, if they 
are unrecorded pass away, like a dream or 
a rainbow, or the glories of an evening sky. 
Some of them are no better than motes in 
the sunbeams, as light, as fleeting, and to 
all apprehension as worthless. Others may 
be called seminal thoughts, which, if they 
light not upon a thorny, or stony, or arid 
field of intellect, germinate, and bring forth 
flowers, and peradventure fruit. Now it is 
in the Interchapters that part of this float- 
ing capital is vested ; part of these waifs and 
strays impounded ; part of this treasure trove 
lodged ; part of these chance thoughts and 
fancies preserved : part I say, because 

J'ay mille autres pensers, et mille et mille et mille, 
Qui font qu'incessamment mon esprit se dislile.f 

" There are three things," says a Welsh 
triad, " that ought to be considered before 
some things should be spoken ; the manner, 
the place, and the time." Touching the 
manner, I see none whereby they could 
more conveniently or agreeably be con- 
veyed; and for the place and time these 
must be allowed to be at my own discretion. 



And howsoever, be it well or ill 
What I have done, it is mine own ; 
Do whatsoever therewithal I will.j 



may 



(Be it remarked in passing that these lines 
bear a much greater resemblance to Italian 
poetry than any of those English sonnets 
which have been called Petrarcal.) One 
place being (generally speaking) as suitable 
as another, it has not been necessary for me 
to deliberate, 

Desla antigua prehez de pensamientos 
Qual cl p rimer o hare, qual el segundo.% 

I have interspersed them where I thought 
fit, and given them the appellation which 



t Des-Poktes. 



X Daniel. 



§ Balbuena. 



THE DOCTOR. 



263 



they bear, to denote that they are no 
more a necessary and essential part of this 
opus, than the voluntary is of the church 



TLifi aroZ, &■%} ifAO'J, me) k^ca-truv ■z^a.yiMtTtiiv.' 11 

A Chapter is, as has been explained, both 
procreated and procreative : an Interchapter 
is like the hebdomad, which profound phi- 
losophers have pronounced to be not only 
irapOivos, but dp.rjTwp, a motherless as well as 
a virgin number. 

Here, too, the exception illustrates the 
rule. There are at the commencement of the 
third volume four Interchapters in succes- 
sion, and relating to each other, the first 
gignitive but not generated ; the second and 
third both generated and gignitive, the 
fourth generated but not gignitive. They 
stand to each other in the relation of Adam, 
Seth, Enoch, Kenan. These are the ex- 
ceptions. The other chapters are all Mel- 
chizedekites. 

The gentle Reader will be satisfied with 
this explanation ; the curious will be pleased 
with it. To the captious one I say in the 
words of John Bunyan, " Friend, howsoever 
thou earnest by this book, I will assure thee 
thou wert least in my thoughts when I writ 
it. I tell thee, I intended the book as little 
for thee as the goldsmith intended his jewels 
and rings for the snout of a sow ! " 

If any be not pleased, let them please 
themselves with their own displeasure. Je 
riay pas enterpris de contenter tout le monde : 
mesme Jupiter riaggree a tous.j 



• Aristophanes. 



t Bouchet. 



CHAPTER CIX. 

INCIDENTAL MENTION OF HAMMOND, SIR ED- 
MUND KING, JOANNA BAILLIE, SIR WILLIAM 
TEMPLE, AND MR. THOMAS PEREGRINE 
COERTENAY. PETER COLLINSON AN AC- 
QUAINTANCE of mr. Allison's, holtdays 

AT THAXTED GRANGE. 

And sure there seem of human kind 

Some born to shun the solemn strife ; 
Some for amusive tasks design'd 
To soothe the certain ills of life, 
Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 

New founts of bliss disclose, 
Call forth refreshing shades and decorate repose. 

Shenstone. 

Dr. Hammond says he had " heard say of a 
man who, upon his death-bed, being to take 
his farewell of his son, and considering what 
course of life to recommend that might se- 
cure his innocence, at last enjoined him to 
spend his time in making verses, and in 
dressing a garden ; the old man thinking no 
temptation could creep into either of these 
employments." As to the former part of 
this counsel, a certain Sir Edmund King 
was of a different opinion ; for meeting with 
Watts in his youth, he said to him, " Young 
man, I hear that you make verses ! Let me 
advise you never to do it but when you 
can't help it." If there were ever a person 
who could not help it, Joanna Baillie would 
have said nothing more than what was 
strictly true, when she observed that " surely 
writing verses must have some power of 
intoxication in it, and can turn a sensible 
man into a fool by some process of mental 
alchemy." 

: ' Gardening," says Mr. Courtenay, in his 
Life of Sir William Temple, " is a pursuit 
peculiarly adapted for reconciling and com- 
bining the tastes of the two sexes, and 
indeed of all ages. It is, therefore, of all 
amusements the most retentive of domestic 
affection. It is, perhaps, most warmly pur- 
sued by the very young, and by those who 
are far advanced in life, — before the mind 
is occupied with worldly business, and after 
it has become disgusted with it. There is 
nothing in it to remind of the bustle of 
political life ; and it requires neither a 



264 



THE DOCTOR. 



sanguine disposition nor the prospect of a 
long life, to justify the expectation of a 
beautiful result from the slight and easy 
care which it exacts. Is it too much to say 
that the mind which can with genuine taste 
occupy itself in gardening, must have pre- 
served some portion of youthful purity; 
that it must have escaped, during its pas- 
sage through the active world its deeper 
contaminations ; and that no shame nor 
remorse can have found a seat in it." 

Certainly it is not too much to say this of 
Sir William Temple ; nor would it be too 
much to say it of his biographer, whether he 
occupy himself, or not, in gardening as well 
as in literature, after many laborious years 
honourably passed in political and official 
life. 

Peter Collinson, whose pious memory 
ought to be a standing toast at the meetings 
of the Horticultural Society, used to say 
that he never knew an instance in which 
the pursuit of such pleasure as the culture 
of a garden affords, did not either find men 
temperate and virtuous, or make them so. 
And this may be affirmed as an undeniable 
and not unimportant fact relating to the 
lower classes of society, that wherever the 
garden of a cottage, or other bumble dwell- 
ing, is carefully and neatly kept, neatness 
and thrift, and domestic comfort, will be 
found within doors. 

When Mr. Allison settled at Thaxted 
Grange, English gardens were beginning 
generally to profit by the benevolent and 
happy endeavours of Peter Collinson to im- 
prove them. That singularly good man 
availed himself of his mercantile connex- 
ions, and of the opportunities afforded him 
by the Royal Society, of which he was one 
of the most diligent and useful members, to 
procure seeds and plants from all parts of 
the world, and these he liberally communi- 
cated to his friends. So they found their 
way first into the gardens of the curious, 
then of the rich, and lastly, when their 
beauty recommended them, spread them- 
selves into those of ordinary persons. He 
divided his time between his counting-house 
in Gracechurch Street and his country- 



house and garden, at Mill Hill, near Hen- 
don ; it might have grieved him could he 
have foreseen that his grounds there would 
pass, after his death, into the hands of a 
purchaser who, in mere ignorance, rooted 
out the rarest plants, and cut down trees 
which were scarcely to be found in perfec- 
tion anywhere else in the kingdom at that 
time. 

Mr. Collinson was a man of whom it was 
truly said that, not having any public 
station, he was the means of procuring 
national advantages for his country, and 
possessed an influence in it which wealth 
cannot purchase, and which will be honoured 
when titles are forgotten. For thirty years 
he executed gratuitously the commissions 
of the Philadelphian Subscription Library, 
the first which was established in America ; 
he assisted the directors in their choice of 
books, took the whole care of collecting and 
shipping them, and transmitted to the di- 
rectors the earliest accounts of every im- 
provement in agriculture and the arts, and 
of every philosophical discovery. 

Franklin, who was the founder of that 
library, made his first electrical experiments 
with an apparatus that had been sent to it 
as a present by Peter Collinson. He deemed 
it therefore a proper mark of acknowledg- 
ment to inform him of the success with 
which it had been used, and his first Essays 
on Electricity were originally communicated 
in letters to this good man. They were .read 
in the Royal Society, " where they were not 
thought worth so much notice as to be 
printed in their transactions ; " and his paper 
in which the sameness of lightning with 
electricity was first asserted, was laughed at 
by the connoisseurs. Peter Collinson, how- 
ever, gave the letters to Cave for the Gen- 
tleman's Magazine ; Cave forming a better 
judgment than the Royal Society had done, 
printed them separately in a pamphlet, for 
which Dr. Fothergill wrote a preface ; the 
pamphlet by successive additions swelled to 
a volume in quarto which went through five 
editions, and, as Franklin observes, " cost 
Cave nothing for copy money." 

What a contrast between this English 



THE DOCTOR. 



261 



Quaker and Monsieur Le Cour (observe, 
reader, I call him Monsieur, lest you should 
mistake him for a Dutchman, seeing that he 
lived at Leyden,) who, having raised a 
double tuberose from the seed, and propa- 
gated it by the roots, till he had as many 
as he could find room to plant, destroyed 
the rest as fast as they were produced, that 
he might boast of being the only person in 
Europe who possessed it. Another French 
florist of the same stamp, M. Bachelier was 
his name, kept in like manner some beauti- 
ful species of the anemone to himself, which 
he had procured from the East Indies, and 
succeeded in withholding them for ten years 
from all who wished to possess them like- 
wise. A counsellor of the Parliament, how- 
ever, one day paid him a visit when they 
were in seed, and in walking with him round 
the garden, contrived to let his gown fall 
upon them ; by this means he swept off a 
good number of the seeds, and his servant, 
who was apprised of the scheme, dexterously 
wrapt up the gown and secured them. Any 
one must have been ■ a sour moralist who 
should have considered this to be a breach 
of the eighth commandment. 

Mr. Allison was well acquainted with 
Peter Collinson ; he and his sister sometimes 
visited him at Mill Hill, and upon their 
removal into Yorkshire they were supplied 
from thence with choice fruit trees, and 
fine varieties of the narcissus and polyan- 
thus, which were the good Quaker's fa- 
vourite tribes. The wall-fruits were under 
Mr. Allison's especial care ; he called him- 
self, indeed, First Lord of the Fruit De- 
partment ; and if the first lords of certain 
other departments had taken as much pains 
to understand their business, and to perform 
it, the affairs of the state would have been 
better managed than they were in his days, 
and than they are in ours. Some part also 
he took in directing the business of the 
kitchen-garden; but the flowers were left 
entirely to Betsey and her aunt. 

The old poet who called himself Shepherd 
Tonie, and whom Sir Egerton, with much 
likelihood, supposes to have been Anthony 
Munday, gives in his Woodman's Walk an 



unfavourable representation of provincial 
morals, when, after forsaking the court and 
the city, because he had found nothing but 
selfishness and deceit in both, he tried the 
country. 

There did appear no subtle shows, 

But yea and nay went smoothly : 
But Lord ! how country folks can glose 

When they speak most untruly ! 
More craft was in a buttoned cap 

And in the old wives' rail, 
Than in my life it was my hap 

To see on down or dale. 
There was no open forgery, 

But underhanded gleaning, 
Which they call country policy, 

But hath a worser meaning. 
Some good bold face bears out the wrong, 

Because he gains thereby ; 
The poor man's back is crackt ere long, 

Yet there he lets him lie : 
And no degree among them all 

But had such close intending, 
That I upon my knees did fall 

And prayed for their amending. 

If the author of these verses, or any one 
who entertained the same opinion, had been 
a guest of Mr. Allison's at Thaxted Grange, 
and had remained under his roof long enough 
to see the way of life there, and the condition 
of the hamlet, he would have gone away with 
a very different persuasion. It was a remark 
of Bishop Percy's that you may discern in a 
country parish whether there is a resident 
clergyman or not, by the civil or savage 
manners of the people. The influence of 
the clergyman, however exemplary he may 
be, is materially impaired if his benefice is 
so poor and his means so straitened that his 
own necessities leave him little or nothing 
to spare ; but when such a parish priest as 
Mr. Bacon has for his neighbour such a 
resident landholder as his friend at the 
Grange, happy are — not the cottagers only, 
but all who live within their sphere. 

There was no alehouse in the hamlet, and 
as the fashion of preserves had not yet been 
introduced, there were no poachers, the in- 
habitants being thus happily exempted from 
two of the great temptations with which in 
our days men of that class are continually 
beset. If a newspaper ever found its way 
among them, newspapers were at that time 
harmless ; and when a hawker came he had 
no pestiferous tracts, cither seditious or sec- 



266 



THE DOCTOR. 



tarian, for sale, or for gratuitous distribution : 
a scurvy jest-book was the worst article in 
his assortment. Mr. Bacon had nothing to 
counteract his pastoral labours except the 
pravity of human nature. Of this there 
must everywhere be but too much ; but for- 
tunate indeed is the parish priest who finds 
himself in like manner stationed where there 
are no external circumstances to aggravate 
and excite it. 

Wherever more than ordinary pains were 
bestowed upon a cottager's or farmer's gar- 
den, Mr. Allison supplied the housewife with 
seed of a better kind than she might other- 
wise have been able to procure, and with 
grafts from his most serviceable fruit trees. 
No one who behaved well in his employ 
was ever left in want of employment; he 
had always some work going on, the cost of 
which was allowed for as charity in his 
accounts : and when he observed in a boy 
the diligence and the disposition which made 
it likely that an opportunity of bettering his 
condition would not be thrown away upon 
him, he advised, or if need were, enabled the 
parents to educate him for trade, and at a 
proper age provided a situation for him in 
London. If any of their daughters desired 
to acquire those useful arts which might 
qualify them for domestic service, they came 
to assist and learn from Miss Allison when 
she distilled her waters, made her cowslip, 
elder, and gooseberry wines, prepared her 
pickles and preserves, dried her medicinal 
plants, or constructed the great goose-pye, 
which in the Christmas week was always 
dispatched by the York coach to Bishops- 
gate Street, for the honour of Yorkshire, 
and the astonishment of the Londoners. 
They came also when preparations were 
making for a holiday, for old observances of 
this kind were maintained as duly there as 
by the Romans when the Laws of the 
Twelve Tables were in use, and every man 
constantly observed his family festivals as 
thereby enjoined. 

Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday are still in 
general usage ; indeed I do not know that it 
was ever deemed malignant and idolatrous 
to eat them on that day even under the 



tyranny of the Puritans. But in Mr. Alli- 
son's days Mid-lent Sunday was not allowed 
to pass without a wholesome and savoury 
bowl of furmity on the social board : and 
Easter day brought with it not only those 
coloured eggs which are the friendly offer- 
ing of that season throughout the whole 
north of Europe, but the tansy pudding 
also, — originally perhaps introduced (and 
possibly by some compulsory converts from 
Judaism) as a representative of the bitter 
herbs with which the Paschal Lamb was to 
be eaten. 

Both Christmas-days were kept at the 
Grange. There were people in those times 
who refused to keep what they called Parlia- 
ment Christmas. But whether the old com- 
putation or the new were right, was a point 
on which neither the master nor mistress of 
this house pretended to form an opinion. 
On which day the Glastonbury Thorn blos- 
somed they never thought it necessary to 
inquire, nor did they go into the byre or 
the fields to see upon which midnight the 
oxen were to be found on their knees. 
They agreed with Mr. Bacon that in other 
respects it was a matter of indifference, but 
not so that Christmas should be celebrated 
on the same day throughout Christendom : 
and he agreed with them that as the ritual 
ought to be performed at the time appointed 
by authority, so the convivial observances 
might be regulated by the old calendar, or 
still more fitly, repeated according to the 
old reckoning, in deference to old feelings 
and recollections which time had conse- 
crated. 

In Bishopsgate Street it had been found 
convenient to set down the children and 
their young guests on these occasions at 
Pope-Joan, or snip-snap-snorum, which was 
to them a more amusing because a noisier 
game. But here was room for more legi- 
timate gambols ; and when a young party 
had assembled numerous enough for such 
pastime, hunt the slipper, hot cockles, or 
blind-man's buff were the sports of a Christ- 
mas evening. These had been days of high 
enjoyment to Betsey for a few years after 
their removal into the country ; they ceased 



THE DOCTOR. 



267 



to be so when she saw that her aunt's hair 
was passing from the steel to the silver hue, 
and remembered that her father had reached 
the term of life, beyond which, in the ordi- 
nary course of nature, our strength is but 
labour and sorrow ; — that the one was at 
an age 

When every day that comes, comes to decay 
A day's work in us * ; 

the other,— 

Even in the downfall of his mellowed years 
When Nature brought him to the door of Death.* 



CHAPTER CX. 

A TRANSITIONAL CHAPTER, WHEREIN THE 
ArTHOR COMPARES HIS BOOK TO AN 
OMNIBUS AND A SHIP, QUOTES SHAKE- 
SPEARE, MARCO ANTONIO DE CAMOS, 
QUAKLES. SPENSER, AND SOMEBODY ELSE, 
AND INTRODUCES HIS READERS TO SOME 
OF THE HEATHEN GODS, WITH WHOM 
PERHAPS THEY WERE NOT ACQUAINTED 
BEEORE. 

"We are not to grudge such interstitial and transitional 
matter as may promote an easy connection of parts and 
an elastic separation of them, and keep the reader's mind 
upon springs as it were. 

Heney Taylor's Statesman. 

Dear impatient readers, — you whom I 

know and who do not know me, — and you 

who are equally impatient, but whom I 

cannot call equally dear, because you are 

totallv strangers to me in my out-of-cog 

character, — you who would have had me 

hurry on 

In motion of no less celerity 
Than that of thought * — 

you will not wonder, nor perhaps will you 
blame me now, that I do not hasten to the 
wedding-day. The day on which Deborah 
left her father's house was the saddest that 
she had ever known till then ; nor was there 
one of the bridal party who did not feel 
that this was the first of those events, in- 

* Shakespeare. 



evitable and mournful all, by which their 
little circle would be lessened, and his or 
her manner of life or of existence changed. 

There is no checking the course of time. 
When the shadow on Hezekiah's dial went 
back, it was in the symbol only that the 
miracle was wrought : the minutes in every 
other horologe held their due course. But 
as Opifex of this opus, I, when it seems good 
unto me, may take the hour-glass from 
Time's hand and let it rest at a stand-still, 
till I think fit to turn it and set the sands 
again in motion. You who have got into 
this my omnibus, know that like other 
omnibuses, its speed is to be regulated, not 
according to your individual, and perhaps 
contrariant wishes, but by my discretion. 

Moreover, I am not bound to ply with 
this omnibus only upon a certain line. In 
that case there would be just cause of com- 
plaint, if you were taken out of your road. 

Mas estorva y desabre en el camino 
Una pequena legua de desvio 
Que la Jornada larga de contino. 

Whoever has at any time lost his way upon 
a long journey can bear testimony to the 
truth of what the Reverend Padre Maestro 
Fray Marco Antonio de Camos says in those 
lines. (I will tell you hereafter, reader, (for 
it is worth telling,) why that namesake of 
the Triumvir, when he wrote the poem from 
whence the lines are quoted, had no thoughts 
of dedicating it, as he afterwards did, to D. 
Juan Pimentel y de Requesens.) But you 
are in no danger of being bewildered, or 
driven out of your way. It is not in a stage 
coach that you have taken your place with 
me, to be conveyed to a certain point, and 
within a certain time, under such an expect- 
ation on your part, and such an engagement 
on mine. We will drop the metaphor of 
the omnibus, — observing, however, by the 
bye, which is the same thing in common 
parlance as by the way, though critically 
there may seem to be a difference, for by 
the bye might seem to denote a collateral 
remark, and by the way a direct one ; ob- 
serving, however, as I said, that as Dexter 
called his work, or St. Jerome called it for 
him, Omnimoda Historia, so might this opus 



268 



THE DOCTOR. 



be not improperly denominated. You have 
embarked with me, not for a definite voyage, 
but for an excursion on the water ; and not 
in a steamer, nor in a galley, nor in one of 
the post-office packets, nor in a man-of-war, 
nor in a merchant-vessel ; but in 

A ship that's mann'd 
With labouring Thoughts, and steer'd by Reason's hand. 
My Will's the seaman's card whereby she sails ; 
My just Affections are the greater sails, 
The top sail is my fancy.* 

Sir Guyon was not safer in Phasdria's " gon- 
delay bedecked trim" than thou art on 
" this wide inland sea," in my ship 

That knows her port and thither sails by aim ; 
Xe care, ne fear I how the wind do blow; 
Or whether swift I wend, or whether slow, 
Both slow and swift alike do serve my turn.f 

My turn is served for the present, and yours 
also. The question who was Mrs. Dove? 
propounded for future solution in the se- 
cond Chapter P. L, and for immediate con- 
sideration at the conclusion of the 7 1st 
Chapter and the beginning of the 72nd, has 
been sufficiently answered. You have been 
made acquainted with her birth, parentage, 
and education ; and you may rest assured that 
if the Doctor had set out upon a tour, like 
Coelebs, in search of a wife, he could never 
have found one who would in all respects 
have suited him better. What Shakespeare 
savs of the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch 
might seem to have been said with a second 
sight of this union : 

Such as she is 
Is this our Doctor, every way complete ; 
If not complete, O say, he is not she: 
And she again wants nothing, to name want, 
If want it be not, that she is not he. 
He is the half part of a blessed man, 
Left to be finished by such a she ; 
And she a fair divided excellence 
Whose fullness of perfection lies in him. 

You would wish me perhaps to describe 
her person. Sixty years had " written their 
defeatures in her face" before I became 
acquainted with her; yet by what those 
years had left methinks I could conceive 
what she had been in her youth. Go to 
your looking-glasses, young ladies, — and 
you will not be so well able to imagine by 



» Quakles : mutatis mutandis. 



t Spenser. 



what you see there, how you will look when 
you shall have shaken hands with Three- 
score. 

One of the Elizabethan minor-poets, 
speaking of an ideal beauty, says, 

Into a slumber then I fell, 

When fond Imagination 
Seemed to see, but could not tell, 

Her feature, or her fashion. 
But even as babes in dreams do smile, 

And sometimes fall a-weeping, 
So I awaked, as wise this while, 
As when I fell a-sleeping. 

Just as unable should I feel myself were 
I to attempt a description from what Mrs. 
Dove Mas when I knew her, of what De- 
borah Bacon might be supposed to have 
been, — just as unable as this dreaming 
rhymer should I be, and you would be no 
whit the wiser. What the disposition was 
which gave her face its permanent beauty 
you may know by what has already been 
said. But this I can truly say of her and of 
her husband, that if they had lived in the 
time of the Romans when Doncaster was 
called Danum, and had been of what was 
then the Roman religion, and had been 
married, as consequently they would have 
been, with the rites of classical Paganism, 
it would have been believed both by their 
neighbours and themselves that their nuptial 
offerings had been benignly received by the 
god Domicius and the goddesses Maturna 
and Gamelia ; and no sacrifice to Viriplaca 
would ever have been thought necessary in 
that household. 



CHAPTER CXI. 

CONCERNING MAGAZINES, AND THE FORMER 
AND PRESENT RACE OF ALPHABET-MEN. 

Altri gli fian messo none Santa Croce, 
Altri lo chiaman V A. B. C guastando 
La misura, gV accenti, ct la sua voce. 

Sansovino. 

The reader has now been informed who Mrs. 
Dove was, and what she was on that day 
of mingled joy and grief when the bells of 



THE DOCTOR. 



269 



St. George's welcomed her to Done:- 
a bride. Enough too has been related con- 
cerning the Doctor in his single state, to 
show that he was not unworthy of such a 
wife. There is, however, more to be told ; 
for any one who may suppose that a phy- 
sician at Doncaster must have been pretty 
much the same sort of person in the year 
1761 as at present, can have reflected little 
upon the changes for better and worse which 
have been going on during the intervening 
time. The fashions in dress and furniture 
have not altered more than the style of in- 
: :al upholstery. 

Our Doctor flourished in the Golden Age 
of Magazines, when their pages were filled 
with voluntary contributions from men who 
never aimed at dazzling the public, but 
came each with his scrap of information, or 
his humble question, or his hard problem, 
or his attempt in verse. 

In those days A was an Antiquary, and 
wrote articles upon Altars and Abbeys and 
Architecture. B made a blunder, which C 
corrected. D demonstrated that E was in 
error, and that F was wrong in Philology, 
and neither Philosopher nor Physician, 
though he affected to be both. G was a Ge- 
nealogist : H was an Herald, who helped him. 
I was an inquisitive inquirer, who found 
reason for suspecting J to be a Jesuit. M 
mathematician. X noted the weather. 
O observed the stars. P was a poet, who 
piddled in pastorals, and prayed Mr. Urban 
to print them. Q came in the corner of the 
page with his query. R arrogated to him- 
self the right of reprehending every one who 
differed from him. S sighed and sued in 
song. T told an old tale, and when he was 
wrong U used to set him right. V was a 
virtuoso. W warred against YVarburton. 
X excelled in algebra. Y yearned for im- 
mortality in rhyme ; and Z in his zeal was 
always in a puzzle. 

Those were hnppy times when each little 
star was satisfied with twinkling in his own 
sphere. Xo one thought of bouncing about 
like a cracker, singeing and burning in the 
mere wantonness of mischief, and then going 
out with a noise and a stink. 



Bui now 

when all this world is woxen daily worse,* 

see what a change has taken place through 

the whole Chrisc: A- tor A. there 

- with his Souvenir, and 

Ackerman with his Forget-me-not, and all 

■ the rest of the Annual Albumers. B is a 
blackguard, and blusters in a popular Ma- 
gazine. C is a coxcomb who concocts fashion- 
able novels for Colburn ; and D is a dunce 
who admires him. E, being empty and 

[ envious, thinks himself eminently qualified 
for Editor of a Literary Gazette. F figures 
as a fop in Knight's Quarterly. G is a 

! general reformer, and dealer in Greek scrip. 

\ H is Humbug and Hume ; and for my I, it 
may always be found with Mr. Irving and 
Mis. Elizabeth Martin. J jeers at the 
Clergy in Mr. Jetfery's journal. K kicks 
against the pricks with his friend L, who is 
Leigh Hunt, the Liberal. M manufactures 
mischief for the Morning Chronicle. N is 
nobody knows who. that manufactures jokes 
for John Bull, and fathers them upon Rogers. 
O is an obstreperous orator. P was Peter 
Pindar, and is now Paul Pry. Q is the 
Quarterly Review, and R S Robert Southey, 
who writes in it. T tells lies in the Old 
Times. U is a Unitarian who hopes to be 
Professor of Theology at the London Uni- 
versity. V is Vivian Grey. W is Sir 
Walter Scott. X the Ex- Sheriff Parkins. 
Y was the Young R - ins ; and Z. — Zounds, 
who can Z be, but Zacharv Macaulev ? 
Oh,— 

m MJg flft' mew in terra 

Democrito, (perche di lagrimare 

Io non sm ug.\ e pero (accio il name 

D' Eraciito dolente ;) Mr, 

Fra' mortali Democrito, per certo 

Ei si smaseelierebbe delta risa, 

Guardando le sciocchezze de' tnortali.i 



Spenser. 



t Chiabrerju 



270 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CXII. 



HUNTING IN AN EAST CHAIR. 
BOOKS. 



THE DOCTOR S 



That place that does contain 
My books, the best companions, is to me 
A glorious court, where hourly I converse 
With the old sages and philosophers ; 
And sometimes for variety I confer 
With Kings and Emperors, and weigh their counsels, 
Calling their victories, if unjustly got, 
Unto a strict account, and in my fancy 
Deface their ill placed statues. 

Beaumont and Fletcher 

A certain Ludovicus Bosch, instead of 
having his coat of arms, or his cypher en- 
graved to put in his books, had a little print 
of himself in his library. The room has a 
venerable collegiate character; there is a 
crucifix on the table, and a goodly propor- 
tion of folios on the shelves, Bosch, in a 
clerical dress, is seated in an easy chair, 
cogitabund, with a manuscript open before 
him, a long pen in his hand, and on his 
head a wig which, with all proper respect 
for the dignity and vocation of the wearer, 
I cannot but honestly denominate a caxon. 
The caxon quizzifies the figure, and thereby 
mars the effect of what would otherwise 
have been a pleasing as well as appropriate 
design. Underneath in the scrolled, framing 
is this verse, 

In tali nunquam lassat venatio sylva. 

Dr. Charles Balguy, of Peterborough, had 
for the same purpose a design which, though 
equally appropriate, was not so well con- 
ceived. His escutcheon, with the words 

Jucunda oblivia vitcs 

above, and his name and place of abode 
below, is suspended against an architectural 
pile of books. It was printed in green. I 
found it in one of our own Doctor's out-of- 
the-way volumes, a thin foolscap quarto, 
printed at Turin, 1589, being a treatise 
della natura de cihi et del here, by Baldas- 
sare Pisanelli, a physician of Bologna. . 

Dr. Balguy's motto would not have suited 
our Doctor. For though books were among 
the comforts and enjoyments of his life from 
boyhood to old age, they never made him 



oblivious of its business. Like Ludovicus 
Bosch, — but remember, I beseech you, 
Ladies! his wig was not a caxon ; and, more- 
over, that when he gave an early hour to 
his books, it was before the wig was put on, 
and that when he had a leisure evening for 
them, off went the wig, and a velvet or 
silken cap, according to the season, supplied 
its place ; — like Bosch, I say, when he was 
seated in his library, — but in no such con- 
ventual or collegiate apartment, and with 
no such assemblage of folios, quartos, and 
all inferior sizes, substantially bound, in ve- 
nerable condition, and " in seemly order 
ranged ; " nor with that atmospheric odour 
of antiquity, and books, which is more grate- 
ful to the olfactories of a student than the 
fumes of any pastille ; but in a little room, 
with a ragged regiment upon his shelves, and 
an odour of the shop from below, in which 
rhubarb predominated, though it was some- 
times overpowered by valerian, dear to cats, 
or assafoetida which sprung up, say the 
Turks, in Paradise, upon the spot where the 
Devil first set his foot : — like Bosch, I say, 
once more and without farther parenthesis, — 

(cri£ttr<ro) voiyr-s el 'v u.ifod Koyot,*) 

like Bosch, the Doctor never was weary with 
pursuing the game that might be started in 
a library. And though there was no forest 
at hand, there were some small preserves in 
the neighbourhood, over which he was at 
liberty to range. 

Perhaps the reader's memory may serve 
him, where mine is just now at fault, and he 
may do for himself, what some future editor 
will do for me, that is supply the name of a 
man of letters who, in his second childhood, 
devised a new mode of book-hunting: he 
used to remove one of the books in his 
library from its proper place, and when he 
had forgotten, as he soon did, where it had 
been put, he hunted the shelves till he 
found it. There will be some who see no- 
thing more in this affecting anecdote than 
an exemplification of the vanity of human 
pursuits ; but it is not refining too much, if 



THE DOCTOR. 



271 



we perceive in it a consolatory mark of a 
cheerful and philosophical mind, retaining 
its character even when far in decay. Tor 
no one who had not acquired a habit of 
happy philosophy would have extracted 
amusement from his infirmities, and made 
the failure of his memory serve to beguile 
some of those hours which could then no 
longer be profitably employed. 

Circulating libraries, which serve for the 
most part to promote useless reading, were 
not known when Daniel Dove set up his 
rest at Doncaster. It was about that time 
that a dissenting minister, Samuel Fancourt 
by name, opened the first in London, of 
course upon a very contracted scale. Book 
clubs are of much later institution. There 
was no bookseller in Doncaster till several 
years afterwards : sometimes an itinerant 
dealer in such wares opened a stall there on 
a market day, as Johnson's father used to 
do at Birmingham ; and one or two of the 
trade regularly kept the fair. A little of 
the live stock of the London publishers 
found its way thither at such times, and 
more of their dead stock, with a regular 
supply of certain works popular enough to 
be printed in a cheap form for this kind of 
sale. And when, at the breaking up of a 
household, such books as the deceased or 
removing owner happened to possess were 
sold off with the furniture, those which 
found no better purchaser on the spot 
usually came into the hands of one of these I 
dealers, and made the tour of the neigh- 
bouring markets. It was from such strag- j 
glers that the Doctor's ragged regiment had j 
been chiefly raised. Indeed he was so fre- j 
quent a customer, that the stall-keepers 
generally offered to his notice any English 
book which they thought likely to take his 
fancy, and any one in a foreign language 
which had not the appearance of a school- 
book. And when in one book he found such 
references to another as made him desirous 
of possessing, or at least consulting it, he 
employed a person at York to make inquiry 
for it there. 



CHAPTER CXIIL 

THOMAS GENT AKD ALICE GEY, A TREE TAJLE, 
SHOWING THAT A WOMANS CONSTANCY 
WILE NOT ALWAYS HOED OUT LONGER 
THAN TROY TOWN, AND YET THE WOMAN 
MAY NOT BE THE PARTY WHO IS MOST IN 
EAELT. 

Io dico, non dimando 
Quel che tu vuoi udir, perch' io T ho visto 
Ove s' appunta ogni ubi, e ogni quando. 

Dante. 

The person whom the Doctor employed in 
collecting certain books for him, and whom 
Peter Hopkins had employed in the same 
way, was that Thomas Gent of whom it was 
incidentally said in the 47th Chapter that he 
published the old poem of Flodden Field, 
from a transcript made by Daniel's kind- 
hearted schoolmaster, Richard Guy, whose 
daughter he married. Since that chapter 
was written an account of Gent's life, writ- 
ten by himself in 1746, when he was in his 
53d year, and in his own handwriting, was 
discovered by Mr. Thorpe, the bookseller, 
among a collection of books from Ireland, 
and published by him, with a portrait of 
the author, copied from a fine mezzotinto 
engraving by Valentine Green, which is well 
known to collectors. Gent was a very old 
man when that portrait was taken ; and his 
fine loose-flowing silver hair gave great 
effect to a singularly animated and cheerful 
face. His autobiography is as characteristic 
as John Dunton's, and like it contains much 
information relating to the state of the press 
in his days, and the trade of literature. A 
few curious notices occur in it of the man- 
ners and transactions of those times. But 
the portion pertinent to the business of these 
volumes is that which in its consequences 
led him to become the Doctor's purveyor of 
old books in the ancient city of York. 

Gent, though descended, he says, from 
the Gents of Staffordshire, was born in 
Dublin : his parents were good people in 
humble life, who trained him up in the way 
he should go, gave him the best education 
their means could afford, and apprenticed 
him to a printer, from whom, after three 



272 



THE DOCTOR. 



years' service, he ran away, because of the 
brutal usage which he received. He got 
on board ship with little more than a shil- 
ling in his pocket, and was landed at Park- 
gate to seek his fortune. But having made 
good use of the time which he had served 
with his tyrannical master, he obtained em- 
ployment in London, and made himself use- 
ful to his employers. After having been 
four years there, he accepted an offer from 
Mr. White, who, as a reward for printing 
the Prince of Orange's Declaration when all 
the printers in London refused to undertake 
so dangerous a piece of work, was made 
King's printer for York and five other coun- 
ties. Mr. White had plenty of business, 
there being few printers in England, except 
in London, at that time ; " None," says Gent, 
" I am sure, at Chester, Liverpool, White- 
haven, Preston, Manchester, Kendal, and 
Leeds. The offer was eighteen pounds a 
year, with board, washing, and lodging, and 
a guinea to bear his charges on the road. 
Twenty shillings of this I offered," he says, 
" to Crofts the carrier, a very surly young 
fellow as ever I conversed with, but he 
would have five or six shillings more ; find- 
ing him so stiff with me, I resolved to ven- 
ture on foot. He set out with his horses on 
Monday, and the next morning, being the 
20th of April, 1714, I set forward, and had 
not, I think, walked three miles, when a 
gentleman's servant with a horse ready sad- 
dled and himself riding another, overtook 
me, and for a shilling, with a glass or so on 
the road, allowed me to ride with him as 
far as Caxton, which was the period of his 
journey." 

Having reached York about twelve o'clock 
on the Sunday following, and found the way 
to Mr. White's house, the door was opened 
by the head-maiden. " She ushered me," 
says Gent, " into the chamber where Mrs. 
White lay something ill in bed ; but the old 
gentleman was at his dinner, by the fire- 
side, sitting in a noble arm-chair, with a 
good large pie before him, and made me 
partake heartily with him. I had a guinea 
in my shoe lining, which I pulled out to 
ease my foot ; at which the old gentleman 



smiled, and pleasantly said, it was more than 
he had ever seen a journeyman save before. 
I could not but smile too, because my trunk, 
with my clothes and eight guineas, was sent, 
about a month before to Ireland, where I 
was resolved to go and see my friends had his 
place not offered to me as it did." 

Gent was as happy as he could wish here, 
and as he earned money bought clothes to 
serve him till he should rejoin his trunk in 
Dublin, which at the year's end he deter- 
mined to do, refusing to renew his engage- 
ment till he had visited his parents. " Yet," 
says he, " what made my departure some- 
what uneasy, I scarce then well knew how, 
was through respect of Mrs. Alice Guy, the 
young woman who I said first opened the 
door to me, upper maiden to Mrs. White, 
who, I was persuaded to believe, had the 
like mutual fondness for me — she was the 
daughter of Mr. Richard Guy, schoolmaster 
at Ingleton, near Lancashire ; had very good 
natural parts, quick- understanding, was of 
a fine complexion, and very amiable in her 
features. Indeed I was not very forward in 
love, or desire of matrimony, till I knew 
the world better, and consequently should 
be more able to provide such a handsome 
maintenance as I confess I had ambition 
enough to desire ; but yet my heart could 
not absolutely slight so lovely a young crea- 
ture as to pretend I had no esteem for her 
charms, which had captivated others, and par- 
ticularly my master's grandson, Mr. Charles 
Bourne, who was more deserving than any. 
However I told her (because my irresolution 
should not anticipate her advancement,) 
that I should respect her as one of the 
dearest of friends ; and receiving a little dog 
from her as a companion on the road, I 
had the honour to be accompanied as far as 
Bramham Moor by my rival." 

He was" received by his parents like the 
Prodigal son, and had engaged himself as 
journeyman in Dublin, when his old master 
Powell employed officers to seize him for 
leaving his apprenticeship. It was in vain 
that his father and a friendly brother-in-law 
offered a fair sum for his release, while he 
concealed himself; more was demanded than 



THE DOCTOR. 



273 



would have been proper for them to give ; 
there was no other remedy than to leave 
Ireland once more, and as about that time 
he had received a letter from his dearest at 
York, saying that he was expected there, 
thither, purely again to enjoy her company, 
he resolved to direct his course. His friends 
were much concerned at their parting, " but 
my unlucky whelp," says he, " that a little 
before, while taking a glass with Mr. Hume 
(the printer with whom I had engaged), had 
torn my new hat in pieces, seemed nowise 
affected by my taking boat; so I let the 
rascal stay with my dear parents who were 
fond of him for my sake, as he was of them 
for his own ; nor was he less pleasant by his 
tricks to the neighbourhood, who called him 
Yorkshire, from the country whence I 
brought him." 

There is a chasm in this part of the manu- 
script : it appears, however, that he remained 
some months at York, and then went to Lon- 
don, where he was as careful as possible in 
saving what he had earned, " but yet," says 
he, " could not perceive a prospect of settle- 
ment whereby to maintain a spouse like her 
as I judged she deserved, and I could not 
bear the thoughts to bring her from a good 
settlement, without I could certainly make 
us both happy in a better." He went on, 
however, industriously and prosperously, had 
"the great happiness" in the year 1717 of 
being made freeman of the company of Sta- 
tioners, and in the same year commenced 
citizen of London, his share of the treat that 
day with other expenses coming to about five 
pounds. Now that he was beyond his reach, 
his old tyrant in Dublin was glad to accept 
of five pounds for his discharge ; this money 
he remitted, and thus became absolutely free 
both in England and Ireland, for which he 
gave sincere thanks to the Almighty. 

" And now," says he, " I thought myself 
happy, when the thoughts of my dearest often 
occurred to my mind : God knows it is but 
too common, and that with the best and most 
considerate persons, that something or other 
gives them disquietude or makes them seek 
after it." A partnership at Norwich was 
offered him, and he accepted it ; but a few 



hours afterwards there came a mournful 
letter from his parents, saying that they 
were very infirm, and extremely desirous to 
see him once more before they died. It is 
to Gent's honour that he immediately gave 
up his engagement at Norwich, though the 
stage coach had been ordered to receive 
him. The person whom he recommended in 
his stead was Mr. Robert Raikes, who when 
Gent wrote these memoirs was settled as a 
master in Gloucester ; he became the father 
of a singularly prosperous family, and one 
of his sons, his successor in the printing 
office, is well known as the person who first 
established Sunday schools. 

Yet though Gent acted under an impulse 
of natural duty on this occasion, he confesses 
that he was not without some cause for self- 
reproach : " I wrote," said he, " a lamenting 
letter to my dear in York, bewailing that I 
could not find a proper place as yet to settle 
in, told her that I was leaving the kingdom, 
and reminded her by what had passed that 
she could not be ignorant where to direct if 
she thought proper so to do ; that I was far 
from slighting her, and resigned her to none 
but the protection of Heaven. But sure 
never was poor creature afflicted with such 
melancholy as I was upon my journey, my 
soul did seem to utter within me, 'wretch 
that I am, what am I doing, and whither 
going ? ' My parents, it's true, as they were 
constantly most affectionate, so indeed they 
are, especially in far advanced years, pecu- 
liar objects of my care and esteem ; but am 
I not only leaving England, the Paradise of 
the world, to which as any loyal subject I 
have now an indubitable right, but am I not 
also departing, for aught I know for ever, 
from the dearest creature upon earth ? from 
her that loved me when I knew not well 
how to respect myself; who was wont to 
give me sweet counsel in order for my 
future happiness, equally partook of those 
deep sorrows which our tender love had oc- 
casioned, was willing to undergo all hazards 
with me in this troublesome life, whose kind 
letters had so often proved like healing balm 
to my languishing condition, and whose con- 
stancy, had I been as equally faithful and 



274 



THE DOCTOR. 



not so timorous of being espoused through 
too many perplexing doubts, would never 
have been shaken, and without question 
would have promoted the greatest happiness 
for which I was created." 

These self-reproaches, which were not 
undeserved, made him ill on the road. He 
reached Dublin, however, and though the 
employment which he got there was not 
nearly so profitable as what he had had in 
London, love for his parents made him con- 
tented, "and took," he says, "all thoughts 
of farther advantages away, till Mr. Alex- 
ander Campbell, a Scotchman in the same 
printing office with me, getting me in liquor, 
obtained a promise that I should accompany 
him to England, where there was a greater 
likelihood of prosperity. Accordingly he so 
pressed me, and gave such reasons to my 
dear parents that it was not worth while to 
stay there for such small business as we 
enjoyed, that they consented we should go 
together : but alas ! their melting tears 
made mine to flow, and bedewed my pillow 
every night after that I lodged with them. 
' What, Tommy,' my mother would some- 
times say, ' this English damsel of yours, I 
suppose, is the chiefest reason why you 
slight us and your native country ! ' ' Well,' 
added she, ' the ways of Providence I know 
are unsearchable ; and whether I live to see 
you again or no, I shall pray God to be 
your defender and preserver!' — I thought 
it not fit to accumulate sorrows to us all, by 
returning any afflictive answers ; but taking 
an opportunity whilst she was abroad on her 
business, I embarked with my friend once 
more for England." 

Tommy, however, made the heart of his 
English damsel sick with hope long deferred. 
He was provident overmuch ; and this he 
acknowledges even when endeavouring to 
excuse himself: — "all that I had under- 
gone I must confess," he says, " I thought 
were but my just deserts for being so long 
absent from my dear," (it had now been an 
absence of some years), " and yet I could 
not well help it. I had a little money it is 
very true, but no certain home wherein to 
invite her. I knew she was well fixed ; and 



it pierced me to the very heart to think, if 
through any miscarriage or misfortune I 
should alter her condition for the worse 
instead of the better. Upon this account 
my letters to her at this time were not so 
amorously obliging as they ought to have 
been from a sincere lover ; by which she 
had reason, however she might have been 
mistaken, to think that I had failed in my 
part of those tender engagements which had 
passed between us." 

Gent had sometimes the honour of being 
the Bellman's poet, and used to get heartily 
treated for the Christmas verses which he 
composed in that capacity. One lucky day 
he happened to meet his friend Mr. Evan 
Ellis, who was the Bellman's printer in 
ordinary : " Tommy," said his friend, " I am 
persuaded that some time or other you'll set 
up a press in the country, where, I believe, 
you have a pretty northern lass at heart ; 
and as I believe you save money and can 
spare it, I can help you to a good penny- 
worth preparatory to your design." Ac- 
cordingly upon this recommendation he 
purchased at a cheap price a considerable 
quantity of old types, which Mr. Mist, the 
proprietor of a journal well known at that 
time by his name, had designed for the 
furnace. To this he added a font almost 
new, resolving to venture in the world 
with his dearest, who at first, he says, gave 
him encouragement He does not say that 
she ever discouraged him, and his own 
resolution appears to have been but half- 
hearted. His purse being much exhausted 
by these purchases, he still worked on for 
further supplies ; by and by he bought a 
new font, and so went on increasing his 
stock, working for his old first master and 
for himself also, and occasionally employing 
servants himself, though the fatigue was 
exceedingly great and almost more than he 
could go through. Alas the while for Alice 
Guy, who was now in the tenth year of her 
engagement to lukewarm Thomas ! 

Lukewarm Thomas imagined " things 
would so fall out that after some little time 
he should have occasion to invite his dear 
to London." But let him tell his own 



THE DOCTOR. 



275 



story. " One Sunday morning, as my shoes 
were japanning by a little boy at the end of 
the lane, there came Mr. John Hoyle, who 
had been a long time in a messenger's cus- 
tody on suspicion for reprinting Vox Populi 
Vox Dei, under direction of Mrs. Powell, 
with whom he wrought as journeyman; 
' Mr. Gent, 1 said he, ' I have been at York 
to see my parents, and am but just as it 
were returned to London. I am heartily 
glad to see you, but sorry to tell you that 
you have lost your old sweetheart; for I 
assure you that she is really married to your 
rival Mr. Bourne ! ' I was so thunderstruck 
that I could scarcely return an answer, — 
all former thoughts crowding into my mind, 
the consideration of spending my substance 
on a business I would not have engaged in 
as a master but for her sake, my own re- 
missness that had occasioned it, and withal 
that she could liot in such a case be much 
blamed for mending her fortune, — all these 
threw me under a very deep concern." 

He consoled himself as Petrarch had 
done : and opening his old vein of poetry 
and bell-metal, gave some vent to his pas- 
sion by writing a copy of verses to the tune 
of " Such charms has Phillis ! " then much 
in request, and proper for the flute. He 
entitled it " The Forsaken Lovers Letter to 
his former Sweetheart." "When I had 
done," says he, " as I did not care that Mr. 
Midwinter (his master) should know of my 
great disappointment, I gave the copy to 
Mr. Dodd, who printing the same sold 
thousands of them, for which he offered me 
a price; but as it was on my own proper 
concern, I scorned to accept of anything 
except a glass of comfort or so." If the 
Forsaken Lover's Lamentation had been 
sung about the streets of York, Mrs. Bourne 
might have listened to it without suspecting 
that she was the treacherous maid, who for 
the sake of this world's splendour had be- 
trayed her only sweet jewel, left him to 
languish alone, and broken his heart, 

Proving that none could be falser than she. 

Conscience would never have whispered 
to her that it was lukewarm Thomas who 



closed his complaint with the desperate 
determination expressed in the ensuing 
stanza. 

Now to the woods and groves I'll be ranging, 

Free from all women I'll vent forth my grief: 
While birds are singing and sweet notes exchanging, 

This pleasing concert will yield me relief. 
Thus like the swan before its departing 

Sings forth its elegy in melting strains, 
My dying words shall move all the kind powers above 

To pity my fate, the most wretched of swains. 

He neither went to the woods, nor died ; 
but entered into an engagement with Mr. 
D odd's widow to manage her printing busi- 
ness, being the more willing to enter into 
the service of this gentlewoman since he was 
disappointed of his first love. The widow 
was a most agreeable person, daughter to a 
sea captain, and had been educated at the 
boarding-school at Hackney : Dodd was her 
second husband, and she had been left with 
a child by each. " I thought her," says 
Gent, " worthy of the best of spouses ; for 
sure there never could be a finer economist 
or sweeter mother to her dear children, 
whom she kept exceedingly decent. I have 
dined with her; but then as in reason I 
allowed what was fitting for my meals, and 
her conversation, agreeably to her fine 
education, almost wounded me with love, 
and at the same time commanded a becom- 
ing reverence. What made her excellent 
carriage the more endearing was, that I 
now must never expect to behold my first 
love at York : though I heard by travellers 
that not only she, but her husband used to 
inquire after me. Indeed I was sensible 
that Mr. Bourne, though a likely young- 
man, was not one of the most healthful 
persons; but far from imagining otherwise 
than that he might have outlived me who 
then was worn to a shadow. But, see the 
wonderful effects of Divine Providence in 
all things ! 

" It was one Sunday morning that Mr. 
Philip Wood, a quondam partner at Mr. 
Midwinter's, entering my chambers where I 
sometimes used to employ him too when 
slack of business in other places — ' Tommy,' 
said he, ' all these fine materials of yours, 
must be moved to York ! ' At which won- 



276 



THE DOCTOR. 



dering, 'what mean you?' said I. 'Ay,' 
said he, ' and you must go too, without it's 
your own fault ; for your first sweetheart 
is now at liberty, and left in good circum- 
stances by her dear spouse, who deceased 
but of late.' ' I pray heaven,' answered I, 
' that his precious soul may be happy : and 
for aught I know it may be as you say, for, 
indeed, I think I may not trifle with a widow 
as I have formerly done with a maid.' I 
made an excuse to my mistress that I had 
business in Ireland, but that I hoped to be 
at my own lodgings in about a month's 
time ; if not, as I had placed everything in 
order, she might easily by any other person 
carry on the business. But she said she 
would not have any beside me in that sta- 
tion I enjoyed, and therefore should expect 
my return to her again : but respectfully 
taking leave, I never beheld her after, 
though I heard she was after very indiffe- 
rently married. I had taken care that my 
goods should be privately packed up, and 
hired a little warehouse and put them in 
ready to be sent, by sea or land, to where I 
should order : and I pitched upon Mr. 
Campbell, my fellow-traveller, as my con- 
fidant in this affair, desiring my cousins to 
assist him ; all of whom I took leave of at 
the Black Swan in Holborn, where I had 
paid my passage in the stage coach, which 
brought me to York in four days' time. 
Here I found my dearest once more, though 
much altered from what she was about ten 
years before that I had not seen her. There 
was no need for new courtship ; but decency 
suspended the ceremony of marriage for 
some time : till my dearest at length, con- 
sidering the ill -consequence of delay in her 
business, as well as the former ties of love 
that passed innocently between us by word 
and writing, gave full consent to have the 
nuptials celebrated," — and performed ac- 
cordingly they were, " in the stately ca- 
thedral," the very day of Archbishop 
Blackburne's installation. 



CHAPTER CXIY. 

THE AUTHOR HINTS AT CERTAIN CIRCUM- 
STANCES IN THE LIFE OF THOMAS GENT 
ON WHICH HE DOES NOT THTNK IT NE- 
CESSARY TO DWELL. 

Round white stones will serve, they say, 
As well as eggs, to make hens lay. 

Butler. 

If I were given to prolixity, and allowed 
myself to be led away from the subject be- 
fore me, I might here be tempted to relate 
certain particulars concerning Thomas Gent; 
how under his first London master, Mr. 
Midwinter, whose house was a ballad-house, 
"he worked many times from five in the 
morning till twelve at night, and frequently 
without food from breakfast till five or six 
in the evening, through their hurry with 
hawkers." And how in that same service 
he wrote, which is to say in modern lan- 
guage reported, Dr. Sacheverel's sermon 
after his suspension, for which his master 
gave him a crown-piece, and a pair of 
breeches, — not before they were wanted ; — 
and by which the said master gained nearly 
thirty pounds in the course of the week. 
And how he once engaged with Mr. Francis 
Clifton, who having had a liberal education 
at Oxford proved a Papist, set up a press, 
printed a newspaper, and getting in debt 
moved his goods into the liberty of the 
Fleet, and there became entered as a pri- 
soner ; and how Gent sometimes in extreme 
weather worked for him under a mean shed 
adjoining to the prison walls, when snow 
and rain fell alternately on the cases, yet, he 
says, the number of wide-mouthed sten- 
torian hawkers, brisk trade, and very often 
a glass of good ale, revived the drooping 
spirits of him and his fellow workmen ; and 
he often admired the success of this Mr. 
Clifton in his station, for whether through 
pity of mankind, or the immediate hand of 
Divine Providence to his family, advan- 
tageous jobs so often flowed upon him as 
gave him cause to be merry under his heavy 
misfortunes. 



THE DOCTOR. 



And how while in this employ a piece 
of work came in which he composed and 
helped to work off, but was not permitted 
to know who was the author. It was a 
vindication of an honest clergyman who had 
been committed to the King's Bench upon 
an action of scandalum magnatum : however, 
says he, "when finished, the papers were 
packed up, and delivered to my care ; and 
the same night, my master hiring a coach, 
we were driven to Westminster, where we 
entered into a large sort of monastic build- 
ing. Soon were we ushered into a spacious 
hall, where we sate near a large table 
covered with an ancient carpet of curious 
work, and whereon was soon laid a bottle of 
wine for our entertainment. In a little time 
we were visited by a grave gentleman in a 
black lay habit, who entertained us with one 
pleasant discourse or other. He bid us be 
secret ; for, said he, the imprisoned divine 
does not know who is his defender ; and if 
he did, I know his temper ; in a sort of 
transport he would reveal it, and so I should 
be blamed for my good office : and whether 
his intention was designed to show his 
gratitude, yet if a man is hurt by a friend, 
the damage is the same as if done by an 
enemy : to prevent which is the reason I 
desire this concealment. 'You need not fear 
me, Sir,' said my master ; ' and I, good Sir,' 
added I, ' you may be less afraid of ; for I 
protest I do not know where I am, much 
less your person, nor heard where I should 
be driven, or if I shall not be driven to 
Jerusalem before I get home again. Nay, 
I shall forget I ever did the job by to-mor- 
row, and consequently shall never answer 
any questions about it, if demanded. Yet, 
Sir, I shall, secretly remember your gene- 
rosity, and drink to your health with this 
brimfull glass.' Thereupon this set them 
both a-laughing, and truly I was got merrily 
tipsy, so merry that I hardly knew how I 
was driven homewards. For my part I was 
ever inclined to secresy and fidelity ; and 
therefore I was nowise inquisitive concern- 
ing our hospitable entertainer. — But hap- 
pening afterwards to behold a state prisoner 
in a coach, guarded from Westminster to 



the Tower, God bless me, thought I, it was 
no less than the Bishop of Kochester, Dr. 
Atterbury, by whom my master and I had 
been treated ! " 

Were I to ramble from my immediate 
purpose I might relate how Gent saw Mr. 
John Mathews, a young printer, drawn on 
a sledge to the place of execution, where he 
suffered for high treason ; and how Ma- 
thews's clothes were exceeding neat, the 
lining of his coat a rich Persian silk, and 
every other thing as befitted a gentleman ; 
and how he talked of death like a philoso- 
pher to some young ladies who came to take 
then- farewell. This poor youth was but in 
his nineteenth year, and not out of his ap- 
prenticeship to his mother and brother. He 
had been under misfortunes before, and 
through the favour of the government at 
that time was discharged, at which time 
his brother had given public orders to the 
people in his employ that if ever they found 
John either doing or speaking anything 
against the government, they would inform 
him that he might take a proper method to 
prevent it. Nevertheless, for ten guineas, 
he, with the assistance of another appren- 
tice and a journeyman, printed a treason- 
able paper intitled Vox Populi Vox Dei, \ 
containing direct incitement to rebellion. I | 
might relate also how this journeyman 
Lawrence Yezey, who went by the name of 
old gentleman in the printing-office, and who 
had not the character of an honest man 
about his printing ; and who, moreover, had 
gone to the criminal's mother and offered to 
go out of the way if she would give him 
money, and accordingly had gone to St. 
Albans, and staid there nine days, but no 
money coming, he could not stay out of the 
way longer, but seems rather to have been 
suspected of putting himself in the way, — 
I might, I say, relate how this Yezey did 
not long survive the ill-fated youth ; and 
how at his burial, in an obscure part of 
Islington churchyard, many of the printers' 
boys, called devils, made a noise like such, 
with their ball stocks carried thither for 
that purpose, and how the minister was 
much interrupted thereby in the Burial 



278 



THE DOCTOR. 



service, and shameful indignities were com- 
mitted at the grave : and how the printers, 
who had been at Islington that day, had 
their names sent off to the Courts of West- 
minster, where it cost their pockets pretty 
well before their persons were discharged 
from trouble. But Gent, who desired to be 
out of harm's way, had shunned what he 
called the crew of demons with their in- 
cendiaries to a mischief. 

I might also relate how he once carried 
skull caps made of printing balls stuffed 
with wool to his brother printers, who were 
to exhibit their faces in that wooden frame 
called the pillory ; in which frame, never- 
theless, he seems to think they were properly 
set ; and the mob were of the same opinion, 
for these skull caps proved but weak helmets 
against the missiles wherewith they were 
assailed. Moreover, further to exemplify 
the perils which in those days environed the 
men who meddled with printer's types, I 
might proceed to say how, after a strange 
dream, poor Gent was in the dead of the 
night alarmed by a strange thundering 
noise at the door, and his door broken open, 
and himself seized in his bed by two king's 
messengers upon a false information that he 
had been engaged in printing some lines 
concerning the imprisoned Bishop of Ro- 
chester, which had given offence ; and how 
he was carried to a public-house near St. 
Sepulchre's Church, whither his two em- 
ployers Mr. Midwinter and Mr. Clifton 
were also brought prisoners, and how they 
were taken to Westminster and there im- 
prisoned in a very fine house in Manchester 
Court which had nevertheless within the 
fusty smell of a prison ; and how from the 
high window of his humble back apartment 
he could behold the Thames, and hear the 
dashing of the flowing waters against the 
walls that kept it within due bounds : and 
how in the next room to him was confined 
that unhappy young Irish clergyman Mr. 
Neynoe" — (not ISTaypoe as the name in these 
memoirs is erroneously given). " I used," 
says Gent, "to hear him talk to himself when 
his raving fits came on ; and now and then 
would he sing psalms with such a melodious 



voice as produced both admiration and pity 
from me, who was an object of commisera- 
tion myself, in being awhile debarred from 
friends to see me, or the use of pen, ink, and 
paper to write to them." And how after 
five days he was honourably discharged, and 
took boat from Palace- Yard stairs, in which, 
he says, "my head seemed to be affected 
with a strange giddiness ; and when I safely 
arrived at home, some of my kinder neigh- 
bours appeared very joyful at my return. 
And my poor linnet, whose death I very 
much feared would come to pass, saluted 
me with her long, pleasant, chirping notes ; 
and, indeed, the poor creature had occasion 
to be the most joyful, for her necessary stock 
was almost exhausted, and I was come just 
in the critical time to yield her a fresh 
supply." It was some compensation for his 
fright on this occasion that he printed the 
Bishop of Rochester's Effigy "with some 
inoffensive verses that pleased all parties," 
which sold very well ; and that he formed 
some observations upon the few dying words 
of Counsellor Layer, in nature of a large 
speech, which for about three days had 
such a run of sale that the unruly hawkers 
were ready to pull his press in pieces for the 
goods. 

Farther I might say of Gent, that in 
January, 1739, when the Ouse at York was 
frozen, he set up a press on the ice, and 
printed names there, to the great satisfac- 
tion of young gentlemen, ladies, and others, 
who were very liberal on the occasion. 
And how having been unjustly as he thought 
ejected from a house in Stonegate, which 
was held under a prebendal lease and which 
fell to Mr. Laurence Sterne, (to whom, 
however, it was in vain to apply for redress, 
it not being in his power to relieve him,) he 
bought a house in Petergate and built a 
tower upon it ; " by which addition," said 
he, " my house seems the highest in the city 
and affords an agreeable prospect round the 
country : we have a wholesome air when- 
ever we please to ascend, especially the 
mornings and evenings, with great conve- 
niency for my business when overcrowded 
in the narrow rooms below : and several 



THE DOCTOR. 



279 



gentlemen have occasionally taken a serious 
pipe there, to talk of affairs in printing, as 
well as neighbours to satisfy their curiosity 
in viewing the flowers that grow almost 
round about upon the walls." 

This, and much more than this, might be 
said of Thomas Gent, and would have been 
deemed not uninteresting by the collectors 
of English topography, and typographic 
curiosities, Gent being well known to them 
for his " famous history of the City of York, 
its magnificent Cathedral, St. Mary's Abbey, 
&c. ; " his " History of the Loyal Town of 
Ripon, Fountains Abbey, Beverley, Wake- 
field, &c. ; " and his " History of the Royal 
and Beautiful Town of Kingston-upon- 
Hull." He entered upon a different pro- 
vince when he wrote his Treatise, entitled 
"Divine Justice and Mercy displayed in 
the Life of Judas Iscariot." But though it 
was because of his turn for books and anti- 
quities that the Doctor employed him to 
hunt the stalls at York, as Browne Willis 
did to collect for him epitaphs and trades- 
men's halfpence, what I had to say of him 
arises out of his connexion with Richard 
Guy, and must therefore be confined to his 
dilatory courtship and late marriage. 



CHAPTER CXY. 

THE READER IS REMINDED OF PRINCE 
ABINO JASSIMA AND THE FOX-LADY. GENT 
NOT LIKE JOB, NOR MRS. GENT LIKE JOb's 
WIFE. 

A me parrebbe a la sloriafar torto, 

S' io non aggiungo qualche codicillo ; 
Accib eke ognun chi legge, benedica 
L' ultimo effetto de la mia fatica. 

Pulci. 

I cannot think so meanly of my gentle 
readers as to suppose that any of them can 
have forgotten the story of the Japanese 
Prince Abino Jassima, and the gradual but 
lamentable metamorphosis of his beautiful 
wife. But perhaps it may not have occurred 
to them that many a poor man, and with- 
out anything miraculous in the case, finds 



himself in the same predicament, — except 
that when he discovers his wife to be a vixen 
he is not so easily rid of her. 

Let me not be suspected of insinuating 
that Alice Gent, formerly Bourne, formerly 
Guy, proved to be a wife of this descrip- 
tion, for which, I know not wherefore, an 
appellation has been borrowed from the she- 
fox. Her husband, who found that ten years 
had wrought a great change in her appear- 
ance, complained indeed of other changes. 
" I found," he says, " her temper much 
altered from that sweet natural softness and 
most tender affection that rendered her so 
amiable to me while I was more juvenile and 
she a maiden. Not less sincere I must own ; 
but with that presumptive air and conceited 
opinion (like Mrs. Day in the play of the 
Committee) which made me imagine an 
epidemical distemper prevailed among the 
good women to ruin themselves and fami- 
lies, or, if not prevented by Divine Pro- 
vidence, to prove the sad cause of great 
contention and of disquietude. However as 
I knew I was but then a novice in the in- 
tricate laws of matrimony, and that nothing 
but a thorough annihilation can disentangle 
or break that chain which often produces a 
strange concatenation for future disorders, I 
endeavoured to comply with a sort of stoical 
resolution to some very harsh rules that 
otherwise would have grated my human 
understanding. For as by this change I had 
given a voluntary wound to my wonted 
liberty, now attacked in the maintenance 
partly of pretended friends, spunging para- 
sites, and flatterers who imposed on good 
nature to our great damage ; so in this con- 
jugal captivity, as I may term it, I was fully 
resolved, likewise in a Christian sense, to 
make my yoke as easy as possible, thereby 
to give no offence to custom or law of any 
kind. The tender affection that a good hus- 
band naturally has to the wife of his bosom 
is such, as to make him often pass by the 
greatest insults that can be offered to human 
nature ; such I mean as the senseless pro- 
voking arguments used by one who will not 
be awakened from delusion till poverty ap- 
pears, shows the ingratitude of false friends 



280 



THE DOCTOR. 



in prosperity, and brings her to sad repent- 
ance in adversity : she will then wish she 
had been foreseeing as her husband, when 
it is too late ; condemn her foolish credulity, 
and abhor those who have caused her to 
differ from her truest friend, whose days she 
has embittered with the most undutiful ag- 
gravations, to render everything uncomfort- 
able to him ! " 

I suspect that Thomas Gent was wrong 
in thinking thus of his wife ; I am sure he 
was wrong in thus writing of her, and that 
I should be doing wrong in repeating what 
he has written, if it were not with the in- 
tention of showing that though he repre- 
sents himself in this passage as another Job, 
Socrates, or Jerry Sneak, it must not be 
concluded that his wife resembled the ter- 
magant daughter of Sir Jacob Jollup, Xan- 
tippe, Rahamat the daughter of Ephraim, 
her cousin Makher the daughter of Manas- 
seh, or Queen Saba, whichever of these 
three latter were the wife of Job. 

And here let me observe that although I 
follow the common usage in writing the last 
venerable name, I prefer the orthography 
of Junius and Tremellius, who write Hiob, 
because it better represents the sound of 
the original Hebrew, and is moreover more 
euphonous than Job, or Jobab, if those com- 
mentators err not who identify that King 
of Edom with the Man of Uz. Indeed it 
is always meet and right to follow the es- 
tablished usage, unless there be some valid 
reason for departing from it ; and moreover 
there is this to be said in favour of retaining 
the usual form and pronunciation of this 
well-known name, that if it were disnatu- 
ralised and put out of use, an etymology 
in our language would be lost sight of. For 
a job in the working or operative sense of 
the word, is evidently something which it 
requires patience to perform ; in the phy- 
sical and moral sense, as when, for example, 
in the language of the vulgar, a personal 
hurt or misfortune is called a had job, it is 
something which it requires patience to sup- 
port ; and in the political sense it is some- 
thing which it requires patience in the public 
to endure : and in all these senses the origin 



of the word must be traced to Job, who is 
the proverbial exemplar of this virtue. This 
derivation has escaped Johnson ; nor has 
that lexicographer noticed the substantives 
jobing and jobation, and the verb to jobe, all 
from the same root, and familiar in the 
mouths of the people. 

For these reasons therefore, and especially 
the etymological one, I prefer the common, 
though peradventure, and indeed perlike- 
lihood, erroneous manner of writing the 
name, to lob, Hiob, Ajob, Ajoub, or Jjob, 
all which have been proposed. And I do 
not think it worth while (that is my while 
or the reader's) to inquire into the deriva- 
tion of the name, and whether it may with 
most probability be expounded to mean sor- 
rowful, jubilant, persecuted, beloved, zeal- 
ous, or wise, in the sense of sage, seer, or 
magician. Nor whether Job was also called 
Jasub, Jaschub, Jocab, Jocam, Jobal, Jubab, 
Hobab, or Uz of that ilk, for this also has 
been contended. Nor to investigate the 
position of a territory the name of which has 
been rendered so famous by its connexion 
with him, and of which nothing but the 
name is known. This indeed has occasioned 
much discussion among biblical chorogra- 
phers. And not many years have elapsed 
since, at a late hour of the night, or perhaps 
an early one of the morning, the watchman 
in Great Russell Street found it necessary in 
the discharge of his duty to interpose be- 
tween two learned and elderly gentlemen, 
who returning together from a literary com- 
potation, had entered upon this discussion 
on the way, and forgetting the example of 
the Man of Uz, quarrelled about the situa- 
tion of his country. The scene of this 
dispute, — the only one upon that subject 
that ever required the interference of the 
watch in the streets of London at mid- 
night, — was near the Museum Gate, and 
the Author of the Indian Antiquities was 
one of the disputants. 

Returning, however, to the matter which 
these last parenthetical paragraphs inter- 
rupted, I say that before lukewarm Thomas 
represented himself as another Job for ma- 
trimonial endurance, he ought to have asked 



THE DOCTOR. 



281 



himself whether the motives for which he 
married the widow Bourne, were the same 
as those for which he wooed the fair maiden 
Alice Guy ; and whether, if Mrs. Gent sus- 
pected that as she had been obliged to her 
first husband for her money, she was obliged 
to the money for her second, it was not very 
natural for her to resent any remonstrances 
on his part, when she entertained or assisted 
those whom she believed to be her friends, 
and who peradventure had claims upon her 
hospitality or her bounty for her late hus- 
band's sake. 

A woman's goodness, when she is a wife, 
Lies much upon a man's desert ; believe it, Sir. 
If there be fault in her, I'll pawn my life on't 
'Twas first in him, if she were ever good.* 

If there be any reader so inconsiderate as 
to exclaim, " what have we to do with the 
temper and character of a low-lived woman 
who was dead and buried long before we 
were born, whom nobody ever heard of 
before, and for whom nobody cares a straw 
now ! What can have induced this most 
unaccountable of authors to waste his time 
and thoughts upon such people and such 
matter ! " — Should there, I say, be persons, 
as in all likelihood there may, so impatient 
and so unreasonable as to complain in this 
manner, I might content myself with observ- 
ing to them in the words of that thoughtful 
and happy-minded man Mr. Danby of Swin- 
ton, that if Common Sense had not a vehicle 
to carry it abroad, it must always stay at 
home. 

But I am of the school of Job, and will 
reply with Uzzite patience to these objectors, 
as soon as I shall have related in a few words 
the little more that remains to be said of 
Thomas Gent, printer of York, and Alice his 
wife. They had only one child, it died an 
infant of six months, and the father speaks 
with great feeling of its illness and death. 
" I buried its pretty corpse," he says, " in 
the Church of St. Michael le Belfrey, where 
it was laid on the breast of Mr. Charles 
Bourne, my predecessor, in the chancel on 
the south side of the altar." This was in 



Beaumont and Fletcher. 



1726 ; there he was buried himself more 
than half a century afterwards, in the 87th 
year of his age ; and Alice, who opened the 
door to him when he first arrived in York, 
was no doubt deposited in the same vault 
with both her husbands. 



CHAPTER CXVI. 

DR. SOUTHEY. JOHN BUNYAN. BARTHOLO- 
MEWS SCHEREUS. TERTULLIAN. DOMENICO 
BERNINO. PETRARCH. JEREMY TAYLOR. 
HARTLEY COLERIDGE. DIEGO DE SAN 
PEDRO, AND ADAM LITTLETON. 

Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray ; 
Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. 

Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in ! 

Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky ! 

Liard, Robin, you must bob in ! 
Round, around, around, about, ahout ! 
All good come running in, all ill keep out. 

Middleton. 

Nine years after the convention of Cintra a 
representation was made to the Laureate in 
favour of some artillery horses employed in 
Sir Arthur Wellesley's army. They were 
cast-off Irish cavalry, and their efficiency 
had been called in question ; indeed it had 
been affirmed that they were good for no- 
thing; attestations to disprove this were 
produced, and the Laureate was requested 
to set this matter right in his History of the 
Peninsular War.f The good-natured his- 
torian has given accordingly a note to the 
subject, saying that he thought himself bound 
to notice the representation were it only for 
the singularity of the case. If Dr. Southey 
thought it became him for that reason and 
for truth's sake, to speak a good word of 
some poor horses who had long ago been 
worked to death and left to the dogs and 
wolves by the way-side, much more may I 
feel myself bound for the sake of Dr. Dove 
to vindicate the daughter of his old school- 
master from a splenetic accusation brought 
against her by her husband. The reader 
who knows what the Doctor's feelings were 

t See vol. i. p. 554. 4to ed. 



282 



THE DOCTOR. 



with regard to Mr. Guy, and what mine are 
for the Doctor, would I am sure excuse me 
even if on such an occasion I had travelled 
out of the record. 

Gent, when he penned that peevish page, 
seems to have thought with Tom Otter, that 
a wife is a very scurvy clogdogdo! And 
with John Bunyan that " Women, whenever 
they would perk it and lord it over their 
husbands, ought to remember that both by 
creation and transgression they are made to 
be in subjection to them." " Such a thing," 
says the Arch-tinker, " may happen, as that 
the woman, not the man, may be in the 
right, (I mean when both are godly), but 
ordinarily it is otherwise." 

Authors of a higher class than the York 
printer and topographist have complained of 
their wives. We read in Burton that Bar- 
tholomgeus Scherseus, Professor of Hebrew 
at Wittenberg, whom he calls " that famous 
Poet Laureate," said in the introduction to 
a work of his upon the Psalms, he should 
have finished it long before, but amongst 
many miseries which almost broke his back 
(his words were inter alia dura et tristia, quae 
misero miJii pene tergum fregerunt,) he was 
yoked to a worse than Xantippe. A like 
lamentation is made more oddly, and with 
less excuse, by Domenico Bernino, the author 
of a large history of All Heresies, which he 
dedicated to Clement XI. Tertullian, he 
says, being ill advised in his youth, and de- 
ceived by that shadow of repose which the 
conjugal state offers to the travellers in this 
miserable world, threw himself into the 
troubled sea of matrimony. And no sooner 
had he taken a wife, than being made wise 
by his own misfortunes, he composed his 
laborious treatise de molestiis nuptiarum, con- 
cerning the troubles of marriage, finding in 
this employment the only relief from those 
continual miseries, to which, he adds, we who 
now write may bear our present and too 
faithful testimony, — delle quali Noi ancora 
che queste cose scriviamo, siamo per lui tes- 
timonio pur troppo vero e presente. 

The Historian of Heresy and the Hebrew 
Professor might have learned a lesson from 
Petrarch's Dialogue de importund Uxore, in 



that work of his de Remediis Utriusque For- 
tunce. When Dolor complains of having a 
bad wife, Ratio reminds him that he might 
blame his ill- fortune for any other calamity, 
but this he had brought upon himself and 
the only remedy was patience. 

Est mala crux, conjux mala ; crux tamen illaferenda est 
Qua nemo nisi Mors te relevare potest. 

" It is the unhappy chance of many," says 
Jeremy Taylor, " that finding many incon- 
veniences upon the mountains of single life, 
they descend into the valleys of marriage to 
refresh their troubles, and there they enter 
into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by 
the cords of a man's or woman's peevish- 
ness ; and the worst of the evil is, they are 
to thank their own follies, for they fell into 
the snare by entering an improper way." 
To complain of the consequences, which are 
indeed the proper punishment, is to commit 
a second folly by proclaiming the first, and 
the second deserves the ridicule it is sure to 
meet with. Hartley Coleridge has well said, 
that there must always be something de- 
fective in the moral feelings or very unfor- 
tunate in the circumstances of a man who 
makes the public his confidant! 

If Thomas Gent had read Lord Berners' 
Castle of Love, which might easily, rare as 
it has now become, have fallen in his way 
a hundred years ago, he would there have 
seen fifteen reasons why men do wrong 
when they speak ill of women, and twenty 
reasons why they ought to speak well of 
them. All lovers of our old literature know 
how greatly we are beholden to John Bou- 
chier, Knight, Lord Berners, who, when 
Deputy General of the King's Town of 
Calais and Marches of the same, employed 
his leisure in translating books out of French 
into English. But he must have been one 
of those persons, who, with a great appetite 
for books, have no discriminating taste, or 
he would not have translated Arthur of 
Little Britain, when Gyron le Courtoys and 
Meliadus were not extant in his own lan- 
guage ; nor would he, even at the instance 
of Lady Elizabeth Carew, if he had known 
a good book from a bad one, have englished 



THE DOCTOR. 



283 



from its French version the Carcel de Amor, 
which Diego de San Pedro composed at the 
request of the Alcayde de los Donzelles, 
D. Diego Hernandez, and of other Knights 
and Courtiers. 

The reader will please to observe that 
though all worthless books are bad, all bad 
books are not necessarily worthless. A work, 
however bad, if written, as the Carcel de 
Amor was, early in the sixteenth century, 
and translated into Italian, French, and 
English, must be worth reading to any per- 
son who thinks the history of literature (and 
what that history includes) a worthy object 
of pursuit. If I had not been one of those 
who like Ludovicus Bosch — (my friend in 
the caxon) — are never weary of hunting 
in those woods, I could not, gentle reader, 
have set before you, as I shall incontinently 
proceed to do, the fifteen above-mentioned 
and here following reasons, why you will 
commit a sin if you ever speak in disparage- 
ment of womankind. 

First then, Leriano, the unhappy hero of 
Diego de San Pedro's tragic story, says that 
all things which God has made are neces- 
sarily good ; women therefore being his 
creatures, to calumniate them is to blas- 
pheme one of his works. 

Secondly, there is no sin more hateful 
than ingratitude ; and it is being ungrateful 
to the Yirgin Mary if we do not honour all 
women for her sake. 

Thirdly, it is an act of cowardice for man 
who is strong, to offend woman who is weak. 

Fourthly, the man who speaks ill of 
woman brings dishonour upon himself, in- 
asmuch as every man is of woman born. 

Fifthly, such evil speaking is, for the last- 
mentioned reason, a breach of the fifth 
commandment. 

Sixthly, it is an obligation upon every 
noble man to employ himself virtuously both 
in word and deed ; and he who speaks evil 
incurs the danger of infamy. 

Seventhly, because all knights are bound 
by their order to show respect and honour 
to all womankind. 

Eighthly, such manner of speech brings 
the honour of others in question. 



Ninthly, and principally, it endangers the 
soul of the evil speaker. 

Tenthly, it occasions enmities and the 
fatal consequences resulting therefrom. 

Eleventhly, husbands by such speeches 
may be led to suspect their wives, to use 
them ill, to desert them, and peradventure 
to make away with them. 

Twelfthly, a man thereby obtains the 
character of being a slanderer. 

Thirteenthly, he brings himself in jeopardy 
with those who may think themselves bound 
to vindicate a lady's reputation or revenge 
the wrong which has b°en done to it. 

Fourteenthly, to speak ill of women is a 
sin because of the beauty which distinguishes 
their sex, which beauty is so admirable that 
there is more to praise in one woman than 
there can be to condemn in all. 

Fifteenthly, it is a sin because all the 
benefactors of mankind have been born of 
women, and therefore we are obliged to 
women for all the good that has ever been 
done in the world. 

Such are the fifteen reasons which Diego 
de San Pedro excogitated to show that it is 
wrong for men to speak ill of women ; and 
the twenty reasons which he has superin- 
duced to prove that they are bound to speak 
well of them are equally cogent and not less 
curious. I have a reason of my own for 
reserving these till another opportunity. 
Not, however, to disappoint my fair readers 
altogether of that due praise which they 
have so properly expected, I will conclude 
the present chapter with a few flowers taken 
from the pulpit of my old acquaintance 
Adam Littleton. There is no impropriety 
in calling him so, though he died before my 
grandfathers and grandmothers were born ; 
and when I meet him in the next world I 
hope to improve this one-sided acquaint- 
ance by introducing myself and thanking 
him for his Dictionary and his Sermons. 

The passage occurs in a sermon preached 
at the obsequies of the Right Honourable 
the Lady Jane Cheyne. The text was 
" Favour is deceitful, and Beauty is vain ; 
but a woman that feareth the Lord, she 
shall be praised:" in which proposition, says 



284 



THE DOCTOR. 



the -Preacher, we have, First the subject 
Woman, with her qualification that fears the 
Lord: Secondly the predicate, she shall be 
praised. 

" Woman, in the primitive design of Na- 
ture, God's master-piece, being the last 
work of creation, and made with a great 
deal of deliberation and solemnity. 

" For to look upon her as a supernume- 
rary creature, and one brought into the 
world by the bye, besides the Creator's first 
intention, upon second thoughts, — is to lay 
a foul imputation upon Divine Wisdom, as 
if it had been at a stand, and were to seek. 

" Wherefore, as we used to argue that all 
things were made for the use and service of 
man, because he was made last of all ; I do 
not see, if that argument be good, why the 
same consequences should not be of like 
force here too, that Man himself was made 
for the affectionate care of Woman, who 
was framed not only after him, but out of 
him too, the more to engage his tenderest 
and dearest respects. 

"Certainly this manner of production 
doth plainly evince the equality of the 
Woman's merits and rights with Man ; she 
being a noble cyon transplanted from his 
stock, and by the mystery of marriage im- 
planted into him again, and made one with 
him. 

" She is then equally at least partaker with 
him of all the advantages which appertain to 
human nature, and alike capable of those 
improvements which by the efforts of reason, 
and the methods of education and the in- 
stincts of the Blessed Spirit, are to be made 
upon it. — 

" Hence it was that all Arts and Sciences, 
all Virtues and Graces, both divine and 
moral, are represented in the shape and 
habit of Women. Nor is there any reason 
for fancying Angels themselves more of our 
sex than of the other, since amongst them 
there is no such distinction, but they may as 
well be imagined female as male. 

"Above all for Piety and Devotion, which 
is the top-perfection of our nature, and 
makes it most like angelical ; as the capacity 
of Women is as large, so their inclinations 



are generally more vigorous, the natural 
bias and tendency of their spirits lying that 
way, and their softer temper more kindly 
receiving the supernatural impression of 
God's Spirit. 

" This is that, if any thing, which gives 
their sex the pre-eminence above us men 
and gains them just advantages of praise; 
that whereas those who have only a hand- 
some shape and good features to commend 
them, are adored and idolised by persons of 
slight apprehensions and ungoverned pas- 
sions, pious and virtuous women command 
the veneration of the most judicious, and 
are deservedly admired by holy men and 
Angels." 

Thus saith that Adam of whom even 
Adam Clarke might have been proud as a 
namesake ; and whose portrait the Gen- 
tlemen of the name of Adam who meet and 
dine together at a tavern in London, once a 
year, ought to have in their club-room. 



CHAPTER CXVII. 

CONCERNING JOB'S WIFE. 

This insertion is somewhat long, and utterly impertinent 
to the principal matter, and makes a great gap in the tale ; 
nevertheless is no disgrace, but rather a beauty and to 
very good purpose. 

PUTTENHAM. 

It has been a custom in popish countries, 
when there were no censors of the press 
civil or ecclesiastical to render it unne- 
cessary, for an author to insert at the be- 
ginning of his work a protestation declaring, 
that if the book contained anything con- 
trary to the established faith, he thereby re- 
voked any such involuntary error of opinion. 
Something similar has sometimes been done 
in free countries, and not then as a mere 
form, nor for prudential considerations, but 
in the sincerity of an upright intention, and 
a humble mind. — " Who can tell how oft he 
offendeth? O cleanse thou me from my 
secret faults ! " 

To be sure what I am about to say is upon 



THE DOCTOK. 



285 



a matter of less import, and may seem neither 
to require nor deserve so grave a prelude. 
But it is no part of my philosophy to turn 
away from serious thoughts when they lie 
before me. 

H^X?- xzotrQi^zs i/rriv s/Vs/v.* 

I had no intention of quoting scripture when 
I began, but the words came to mind and I 
gave them utterance, and thou wilt not be 
displeased, good reader, at seeing them thus 
introduced. — Good reader, I have said: — 
if thou art not good, I would gladly persuade 
thee to become so; — and if thou art good, 
would fain assist thee in making thyself bet- 
ter. Si de tout ce que je vous ai dit, un mot 
peut vous etre utile, je riaurai nul regret a ma 
peine.f 

Well then benevolent and patient reader, 
it is here my duty to confess that there is a 
passage in the last chapter which I am bound 
to retract. For since that chapter was 
written I have found cause to apprehend 
that in vindicating Guy's daughter I have 
wronged Job's wife, by accrediting a re- 
ceived calumny founded upon a mistransla- 
tion. I did not then know, what I have now 
learned, that a judicious and learned writer, 
modest enough to conceal his name and 
designate himself only as a private gentle- 
man, had many years ago, in a Review of 
the History of Job, stated his reasons for 
regarding her as a much injured woman. 

Every one knows that the wife of Job in 
our Bible says to her husband, " Dost thou 
still retain thine integrity ? Curse God and 
die ! " Now this writer asserts that the 
Hebrew verb which our translators render 
in this place to curse, means also to bless, to 
salute, or give the knee, and that there are 
but four more places in all the Bible where 
it can be supposed to have an opposite 
meaning, and that even in those places it 
may admit of the better signification. It is 
not surprising that many verbal difficulties 
should occur in a book, which, if of later 
date than the books of Moses, is next to 



Euripides. 



t Mad. de Maintenon. 



them in antiquity. Such difficulties might 
be expected whether we have it in its original 
language, or whether it were written, as 
many have opined, by Job himself in Syriac, 
Arabic, or Idumean, and translated into 
Hebrew ; much more if the opinion of Dr. 
Wall could be admitted, that it was written 
at first in hieroglyphics, against which the 
length of the book is a conclusive objection. 
" I should imagine," says the anonymous 
defender, " she had so high an opinion of 
her husband's innocence that she might 
mean to advise him, seeing notwithstanding 
his uprightness he was thus amazingly 
afflicted, to go and kneel or bow down be- 
fore God, and plead or as it were expos- 
tulate with him concerning the reason of 
these dreadful calamities, — even though he 
should die. If this sense of her expressions 
be allowed, it will justify Job's wise rebuke 
for her inconsiderateness, while, as he still 
possessed his soul in submissive patience, 
crying out — ' Thou speakest as a rash, 
thoughtless, or foolish woman : what, shall we 
receive good at the hands of God, and shall 
we not receive evil ? ' — Indeed it should 
seem that God himself did not behold her as 
an impious or blasphemous woman, inasmuch 
as we find she was made a great instrument 
in Job's future and remarkable prosperity, 
becoming after their - great calamity the 
mother of seven sons and three most beau- 
tiful daughters. I say she was their mother, 
because we have no intimation that Job had 
any other wife." 

Now upon consulting such authorities as 
happen to be within my reach, I find that this 
interpretation is supported by the Yulgate, 
— benedic Deo, et morere ; and also by the 
version of Junius and Tremellius — adhuc 
tu retines integritatem luam, benedicendo Deum 
atque moriendo. Piscator too renders the 
word in its better sense, as I learn from the 
elder Wesley's elaborate collation of this 
most ancient book, from which I collect also 
that the Chaldee version gives the good 
meaning, the Arabian and Syriac the bad 
one ; and that the words of the Septuagint 
a\\a elir6v tl prj/na ets Kvpiov Kal TeAeirra, are in- 
terpreted by the Scholiast KaTapacrov rhu 0eoV. 



286 



THE DOCTOR. 



Moreover, a passage of some length which 
is in no other translation except that of St. 
Ambrose, is found in three manuscripts of 
the Septuagint, one* of them being that 
from which the text of the Oxford edition 
of 1817 is taken. It is as follows: "But 
after much time had elapsed, his wife said 
unto him, how long wilt thou endure thus, 
saying, ' I will expect yet a little while, 
awaiting the hope of my salvation ? ' Behold 
thy memory hath passed away from the earth, 
the sons and daughters of my womb, whom 
I have with pain and sorrow brought forth 
in vain. Thou thyself sittest among filthy 
worms, passing the night under the open 
sky ; and I am a wanderer and a servant, 
from place to place and from house to house, 
looking for the sun to go down that I may 
rest from the grief and labour that oppress 
me. Speak then a word against the Lord, 
and die ! " 

If the text were to be considered singly, 
without reference to anything which may 
assist in determining its meaning, it would 
perhaps be impossible now to ascertain 
among these contrariant interpretations 
which is the true one. But the generous 
Englishman who in this country first in our 
language undertook the vindication of this 
Matriarch and by whom I have been led to 
make the present pertinent inquiry, has 
judiciously (as has been seen) observed in 
confirmation of his opinion, that the cir- 
cumstance of her having been made a par- 
taker in her husband's subsequent prosperity 
is proof that she also had been found righ- 
teous under all their trials. This is a valid 
argument deduced from the book itself. 

It would be invalidated were there any 
truth in what certain Talmudists say, that 
Job came into the world only to receive his 
good things in it ; that when Satan was per- 
mitted to afflict him he began to blaspheme 
and to revile his Maker, and that therefore 
the Lord doubled his measure of prosperity 
in this life, that he might be rejected from 
the world to come. But when we remember 
that he is called " a perfect and an upright 



* I.e. the Vatican MS. 



man, one that feareth God and escheweth 
evil," we may say with the great Cistercian 
Rabbinomastix, Hcec est magna blasphemia 
et convicium in lob. Other Rabbis repre- 
sent him as a fatalist, put into his mouth 
the common argument of that false and 
impious philosophy, and affirm that there is 
no hope of his salvation : what they say con- 
cerning him may safely be rejected. Others 
of the same school assert that there never 
was any such person as Job, in the teeth of 
the Prophet Ezekiel, — and that his whole 
history is only a parable : if their opinion 
were right it would be useless to inquire 
into the character of his wife ; sed isti redar- 
guuntur, says Bartolocci, ex nomine ipsius 
et nomine civitatis ejusdem. Just as, what- 
ever inconsiderate readers may suppose who 
take these my reminiscences of the Doctor 
for a work of fiction, Daniel Dove was 
Daniel Dove nevertheless, and Doncaster is 
Doncaster. 

There is nothing then among the Jewish 
traditions, so far as my guides lead me, that 
can throw any light upon the subject of this 
inquiry. But there is among the Arabian, 
where it was more likely to be found ; and 
though the Arabic translation supports the 
evil meaning of the equivocal text, the 
tradition on the contrary is in favour of 
Job's wife. It is indeed a legend, a mere 
figment, plainly fabulous ; but it is founded 
upon the traditional character of Job's wife 
in Job's own country. There are two ver- 
sions of the legend. The one Sale has given 
as a comment upon the text of the Koran, — 
" Remember Job when he cried unto his 
Lord, saying, Verily evil hath afflicted me ; 
but Thou art the most merciful of those 
who show mercy ! " 

When Job, says this legend, was in so 
loathsome a condition that as he lay on a 
dunghill none could bear to come near him, 
his wife alone attended him dutifully with 
great patience, and supported him with what 
she earned by her labour. One day the 
Devil appeared to her, reminded her of their 
former prosperity, and promised to restore 
all they had lost if she would worship him. 
He had overcome Eve by a less temptation ; 



THE DOCTOR. 



287 



the Matriarch did not yield like the Mother 
of Mankind, but neither did she withstand 
it ; she took a middle course, and going to 
her husband repeated to him the proposal, 
and asked his consent : whereat he was so 
indignant that he swore if he recovered to 
give her an hundred stripes ; and then it 
was that he uttered the ejaculation recorded 
in the Koran. Immediately the Lord sent 
Gabriel, who took him by the hand and 
raised him up ; a fountain sprung up at his 
feet, he drank of it, and the worms fell from 
his wounds, and he washed in it, and his 
health and beauty were restored. "What his 
wife had done was not imputed to her for 
sin, doubtless in consideration of the motive, 
and the sense of duty and obedience to her 
lord and master which she had manifested. 
She also became young and beautiful again; 
and that Job might keep his oath and 
neither hurt her nor his own conscience, he 
was directed to give her one blow with a 
palm branch having an hundred leaves. 

The legend, as related in D'Herbelot, is 
more favourable to her and exempts her 
from all blame. According to Khondemir, 
whom he follows, what Job's wife, here called 
Rasima, provided for her miserable husband, 
Satan stole from her, till he deprived her at 
last of all means of supporting him, and thus 
rendered him utterly destitute. As soon as 
the tempter had effected this, he appeared to 
Rasima in the form of a bald old woman, 
and offered if she would give him the two 
locks which hung down upon her neck, to 
supply her every day with whatever she 
wanted for her husband. Rasima joyfully 
accepted the proposal, cut off her locks and 
gave them to the false old woman. JSTo 
sooner was Satan possessed of them than he 
went to Job, told him that his wife had been 
detected in dishonouring herself and him, 
and that she had been ignominiously shorn 
in consequence, in proof of which he pro- 
duced the locks. Job when he saw that his 
wife had indeed been shorn of her tresses, 
believed the story, and not doubting that 
she had allowed the Devil to prevail over 
her, swore if ever he recovered his health to 
punish her severely. Upon this Satan ex- 



ulting that he had provoked Job to anger, 
assumed the form of an Angel of Light, and 
appearing to the people of the land, said he 
was sent by the Lord to tell them that Job 
had drawn upon himself the displeasure of 
the Most High, wherefore he had lost the 
rank of Prophet which theretofore he had 
held, and they must not suffer him to remain 
among them, otherwise the wrath of the 
Lord would be extended to them also. Job 
then breathed the prayer which is in the 
Koran, and the legend proceeds as in the 
other version, except that nothing is said 
concerning the manner in which he was dis- 
charged of his vow, the vow itself being 
annulled when Rasima's innocence was made 
known. 

The Koran, where it touches upon this 
legend, says, it was said to Job, " take a 
handful of rods in thy hand, and strike thy 
wife therewith, and break not thine oath." 
Sale observes upon this that as the text 
does not express what this handful of rods 
was to be, some commentators have sup- 
posed it to be dry grass, and others rushes, 
and others (as in the legend) a palm branch. 
But the elder Wesley takes the words in 
their direct and rigorous meaning, and 
says that as the Devil had no small part in 
the Koran, this passage indubitably bears 
his stamp, for who but the Devil would 
instigate any one to beat his wife ? This 
erudite commentator (he deserves to be so 
called) vindicates the Matriarch in one of 
his Dissertations, and says that in the speech 
for which Job reproved her she only advised 
him to pray for death : in the mouth of a 
Greek or Roman matron it might have been 
understood as an exhortation to suicide ; — 
Hcec ore Grcecce aut Romance mnlieris pro- 
lata ut lieroica qucedam exliortatio essct sus- 
pecta. 

His favourable opinion is entitled to more 
weight, because it was formed when he made 
the book of Job his particular study, whereas 
in an earlier work, the History of the Bible 
in verse, he had followed the common error, 
and made Satan as the last and worst of 
Job's torments play his wife against him, 
saying that the fiercest shock which the 



288 



THE DOCTOR. 



Patriarch sustained was from the tempest 
raised by her tongue. 

The expositors who comment upon this 
text of the Koran without reference to the 
legend, have differed in opinion as to the 
offence which Job's wife had committed 
thus to provoke her husband, some asserting 
that he swore to punish her with stripes 
because she had stayed too long on an 
errand, — an opinion by no means con- 
sistent with his patience. 

Returning to the main argument I con- 
clude, that if upon the meaning of the 
doubtful word in the Hebrew text authori- 
ties are so equipoised as to leave it doubtful, 
these traditions being of Arabian growth 
have sufficient weight to turn the scale ; 
even if it were not a maxim that in cases of 
this kind the most charitable opinion ought 
to be preferred. And as Dr. Southey has 
classed this injured Matriarch in a triad 
with Xantippe and Mrs. Wesley, I cannot 
but hope that the candid and learned Lau- 
reate, who, as I before observed, has con- 
descended to clear the character of some 
Irish cast-off cavalry horses, will, when he 
has perused this chapter, render the same 
justice to Job's wife ; and in the next edi- 
tion of his Life of Wesley, substitute 
Hooker's in her place. 



CHAPTER CXVIII. 

POINTS OF SIMILITUDE AND DISSIMILITUDE 
BETWEEN SIR THOMAS BROWN AND DOC- 
TOR DOVE. 

But in these serious works designed 
To mend the morals of mankind, 
We must for ever be disgraced 
With all the nicer sons of taste, 
If once the shadow to pursue 
We let the substance out of view. 
Our means must uniformly tend « 

In due proportion to their end, 
And every passage aptly join 
To bring about the one design. 

Churchill. 

Dr. Johnson says that, " perhaps there is 
no human being, however hid in the crowd 
from the observation of his fellow mortals, 



who if he has leisure and disposition to 
recollect his own thoughts and actions, will 
not conclude his life in some sort a miracle, 
and imagine himself distinguished from all 
the rest of his species by many discrimina- 
tions of nature or of fortune." This remark 
he makes in relation to what Sir Thomas 
Brown asserts of the course of his own life, 
that it was " a miracle of thirty years, which 
to relate were not a history, but a piece of 
poetry, and would sound to common ears 
like a fable." Now it is not known that any 
thing extraordinary ever befell him. " The 
wonders," says Johnson, "probably were 
transacted in his own mind : self-love, co- 
operating with an imagination vigorous and 
fertile as that of Brown, will find or make 
objects of astonishment in every man's 
life." 

What the Philosopher of Norwich con- 
sidered as miraculous was probably this, 
that he had escaped from " Pyrrho's maze," 
and had never been contaminated in Epi- 
curus' sty ; that he had neither striven for 
place among the " wrangling crew " nor 
sought to make his way with the sordid 
herd ; that he had not sold himself to the 
service of Mammon ; but in mature years 
and with deliberate judgment had chosen a 
calling in which he might continually in- 
crease his knowledge and enlarge his views, 
and entertain a reasonable hope that while 
he endeavoured to relieve the sufferings of 
his fellow creatures and discipline his own 
mind, the labours wherein his life was passed 
would neither be useless to others nor to 
himself. He might well consider it a miracle 
of divine mercy that grace had been given 
him to fulfil the promise made for him at 
his baptism, and that he had verily and 
indeed renounced the pomps and vanities of 
this wicked world. He might indeed take 
comfort in his " authentic reflections how 
far he had performed the great intention of 
his Maker; — whether he had made good 
the principles of his nature and what he 
was made to be ; what characteristic and 
special mark he had left to be observable in 
his generation ; whether he had lived to 
purpose or in vain ; and what he had added, 



THE DOCTOR. 



289 



acted, or performed, that might considerably 
speak him a man." 

There were more resemblances between 
Sir Thomas Brown and the Doctor than 
Fluellen discovered between Henry of 
Monmouth and Alexander the Great. Both 
graduated in the same profession at the same 
university ; and each settled as a prac- 
titioner in a provincial town. (Doncaster 
indeed was an inconsiderable place compared 
with Norwich ; and Brown merely procured 
his degree at Leyden, which was not in his 
time, as it was in Daniel Dove's, the best 
school of physic in Europe.) Both too were 
Philosophers as well as Physicians, and both 
were alike speculative in their philosophy 
and devout- Both were learned men. Sir 
Thomas Brown might have said of himself 
with Herbert, 

I know the ways of learning ; both the head 

And pipes that feed the press and make it run ; 
What reason hath from nature borrowed, 

Or of itself, like a good housewife, spun 
In laws and policy : what the Stars conspire ; 
What willing Nature speaks, what forced by fire ; 

Both the old discoveries, and the new found seas : 
The stock and surplus, cause and history: 

All these stand open, or I have the keys. 

The Doctor could not have said this ; he 
would rather have said, 

I am but one who do the world despise 

And would my thoughts to some perfection raise, 

A wisdom-lover, willing to be wise.* 

Yet he was as justly entitled to the appel- 
lation of a learned man by his multifarious 
knowledge, as he was far from pretending to 
it. There were many things of which he 
was ignorant, and contented to be ignorant, 
because the acquirement would not have 
been worth the cost. Brown would have 
taken with just confidence a seat at the 
Banquet of the Philosophers, whereas Dove 
would have thought himself hardly worthy 
to gather up the crumbs that fell from their 
table. 

A certain melancholy predominated as 
much in the constitution of Sir Thomas's 
mind, as in that of Charles the First, to 
whom his portrait bears so remarkable a 

» Lord Stirling. 



resemblance; and a certain mirth entered as 
largely into the composition of the Doctor's, 
as it did into Charles the Second's, to whom 
in all moral respects no one could be more 
utterly unlike. The elements have seldom 
been so happily mixed as they were in 
the Philosopher of Norwich ; he could not 
have been perfectly homogeneous if a par- 
ticle of the quintelement had been super- 
added ; — such an ingredient would have 
marred the harmony of his character : 
whereas the Philosopher of Doncaster would 
have been marred without a large portion 
of it. 

It was a greater dissimilarity, and alto- 
gether to be regretted, that my Doctor left 
nO " characteristic and special mark to be 
observable in his generation ; " but upon 
this I shall make some observations here- 
after. What led me to compare these 
persons, incomparable each in his own way, 
was that my Doctor, though he did not look 
upon his own history as miraculous, con- 
sidered that the course of his life had been 
directed by a singular and special Providence. 
How else could it have been that being an 
only son, — an only child, the sole represen- 
tative in his generation of an immemorial 
line, — his father, instead of keeping him 
attached to the soil, as all his forefathers 
had been, should have parted with him for 
the sake of his moral and intellectual im- 
provement, not with a view to wealth or 
worldly advancement, but that he might 
seek wisdom and ensue it? — that with no 
other friend than the poor schoolmaster of a 
provincial townlet, and no better recom- 
mendation, he should have been placed with 
a master by whose care the defects of his 
earlier education were supplied, and by 
whose bounty, after he had learned the 
practical routine of his profession, he was 
sent to study it as a science in a foreign 
university, which a little before had been 
raised by Boerhaave to its highest repu- 
tation ; — that not only had his daily bread 
been given him without any of that wearing 
anxiety which usually attends upon an 
unsettled and precarious way of life, but in 
the very house which when sent thither in 



290 



THE DOCTOR. 



boyhood he had entered as a stranger, he 
found himself permanently fixed, as succes- 
sively the pupil, the assistant, the friend, 
and finally the successor and heir of his 
benefactor ; — above all, that he had not been 
led into temptation, and that he had been 
delivered from evil. 

" My life," said an unfortunate poor man 
who was one of the American Bishop 
Hobart's occasional correspondents, "has 
been a chapter of blunders and disappoint- 
ments." John Wilkes said that "the chapter 
of accidents is the longest chapter in the 
book;" and he, who had his good things 
here, never troubled himself to consider 
whether the great volume were the Book of 
Chance, or of Necessity, the Demogorgon of 
those by whom no other deity is acknow- 
ledged. With a wiser and happier feeling 
Bishop White Kennett when he was asked 
"where are we?" answered the question 
thus, — "in a world where nothing can be 
depended on but a future state ; in the way 
to it, little comfort but prayers and books." 
White Kennett might have enjoyed more 
comfort if he had been born in less con- 
tentious times, or if he had taken less part 
in their contentions, or if he had been placed 
in a less conspicuous station. Yet he had 
little cause to complain of his lot, and he 
has left behind him good works and a good 
name. 

There is scarcely any man who in thought- 
fully contemplating the course of his own 
life would not find frequent reason to 
say, 

— in fede mia 
Hofatto bene a nonfare a mio modo.* 

The Doctor, however, was one of the very 
few who have never been put out of their 
designed course, and never been disposed to 
stray from it. 

Spesso sipcrde il buono 
Cercando il meglio. E a scegliere il senliero 
Chi vuol troppo esser saggio, 
Del tempo abusa, e nonfa mat viaggio.f 



HlCClARDETTO. 



t Metastasio. 



INTERCHAPTER XV. 

THE AUTHOR RECOMMENDS A CERTAIN WELL- 
KNOWN CHARACTER AS A CANDIDATE FOR 
HONOURS, BOTH ON THE SCORE OF HIS 
FAMILY AND HIS DESERTS. HE NOTICES 
ALSO OTHER PERSONS WHO HAVE SIMILAR 
CLAIMS. 

Thoricht, avf Be.ssrung der Thoren xu harren! 

Kinder der klugheit, o habet die Narren 

Eben xum Narren auch, wie sich's gehort. Goethe. 

In these days when honours have been so 
profusely distributed by the most liberal of 
Administrations and the most popular of 
Kings, I cannot but think that Tom Fool 
ought to be knighted. And I assure the 
reader that this is not said on the score of 
personal feeling, because I have the honour 
to be one of his relations, but purely with 
regard to his own claims, and the fitness of 
things, as well as to the character of the 
Government. 

It is disparaging him, and derogatory to 
his family, which in undisputed and indis- 
putable antiquity exceeds any other in these 
kingdoms, — it is disparaging him, I say, to 
speak of him as we do of Tom Duncombe, 
and Tom Cribb, and Tom Campbell ; or of 
Tom Hood and Tom Moore, and Tom 
Sheridan ; and before them of Tom Browne 
and Tom D'Urfey, and Tom Killigrew. Can 
it be supposed if he were properly presented 
to his Majesty (Lord Nugent would in- 
troduce him), and knelt to kiss the royal 
hand, that our most gracious and good- 
natured King would for a moment hesitate 
to give him the accollade, and say to him 
" Rise Sir Thomas ! " 

I do not ask for the Guelphic Order; 
simple Knighthood would in this case be 
more appropriate. 

It is perfectly certain that Sir Thomas 
More, if he were alive, would not object to 
have him for a brother knight and namesake. 
It is equally certain that Sir Thomas Leth- 
bridge could not, and ought not. 

Dryden was led into a great error by his 
animosity against Hunt and Shadwell when 
he surmised that " dullness and clumsiness 



THE DOCTOR. 



291 



were fated to the name of Tom." " There 
are," says Serjeant Kite, " several sorts of 
Toms ; Tom o' Lincoln, Tom Tit, Tom Tell- 
truth, Tom o' Bedlam and Tom Fool!" 
With neither of these is dulness or clumsi- 
ness associated. And in the Primitive World, 
according to the erudite philologist who 
with so much industry and acumen col- 
lected the fragments of its language, the 
word itself signified just or perfect. There- 
fore the first Decan of the constellation 
Virgo was called Tom, and from thence 
Court de Gebelin derives Themis : and thus 
it becomes evident that Themistocles be- 
longs to the Toms. Let no Thomas then or 
Sir Thomas, who has made shipwreck of his 
fortune or his reputation or of both, con- 
sider himself as having been destined to 
such disgrace by his godfathers and god- 
mothers when they gave him that name. 
The name is a good name. Any one who 
has ever known Sir Thomas Acland may 
like it and love it for his sake : and no wise 
man will think the worse of it for Tom 
Fool's. 

No ! the name Thomas is a good name, 
however it has been disparaged by some of 
those persons who are known by it at this 
time. Though Bovius chose to drop it and 
assume the name Zephiriel in its stead in 
honour of his tutelary Angel, the change 
was not for the better, being indeed only a 
manifestation of his own unsound state of 
mind. And though in the reign of King- 
James the First, Mr. William Shepherd of 
Towcester christened his son by it for a 
reason savouring of disrespect, it is not the 
worse for the whimsical consideration that 
induced him to fix upon it. The boy was 
born on the never-to-be-forgotten fifth of 
November 1605, about the very hour when 
the Gunpowder Treason was to have been 
consummated ; and the father chose to have 
him called Thomas, because he said this 
child, if he lived to grow up, would hardly 
believe that ever such wickedness could be 
attempted by the sons of men. 

It is recorded that a parrot which was 
j seized by a kite and carried into the air, 
j escaped by exclaiming Sancte Thoma adjuva 



me ! for upon that powerful appeal the kite 
relaxed his hold, and let loose the intended 
victim. This may be believed, though it is 
among the miracles of Thomas a Becket, to 
whom and not to the great schoolman of 
Aquino, nor the Apostle of the East, the 
invocation was addressed. Has any other 
human name ever wrought so remarkable a 
deliverance ? 

Has any other name made a greater noise 
in the world. Let Lincoln tell, and Oxford ; 
for although, omnis clocha clochabilis in 
clocherio clochando, clochans clocJiativo, clo- 
charefacit clochabiliter clochantes, yet among 
them all, Master Janotus de Bragmardo 
would have assigned pre-eminence to the 
mighty Toms. 

The name then is sufficiently vindicated, 
even if any vindication were needed, when 
the paramount merits of my claimant are 
considered. 

Merry Andrew likewise should be pre- 
sented to receive the same honour, for 
sundry good reasons, and especially for this, 
that there is already a Sir Sorry Andrew. 

I should also recommend Tom Noddy, 
were it not for this consideration, that the 
honour would probably soon be merged in 
an official designation, and therefore lost 
upon him ; for when a certain eminent states- 
man shall be called from the Lower House, 
as needs he must ere long, unless the party 
who keep moving and push him forward as 
their leader, should before that time relieve 
him of his hereditary rights, dignities, and 
privileges, no person can possibly be found 
so worthy to succeed him in office and tread 
in his steps, as Tom Noddy. 

Nor is Jack Pudding to be forgotten, who 
is cousin-german to that merry man Andrew ! 
He moreover deserves it by virtue of his 
Puddingship ; the Puddings are of an ancient 
and good family : the Blacks in particular 
boast of their blood. 

Take, reader, this epigram of that cheer- 
ful and kind-hearted schoolmaster Samuel 
Bishop of Merchant Taylors, written in his 
vocation upon the theme Aliusque et Idem — 

Five countries from five favorite dishes name 
The popular stage buffoon's professional name. 



292 



THE DOCTOR. 



Half fish himself, the Dutchman never erring 

From native instinct, styles him Pickle Herring. 

The German whose strong palate haut-gouis fit, 

Calls him Hans Werst, that is John-Sausage-Wit. 

The Frenchman ever prone to badinage 

Thinks of his soup, and shrugs, Eh ! voila Jean Potage ! 

Full of ideas his sweet food supplies, 

The Italian, Ecco Macaroni! cries. 

While English Taste, whose board with dumplin smokes, 

Inspired by what it loves, applauds Jack Pudding's jokes. 

A charming bill of fare, you'll say, to suit 

One dish, and that one dish a Fool, to boot ! 

" A learned man will have it," says 
Fuller, " that Serapis is nothing more than 
Apis with the addition of the Hebrew Sar, a 
Prince, whence perchance our English Sir." 
Odd, that the whole beast should have ob- 
tained this title in Egypt, and a part of it in 
England. For we all know that Loin of 
Beef has been knighted, and who is not 
pleased to meet with him at dinner? and 
John Barleycorn has been knighted, and who 
is not willing to pledge him in all companies 
in a glass ? 

But wherefore should I adduce prece- 
dents, as if in this age any regard were paid 
to them in the distribution of honours, or 
there could be any need of them in a case 
which may so well stand upon its own 
merits. 



CHAPTER CXIX. 

THE DOCTOR IN HIS CURE. IRRELIGION THE 
REPROACH OF HIS PROFESSION. 

Virtue, and that part of philosophy 
Will I apply, that treats of happiness 
By virtue especially to be achieved. 

Taming of the Shrew. 

A practitioner of medicine possesses in 
what may be called his cure, that knowledge 
of all who are under his care, which the 
parochial priest used to possess in former 
times, and will it is to be hoped regain when- 
ever the most beneficial of all alterations 
shall be effected in the Church Establish- 
ment, and no Clergyman shall have a duty 
imposed upon him which it is impossible to 
fulfil, — impossible it is, if his parishioners 
are numbered by thousands instead of hun- 
dreds. In such cases one of two conse- 



quences must inevitably ensue. Either he 
will confine himself to the formalities of his 
office, and because he cannot by any exer- 
tions do what ought to be done, rest con- 
tented with performing the perfunctory 
routine ; or he will exert himself to the 
utmost till his health, and perhaps his heart 
also, is broken in a service which is too often 
found as thankless as it is hopeless. 

Our Doctor was, among the poorer fami- 
lies in his cure, very much what Herbert's 
Country Parson is imagined to be in his 
parish. There was little pauperism there at 
that time ; indeed none that existed in a de- 
gree reproachful to humanity ; or in that 
obtrusive and clamorous form which at pre- 
sent in so many parts of this misgoverned 
country insults, and outrages, and endangers 
society. The labourers were not so ill paid 
as to be justly discontented with their lot ; 
and he was not in a manufacturing district. 
His profession led him among all classes ; 
and his temper as well as his education 
qualified him to sympathise with all, and 
accommodate himself to each as far as such 
accommodation was becoming. Yet he was 
everywhere the same man ; he spoke the 
King's English in one circle, and the King's 
Yorkshire in another ; but this was the only 
difference in his conversation with high and 
low. Before the professors of his art in- 
deed, in the exercise of their calling, the 
distinctions of society disappear, and poor 
human nature is stripped to its humanities. 
Rank, and power, and riches, — these — 

— cannot take a passion away, Sir, 
Nor cut a fit but one poor hour shorter.* 

The most successful stock-jobber or manu- 
facturer that ever counted his wealth by 
hundreds of thousands — 

— must endure as much as the poorest beggar 
That cannot change his money, — this is equality 
In our impartial essences ! * 

Death is not a more inexorable leveller than 
his precursors age, and infirmity, and sick- 
ness, and pain. 

Hope, and fear, and grief, and joy act with 
the same equitable disregard of conventional 

* Beaumont and Fletcher. 



THE DOCTOR. 



- . 



distinctions. And though there is reason 
for disbelieving that the beetle which we 
tread upon feels as much as a human being 
suffers in being crushed, it is yet undoubtedly 
true that except in those cases where indi- 
viduals have so thoroughly corrupted their 
feelings as to have thereby destroyed the in- 
stinctive sense of right and wrong, making 
evil their good, what may be termed the 
primitive affections exist in as much strength 
among the rudest as among the most re- 
fined. They may be paralysed by pauper- 
ism, they may be rotted by the licentiousness 
of luxury ; but there is no grade of society 
in which they do not exhibit themselves in 
the highest degree. Tragic poets have been 
attracted by the sufferings of the great, and 
have laid the scene of their fables in the 
higher circles of life ; yet tragedy represents 
no examples more touching or more dread- 
ful, for our admiration or abhorrence, to 
thrill us with sympathy or with indignation, 
than are continually occurring in all classes 
of society. 

They who call themselves men of the 
world and pride themselves accordingly upon 
their knowledge, are of all men those who 
know least of human nature. It wa3 well 
said by a French biographer, though not 
well applied to the subject * of his biography, 
that il avait pu, dans la solitude, se former a 
Tumour du vrai et du juste, et meme a la con- 
noissance de Vhomme, si souvent et si mal a. 
propos confondue avec celle des hommes ; c'est- 
a-dire, avec la petite experience des intrigues 
mouvantes (Tun petit nombre cTindividus plus 
ou moins accreditees et des habitudes etroites 
de leurs petites coteries. La connoissance des 
hommes est a celle de Vhomme ce quest T in- 
trigue sociale a Vart social. 

Of those passions which are or deserve to 
be the subject of legal and judicial tragedy, 
the lawyers necessarily see most, and for 
this reason perhaps they think worse of 
human nature than any other class of men, 
except the Roman Catholic Clergy. Phy- 
sicians, on the contrary, though they see 
humanity in its most humiliating state, see 



The Abbe Sieves. 



it also in the exercise of its holiest and most 
painful duties. Xo other persons - 
such deep emotions and such exert; 
self-control. They know what virtt. 
developed by the evils which flesh is heir 
to, what self-devotion, what patience, what 
fortitude, what piety, what religious re- 
signation. 

Wherefore is it then that physicians have 
lain under the reproach of irreligion, who of 
all men best know how fearfully and wonder- 
fully we are made, and who, it might be 
thought, would be rendered by the 
at which they are continually called upon 
to assist, of all men the most rel:r loaf 8 
Thomas Brown acknowledges that this was 
the general scandal of his profession, and his 
commentator Sir Ken elm Digby observes 
upon the passage, that " Physicians do com- 
monly hear ill in this behalf," and it 
is a common b it," he parent".. 

" only amongst the unlearned sort) ubi tres 
media duo at heir Rabelais de:: 
sician to be animal incombustible propter 
religionem. 

:; As some mathematicians," says an old 
Preacher, " deal so much in Jacob ■ 
that they forget Jacob's ladder, so . some 
Physicians (God decrease the number I) are 
so deep naturalists that they are very shallow 
Christians. With us, Grace waits at the 
heels of Nature, and they dive so deep into 
the secrets of philosophy that they never 
look up to the myster i . ..ity." 

Old 'Adam Littleton, who looked at every j 
thing in its best light, took a different view 
of the effect of medical studies, in his sermon 
upon St. Luke's day. u His dbaraef a 
Physician," said he, " certainly gave him no 
mean advantage, not only in the e: 
of his ministry by an acceptable address 
and easy admission which men of that | 
sion everywhere find among persons of any 
civility ; but even to his understan 
Christian truths and to the apprehending 
the mysteries of faith. 

•• Pot having, as that study directed him, 
gone orderly over all the links of that chain 
by which natural causes are mutually tied to 
one another, till he found God the supreme 



294 



THE DOCTOR. 



cause and first mover at the top ; having 
traced the footsteps of Divine Goodness 
through all the most minute productions of 
his handmaid Nature, and yet finding human 
reason puzzled and at a loss in giving an 
account of his almighty power and infinite 
wisdom in the least and meanest of his 
works ; with what pious humility must he 
needs entertain supernatural truths, when 
upon trial he had found every the plainest 
thing in common nature itself was mystery, 
and saw he had as much reason for his 
believing these proposals of faith, as he had 
for trusting the operations of sense, or the 
collections of reason itself. 

" I know there is an unworthy reproach 
cast upon this excellent study that it in- 
clines men to atheism. 'Tis true the ig- 
norance and corruption of men that profess 
any of the three honourable faculties bring 
scandal upon the faculty itself. Again, 
sciolists and half-witted men are those that 
discredit any science they meddle with. 
But he that pretends to the noble skill of 
physic, and dares to deny that which doth 
continually incurrere in sensus, that which 
in all his researches and experiments he must 
meet with at every turn, I dare to say he is 
no Physician ; or at least that he doth at 
once give his profession and his conscience 
too the lye." 



CHAPTER CXX. 

EFFECT OF MEDICAL STUDIES ON DIFFERENT 
DISPOSITIONS. JEW PHYSICIANS. ESTI- 
MATION AND ODIUM IN WHICH THEY WERE 
HELD. 

Conficsso la digression ; mas es facil al que no quisiere 
leerla, passar al capitulo siguiente, y esta advertencia 
sirva de disculpa. 

Luis Munoz. 

If the elder Daniel had thought that the 
moral feelings and religious principles of his 
son were likely to be endangered by the 
study of medicine, he would never have 
been induced to place him with a medical 
practitioner. But it seemed to him, good 



man, that the more we study the works of 
the Creator, the more we must perceive and 
feel his wisdom, and his power, and his 
goodness. It was so in his own case, and, 
like Adam Littleton and all simple-hearted 
men, he judged of others by himself. 

Nevertheless that the practice of Physic, 
and still more of surgery, should have an 
effect like that of war upon the persons 
engaged in it, is what those who are well 
acquainted with human nature might expect, 
and would be at no loss to account for. It 
is apparent that in all these professions 
coarse minds must be rendered coarser, and 
hard hearts still farther indurated ; and that 
there is a large majority of such minds and 
hearts in every profession, trade and calling, 
few who have had any experience of the 
ways of the world can doubt. We need not 
look farther for the immediate cause. Add 
to a depraved mind and an unfeeling dispo- 
sition either a subtle intellect or a daring 
one, and you have all the preparations for 
atheism that the Enemy could desire. 

But other causes may be found in the 
history of the medical profession, which was 
an art, in the worst sense of the word, before 
it became a science, and long after it pre- 
tended to be a science, was little better 
than a craft. Among savages the sorcerer 
is always the physician ; and to this day 
superstitious remedies are in common use 
among the ignorant in all countries. But 
wherever the practice is connected with 
superstition as free scope is presented to 
wickedness as to imagination ; and there 
have been times in which it became ob- 
noxious to much obloquy, which on this 
score was well deserved. 

Nothing exposed the Jews to more odium 
in ages when they were held most odious, 
than the reputation which they possessed as 
physicians. There is a remarkable instance 
of the esteem in which they were held for 
their supposed superiority in this art as late 
as the middle of the sixteenth century. 
Francis I. after a long illness in which he 
found no benefit from his own physicians, 
dispatched a courier into Spain, requesting 
Charles V. to send him the most skilful 



THE DOCTOR. 



•295 



Jewish practitioner in Lis dominions. This 
afforded matter for merriment to the Spa- 
niards ; the Emperor, however, gave orders 
to make inquiry for one, and when he could 
hear of none who would trust himself in that 
character, he sent a New-Christian phy- 
sician, with whom he supposed Francis 
would be equally satisfied. But when this 
person arrived in France, the King by way of 
familiar discourse sportively asked him if he 
were not yet tired of expecting the Messiah ? 
Such a question produced from the new 
Convert a declaration that he was a Chris- 
tian, upon which the King dismissed him 
immediately without consulting him, and 
sent forthwith to Constantinople for a Jew. 
The one who came found it necessary to 
prescribe nothing more for his royal patient 
than Asses' milk. 

This reputation in which their physicians 
were held was owing in great measure to the 
same cause which gave them their superiority 
in trade. The general celebrity which they 
had obtained in the dark ages, and which is 
attested by Eastern tales as well as by 
European history, implies that they had 
stores of knowledge which were not acces- 
sible to other people. And indeed as they 
communicated with all parts of the known 
world, and with parts of it which were un- 
known to the Christian nations, they had 
means of obtaining the drugs of the East, 
and the knowledge of what remedies were in 
use there, which was not of less importance 
in an art, founded, as far as it was of any 
avail, wholly upon experience. That know- 
ledge they reserved to themselves, perhaps 
as much with a view to national as to pro- 
fessional interests. 

Nicolas Antonio sent to Bertolacci a 
manuscript entitled Otzar Haajiijm, that is, 
" The Treasure of the Poor," written by a 
certain Master Julian in the Portuguese 
language, but in rabbinical characters. It 
was a collection of simple receipts for all 
diseases, and appears to have been written 
thus that it might be serviceable to those 
only who were acquainted with Hebrew. 
There was good policy in this. A king's 
physician in those days was hardly a less 



important person than a king's confessor ; 
with many princes indeed he would be the 
more influential of the two, as being the 
most useful, and frequently the best in- 
formed ; and in those times of fearful in- 
security, it might fall within his power, like 
Mordecai, to avert some great calamity from 
his nation. 

Among the articles which fantastic super- 
stition, or theories not less fantastic, had in- 
troduced into the materia medica, there were 
some which seemed more appropriate to the 
purposes of magic than of medicine, and 
some of an atrocious kind. Human fat was 
used as an unguent, — that of infants as a 
cosmetic. Romances mention baths of 
children's blood ; and there were times and 
countries in which such a remedy was as 
likely to be prescribed, as imagined in 
fiction. It was believed that deadly poisons 
might be extracted from the human body ; 
— and they who were wicked enough to 
administer the product, would not be scru- 
pulous concerning the means whereby it 
was procured. One means indeed was by 
tormenting the living subject. To such 
practices no doubt Harrison alludes when, 
speaking, in Elizabeth's reign, of those who 
graduated in the professions or law or 
physic, he says, " one thing only I mislike in 
them, and that is their usual going into 
Italy, from whence very few without special 
grace do return good men, whatever they 
pretend of conference or practice ; chiefly 
the physicians, who under pretence of seek- 
ing of foreign simples, do oftentimes learn 
the framing of such compositions as were 
better unknown than practised, as I have 
often heard alleged." The suspicion of such 
practices attached more, to the Jewish than 
to any other physicians, because of the 
hatred with which they were supposed to 
regard all Christians, a feeling which the 
populace in every country, and very fre- 
quently the Rulers also, did everything to 
deserve. The general scandal of atheism lay 
against the profession ; but to be a Jew was 
in common opinion to be worse than an 
atheist, and calumnies were raised against 
the Jew Physicians on the specific ground of 



296 



THE DOCTOR. 



their religion, which, absurd and monstrous 
as they were, popular credulity was ready 
to receive. One imputation was that they 
made it a point of conscience to kill one 
patient in five, as a sacrifice of atonement 
for the good which they had done to the 
other four. Another was that the blood of 
a Christian infant was always administered to 
a Jewess in child-bed, and was esteemed so 
necessary an ingredient in their superstitious 
ceremonies or their medical practice at such 
times, that they exported it in a dried and 
pulverised form to Mahommedan countries, 
where it could not be obtained fresh. 

They are some pages in Jackson's Treatise 
upon the Eternal Truth of Scripture and 
Christian Belief, which occurring in a work 
of such excellent worth, and coming from 
so profound and admirable a writer, must be 
perused by every considerate reader with as 
much sorrow as surprise. They show to 
what a degree the most judicious and chari- 
table mind may be deluded when seeking 
eagerly for proofs of a favourite position or 
important doctrine, even though the posi- 
tion and the doctrine should be certainly 
just. Forgetful of the excuse which he has 
himself suggested for the unbelief of the 
Jews since the destruction of Jerusalem, 
saying, with equal truth and felicity of ex- 
pression, that " their stubborness is but a 
strong hope malignified, or, as we say, grown 
wild and out of kind," he gives credit * to 
the old atrocious tales of their crucifying 
Christian children, and finds in them an 
argument for confirming our faith at which 
the most iron-hearted supralapsarian might 
shudder. For one who passes much of his 
time with books, and with whom the dead 
are as it were living and conversing, it is 
almost as painful to meet in an author 
whom he reveres and loves, with anything 
which shocks his understanding and disturbs 
his moral sense, as it is to perceive the faults 
of a dear friend. When we discover aberra- 
tions of this kind in such men, it should 
teach us caution for ourselves as well as 
tolerance for others ; and thus we may 



E.g. vol. i. p. 148. &c. Ed. Folio. 



derive some benefit even from the errors of 
the wise and good. 

That the primitive Christian should have 
regarded the Jews with hostile feelings as 
their first persecutors, was but natural, and 
that that feeling should have been aggravated 
by a just and religious horror for the crime 
which has drawn upon this unhappy nation 
its abiding punishment. But it is indeed 
strange that during so many centuries this 
enmity should have continued to exist, and 
that no sense of compassion should have 
mitigated it. For the Jews to have inherited 
the curse of their fathers was in the ap- 
prehension of ordinary minds to inherit 
their guilt ; and the cruelties which man 
inflicted upon them were interpreted as 
proofs of the continued wrath of Heaven, so 
that the very injuries and sufferings which 
in any other case would have excited com- 
miseration, served in this to close the heart 
against it. Being looked upon as God's 
outlaws, they were everywhere placed as it 
were under the ban of humanity. And while 
these heart-hardening prepossessions sub- 
sisted against them in full force, the very 
advantages of which they were in possession 
rendered them more especial objects of 
envy, suspicion, and popular hatred. In 
times when literature had gone to decay 
throughout all Christendom, the Jews had 
not partaken of the general degradation. 
They had Moses and the Prophets, whose 
everlasting lamps were kept trimmed amongst 
them, and burning clearly through the dark 
when the light of the Gospel had grown dim 
in the socket, and Monkery and Popery had 
well nigh extinguished it. They possessed 
a knowledge of distant countries which was 
confined to themselves ; for being dispersed 
everywhere, they travelled everywhere with 
t!;e advantage of a language which was 
spoken by the Children of Israel wherever 
they were found, and nowhere by any other 
people. As merchants therefore and as 
statesmen they had opportunities peculiar to 
themselves. In both capacities those Princes 
who had any sense of policy found them 
eminently useful. But wealth made them 
envied, and the way in which they increased 



THE DOCTOR. 



297 



it by lending money made them odious in 
ages when to take any interest was accounted 
usury.* That odium was aggravated when- 
ever they were employed in raising taxes; and 
as they could not escape odium, they seem 
sometimes to have braved it in despite or in 
despair, and to have practised extortion if 
not in defiance of public opinion, at least as 
a species of retaliation for the exactions 
which they themselves endured, and the 
frauds which unprincipled debtors were 
always endeavouring to practise upon them. 
But as has already been observed, nothing 
exposed them to greater obloquy than the 
general opinion which was entertained of 
their skill in medicine, and of the flagitious 
practices with which it was accompanied. 
The conduct of the Eomish Church tended 
to strengthen that obloquy, even when it 
did not directly accredit the calumnies which 
exasperated it. Several Councils denounced 
excommunication against any persons who 
should place themselves under the care of 
a Jewish Physician, for it was pernicious 
and scandalous they said, that Christians, 
who ought to despise and hold in horror 
the enemies of their holy religion, should 
have recourse to them for remedies in sick- 
ness. They affirmed that medicines admi- 
nistered by such impious hands became 
hurtful instead of helpful; and, moreover, 
that the familiarity thus produced between 
a Jewish practitioner and a Christian family 
gave occasion to great evil and to many 
crimes. The decree of the Lateran Council 
by which physicians were enjoined, under 
heavy penalties, to require that their patients 
should confess and communicate before they 
administered any medicines to them, seems 
to have been designed as much against 
Jewish practitioners as heretical patients. 
The Jews on their part were not more cha- 
ritable, when they could express their feel- 
ings with safety. It appears in their own 
books that a physician was forbidden by the 
Rabbis to attend upon either a Christian 
or Gentile, unless he dared not refuse ; 

* See the remarkable words of Jewel on 1 Thess. iv. 6. 
pp. 78— 86. Ed. Folio. 1611. Archbishop Abbot's Lectures 
on Jonah, p. 90. Ed. 1613. 4to. 



under compulsion it was lawful, but he was 
required to demand payment for his ser- 
vices, and never to attend any such patients 
gratuitously. 



CHAPTER CXXI. 

WHEREIN IT APPEARS THAT SANCHo's PHY- 
SICIAN AT BARATARIA ACTED ACCORDING 
TO PRECEDENTS AND PRESCRIBED LAWS. 

Lettor, tu vedi ben com' to innalxo 

La mia materia, e perb con piu arte 

Non ti maravigliar s' V la rincalzo. Dante. 

But the practice both of medicine and of 
surgery, whatever might be the religion of 
the practitioner, was obnoxious to suspicions 
for which the manners of antiquity, of the 
dark ages, and of every corrupted society, 
gave but too much cause. It was a power 
that could be exercised for evil as well as 
for good. 

One of the most detestable acts recorded 
in ancient history is that of the Syrian usur- 
per Tryphon, who, when he thought it 
expedient to make away with young Anti- 
ochus, the heir to the kingdom, delivered 
him into a surgeon's hands to be cut for the 
stone, that he might in that manner be put 
to death. It is a disgraceful fact that the 
most ancient operation known to have been 
used in surgery, is that abominable one 
which to the reproach of the civil and ec- 
clesiastical authorities is still practised in 
Italy. 

Physicians were not supposed to be more 
scrupulous than surgeons. The most famous 
and learned Doctor Christopher Wirtzung, 
whose General Practice of Physic was trans- 
lated from German into English at the 
latter end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, by 
his countryman Jacob Mosan, Doctor in the 
same faculty, has this remarkable section in 
his work : 

" Ancient Physicians were wont to have 
an old proverb, and to say that Venom is 
so proud that it dwelleth commonly in gold 
and silver ; whereby they meant that great 



298 



THE DOCTOR. 



personages that eat and drink out of gold 
and silver, are in greater danger to be poi- 
soned than the common people that do eat 
and drink out of earthen dishes." Chris- 
topher Wirtzung might have quoted Juve- 
nal here : 

Nulla aconita bibuntur 
Fictilibus. Tunc ilia time, cum pocula sumes 
Gemmata, et lalo Setinum ar debit in auro. 

"Wherefore," proceeds the German Doctor, 
" must such high personages that are afraid 
to be poisoned, diligently take heed of the 
meat and drink that they eat, and that are 
dressed of divers things. Also they must 
not take too much of all sweet, salt and sour 
drinks ; and they must not eat too eagerly, 
nor too hastily ; and they must at all times 
have great regard of the first taste of their 
meat and drink. But the most surest way 
is, that before the mealtide he take some- 
what that may resist venom, as figs, rue, or 
nuts, each by himself, or tempered together. 
The citrons, rape-seed, nepe, or any of those 
that are described before, the weight of a 
drachm taken with wine, now one and then 
another, is very much commended. Some- 
times also two figs with a little salt, then 
again mithridate or treacle, and such like 
more may be used before the mealtide." 

" It is a matter of much difficulty," says 
Ambrose Pare, " to avoid poisons, because 
such as at this time temper them are so 
thoroughly prepared for deceit and mischief 
that they will deceive even the most wary 
and quick-sighted ; for they so qualify the 
ingrate taste and smell by the admixture of 
sweet and well-smelling things that they 
cannot easily be perceived even by the skil- 
ful. Therefore such as fear poisoning ought 
to take heed of meats cooked with much 
art, very sweet, salt, sour, or notably en- 
dued with any other taste. And when they 
are opprest with hunger or thirst, they must 
not eat nor drink too greedily, but have a 
diligent regard to the taste of such things 
as they eat or drink. Besides, before meat 
let them take such things as may weaken 
the strength of the poisons, such as is the 
fat broth of good nourishing flesh-meats. 



In the morning let them arm themselves 
with treacle or mithridate, and conserve of 
roses, or the leaves of rue, a walnut and dry 
figs : besides let him presently drink a little 
draught of muscadine, or some other good 
wine." 

How frequent the crime of poisoning had 
become in the dark ages appears by the old 
laws of almost every European people, in 
some of which indeed its frequency, Proh 
dolor! is alleged as a reason for enacting- 
statutes against it. And whilst in the empire 
the capital sentence might be compounded 
for, like other cases of homicide, by a stated 
compensation to the representatives of the 
deceased, no such redemption was allowed 
among the Wisi-Goths, but the poisoner, 
whether freeman or slave, was to suffer the 
most ignominious death. In the lower ranks 
of life men were thought to be in most 
danger of being thus made away with by 
their wives, in the higher by their Physicians 
and their cooks. 

There are two curious sections upon this 
subject in the Laws of Alphonso the Wise, 
the one entitled Qudles dehen ser los fisicos 
del Rey, et que es lo que deben facer ; — 
What the Physicians of a King ought to be, 
and what it is they ought to do : — the 
other, Qudles dehen ser los ojiciales del Hey 
que le han de servir en su comer et en su 
beber : What the officers of a King ought to 
be who minister to him at his eating and at 
his drinking. 

" Physic," says the royal author, " ac- 
cording as the wise antients have shown, is 
as much as to say the knowledge of under- 
standing things according to nature, what 
they are in themselves, and what effect each 
produces upon other things ; and therefore 
they who understand this well, can do much 
good, and remove many evils ; especially by 
preserving life and keeping men in health, 
averting from them the infirmities whereby 
they suffer great misery, or are brought to 
death. And they who do this are called 
Physicians, who not only must endeavour to 
deliver men from their maladies, but also to 
preserve their health in such manner that 
they may not become sick ; wherefore it is 



THE DOCTOK. 



2S9 



necessary that those whom the King has 
with him should be right good. And as 
Aristotle said to Alexander, four things are 
required in them ; — First that they should 
be knowing in their art ; secondly, that they 
should be well approved in it ; thirdly, that 
they should be skilled in the cases which 
may occur ; fourthly, that they should be 
right loyal and true. For if they are not 
knowing in their art, they will not know how 
to distinguish diseases ; and if they are not 
well approved in it, they will not be able to 
give such certain advice, which is a thing 
from whence great hurt arises ; and if they 
are not skilful, they will not be able to act 
in cases of great danger when such may 
happen ; and if they are not loyal, they can 
commit greater treasons than other men, be- 
cause they can commit them covertly. And 
when the King shall have Physicians in 
whom these four aforesaid things are found, 
and who use them well, he ought to do them 
much honour and much good ; and if per- 
adventure they should act otherwise know- 
ingly, they commit known treason, and 
deserve such punishment as men who trea- 
cherously kill others that have confided in 
them. 

" Regiment also in eating and drinking 
is a thing without which the body cannot be 
maintained, and therefore the officers who 
have to minister to the King or others have 
no less place than those of whom we have 
spoken above, as to the preservation of his 
life and his health. For albeit the Phy- 
sicians should do all their endeavours to 
preserve him, they will not be able to do it 
if he who prepares his food for him should 
not choose to take the same care ; we say the 
same also of those who serve him with bread, 
and wine, and fruit, and all other things of 
which he has to eat, or drink. And accord- 
ing as Aristotle said to Alexander, in these 
officers seven things are required ; — First, 
that they be of good lineage, for if they be, 
they will always take heed of doing things 
which would be ill for them ; secondly, that 
they be loyal, for if they be not so, great 
danger might come to the King from them ; 
thirdly, that they be skilful, so that they 



may know how to do those things well which 
appertain to their offices: fourthly, that they 
be of good understanding, so that they may 
know how to comprehend the good which the 
King may do them, and that they be not 
puffed up, nor become insolent because of 
their good fortune ; fifthly, that they be not 
over covetous, for great covetousness is the 
root of all evil ; sixthly, that they be not 
envious in evil envy, lest if they should be, 
they might haply be moved thereby to com- 
mit some wrong ; seventhly, that they be 
not much given to anger, for it is a thing 
which makes a man beside himself, and this 
is unseemly in those who hold such offices. 
And also besides all those things which we 
have specified, it behoveth them greatly 
that they be debonair and clean, so that 
what they have to prepare for the King, 
whether to eat or drink, may be well pre- 
pared ; and that they serve it to him clean- 
lily, for if it be clean he will be pleased with 
it, and if it be well prepared he will savour 
it the better, and it will do him the more 
good. And when the King shall have such 
men as these in these offices, he ought to 
love them, and to do them good and honour ; 
and if peradventure he should find that any 
one offends in not doing his office loyally, so 
that hurt might come thereof to the person 
of the King, he ought to punish him both in 
his body and in his goods, as a man who doth 
one of the greatest treasons that can be." 

The fear in which the Princes of more 
barbarous states lived in those ages is no- 
where so fully declared as in the Palace- 
laws compiled by that King of Majorca who 
was slain at the battle of Cressy, from which 
laws those of his kinsman Pedro the Cere- 
monious of Arragon, who drove him from 
his kingdom, were chiefly taken. His butler, 
his under butler, his major domo, and his 
cooks were to swear fealty and homage, 
quia tarn propter nefandissimam wfidclitutem 
aliquorum vrinistrorum, quam ipsorum uegii- 
geutiam, qua} est totius boui inimica, qua 
?ni7iistrante omittuntur prcccavenda, audivimus 
pluries tarn Begibus quam aliis Prineipibus 
maxima pcrictda cvenisse, quod est plus qnam 
summe abkorrendum. No stranger might 



SCO 



THE DOCTOR. 



approach the place where any food for the 
King's table was prepared or kept ; and all 
the cooks, purveyors and sub-purveyors, and 
the major domo, and the chamberlain were to 
taste of every dish which was served up to 
him. The noble who ministered to him when 
he washed at table was to taste the water, 
and the barber who washed his head was to 
do the like ; for great as the King was, being- 
mindful that he was still but a man, he 
acknowledged it necessary that he should 
have a barber, pro humanis necessitatibus, 
quibus natura hominum quantdcunque /return 
potentid nullum fecit expertem, etiam nos 
Barbitonsorum officio indigemus. His tailor 
was to work in a place where no suspicious 
people could have access ; and whatever 
linen was used for his bed, or board, or 
more especially for his apparel, was to be 
washed in a secret place, and by none but 
known persons. The Chief Physician was 
to taste all the medicines that he adminis- 
tered. Every morning he was to inspect 
the royal urinal, and if he perceived any 
thing amiss prescribe accordingly. He was 
to attend at table, caution the King against 
eating of anything that might prove hurt- 
ful, and if, notwithstanding all precautions, 
poisons should be administered, he was to 
have his remedies at hand. 

By the Chinese laws, if either the super- 
intending or dispensing officer, or the cook, 
introduces into the Emperor's kitchen any 
unusual drug, or article of food, he is to be 
punished with an hundred blows, and com- 
pelled to swallow the same. 



CHAPTER CXXII. 

A CHAPTER WHEREIN STUDENTS IN SURGERY 
MAY FIND SOME TACTS WHICH WERE NEW 
TO THEM IN THE HISTORY OF THEIR OWN 
PROFESSION. 

If I have more to spin, 
The wheel shall go. Herbert. 

Another reproach to which the medical 
profession was exposed arose from the pre- 
paratory studies which it required. The 



natural but unreflecting sentiment of horror 
with which anatomy is everywhere regarded 
by the populace, was unfortunately sanc- 
tioned by the highest authorities of the 
Roman Church. Absolutely necessary for 
the general good as that branch of science 
indisputably is, it was reprobated by some 
of the Fathers in the strongest and most 
unqualified terms ; they called it butchering 
the bodies of the dead ; and all persons who 
should disinter a corpse for this purpose 
were excommunicated by a decree of Boni- 
face the VHIth, wherein the science itself 
was pronounced abominable both in the eyes 
of God and man. In addition to this cause 
of obloquy, there was a notion that cruel 
experiments, such as are now made upon 
animals and too often unnecessarily, and 
therefore wickedly repeated, were sometimes 
performed upon living men.* The Egyptian 
Physician who is believed first to have 
taught that the nerves are the organs of 
sensation, is said to have made the discovery 
by dissecting criminals alive. The fact is 
not merely stated by Celsus, but justified by 
him. Deducing its justification as a conse- 
quence from the not-to-be-disputed asser- 
tion cum in interioribus partibus et dolores, et 
morborwm varia genera nascantur, neminem 
his adhibere posse remedia, quce ipse ignoret : 
— necessarium ergo esse, he proceeds to say, 
incidere corpora morluorum, eorumque viscera 
atque intestina scrutari. Longeque optime 
fecisse Herophilum et Erasistratum, qui 
nocentes homines a regibus ex carcere ac- 
ceptos, vivos inciderint ; consider arintque, 
etiam spiritu manente, ea quce natura antea 
clausisset, eorumque posituram, colorem, figu- 
ram, magnitudinem, ordinem, duritiem, molli- 
tiem, Icevorem, contactum; processus deinde 
singidorum et recessus ; et sive quid inseritur 
alteri, sive quid partem alterius in se recipit. 
As late as the sixteenth century surgeons 
were wont to beg (as it was called) con- 
demned malefactors, whom they professed 
to put to death in their own way, by opium 
before they opened them. It might well be 
suspected that these disciples of Celsus were 



* The curious reader should refer to Nicolai Klimii 
Iter Subterraneum, c. ix. p. 139. Ed. 1766. 



THE DOCTOK. 



301 



not more scrupulous than their master ; and 
they who thus took upon themselves the 
business of an executioner, had no reason to 
complain if they shared in the reproach 
attached to his infamous office. 

A French author * of the sixteenth cen- 
tury says that the Physicians at Montpelier, 
which was then a great school of medicine, 
had every year two criminals, the one living, 
the other dead, delivered to them for dissec- 
tion. He relates that on one occasion they 
tried what effect the mere expectation of 
death would produce upon a subject in per- 
fect health, and in order to this experiment 
they told the gentleman (for such was his 
rank) who was placed at their discretion, 
that, as the easiest mode of taking away his 
life they would employ the means which 
Seneca had chosen for himself, and would 
therefore open his veins in warm water. 
Accordingly they covered his face, pinched 
his feet without lancing them, and set them 
in a foot-bath, and then spoke to each other 
as if they saw that the blood were flowing 
freely, and life departing with it. The man 
remained motionless, and when after a while 
they uncovered his face they found him 
dead. 

It would be weakness or folly to deny 
that dangerous experiments for the promo- 
tion of medical or surgical practice may, 
without breach of any moral law, or any 
compunctious feeling, be tried upon crimi- 
nals whose lives are justly forfeited. The 
Laureate has somewhere in his farraginous 
notes de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, 
produced a story of certain Polish physicians 
who obtained permission to put on the head 
of a criminal as soon as it had been cut off, 
and an assurance of his pardon if they should 
succeed in reuniting it. There is nothing to 
be objected to such an experiment, except 
its utter unreasonableness. 

When it was necessary that what was at 
that time a most difficult and dangerous 
surgical operation should be performed upon 
Louis XIV., inquiry was made for men 
afflicted with the same disease ; they were 

* BOUCHET. 



conveyed to the house of the minister Lou- 
vois, and there in the presence of the King's 
physician Fagon, Felix the chief surgeon 
operated upon them. Most of these patients 
died ; they were interred by night, but, 
notwithstanding all precautions, it was ob- 
served that dead bodies were secretly carried 
from that house, and rumours got abroad 
that a conspiracy had been discovered, that 
suspected persons had been brought before 
the minister, and had either died under the 
question or been made away with by poison 
under his roof. The motive for this secresy 
was that the King might be saved from that 
anxiety which the knowledge of what was 
going on must have excited in him. In 
consequence of these experiments, Felix 
invented new instruments which he tried at 
the Hotel des Invalides, and when he had 
succeeded with them the result was com- 
municated to the King, who submitted to 
the operation with characteristic fortitude. 
The surgeon performed it firmly and suc- 
cessfully ; but the agitation which he had 
long struggled against and suppressed, pro- 
duced then a general tremour from which 
he never recovered. The next day, in bleed- 
ing one of his own friends he maimed him 
for life. 

This was a case in which the most consci- 
entious practitioner would have felt no 
misgiving ; there was no intentional sacrifice 
of life, or infliction of unnecessary suffer- 
ing. So too when inoculation for the small- 
pox was introduced into this country ; some 
condemned criminals gladly consented to be 
inoculated instead of hanged, and saved 
their lives by the exchange. 

It is within the memory of some old mem- 
bers of the profession, that a man was 
sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, who 
had a wen upon his throat weighing between 
thirty and forty pounds. To hang him was 
impossible without circumstances of such 
revolting cruelty as would, even at that 
time, have provoked a general outcry of 
indignation. The case found its way from 
the lawyers to the surgeons ; the latter ob- 
tained his pardon, and took off the tumour. 
John Hunter was the operator ; the man, 



302 



THE DOCTOR. 



his offence not having been of a very heinous 
kind, though the indiscriminating laws made 
it at that time capital, was taken into his 
service, and used to show his own wen in 
his master's museum ; it was the largest from 
which any person had ever been relieved. 
The fate of the poor Chinese who underwent 
a similar operation in London with a differ- 
ent result, is fresh in remembrance and will 
long be remembered. The operation was 
made a public exhibition for medical stu- 
dents, instead of being performed with all 
circumstances that could tend to soothe the 
patient ; and to the consequent heat of a 
crowded room, and partly perhaps to the 
excitement which such an assemblage oc- 
casioned in the object of their curiosity, the 
fatal termination was, with too much pro- 
bability, imputed. We may be sure that no 
such hazardous operation will ever again be 
performed in this country in the same pub- 
lic manner. 

The remarks which were called forth on 
that occasion are proofs of the great im- 
provement in general feeling upon such 
points, that has taken place in modern times. 
In the reign of Louis XL a franc-archer of 
Meudon was condemned to be hanged for 
robbery and sacrilege ; he appealed to the 
Court of Parliament, but that Court con- 
firmed the sentence, and remanded him to 
the Provost of Paris for execution. The 
appeal, however, seems to have brought the 
man into notice, and as he happened to 
afford a surgical case as well as a criminal 
one, the surgeons and physicians of the 
French capital petitioned the King for leave 
to operate upon him. They represented 
that many persons were afflicted with the 
stone and other internal disorders ; that the 
case of this criminal resembled that of the 
Sieur de Bouchage, who was then lying 
dangerously ill ; it was much to be desired 
for his sake that the inside of a living man 
should be inspected, and no better subject 
could have occurred than this franc-archer 
who was under sentence of death. This 
application was made at the instance of Ger- 
maine Colot, a practitioner who had learned 
his art under one of the Norsini, a Milanese 



family of itinerant surgeons*, celebrated 
during several generations for their skill in 
lithotomy. Whether the criminal had his 
option of being hanged, or opened alive, is 
not stated; but Monstrelet, by whom the 
fact is recorded, says that permission was 
granted, that the surgeons and physicians 
opened him, inspected his bowels, replaced 
them, and then sewed him up; that the 
utmost care was taken of him by the King's 
orders, that in the course of fifteen days he 
was perfectly cured, and that he was not 
only pardoned but had a sum of money given 
him. To such means were the members of 
this profession driven, because anatomy was 
virtually if not formally prohibited. 

A much worse example occurred when 
the French King Henry II. was mortally 
wounded in tilting with Montgomery. It is 
stated by most historians, that a splinter 
from Montgomery's spear entered the King's 
visor and pierced his eye ; but Vincent Car- 
loix, who probably was present, and if not, 
had certainly the best means of information, 
shows that this is altogether an erroneous 
statement. He says that when the Scot had 
broken his spear upon the King, instead of 
immediately throwing away the truncheon, 
as he ought to have done, he rode on hold- 
ing it couched ; the consequence of this 
inadvertence was, that it struck the King's 
visor, forced it up, and ran into his eye. 
His words are these, ayans tons deux fort 
valeureusement couru et rompu cftine grande 
dexterite et adresse lews lances, ce mal-habile 
Lorges ne jecta pas, selon V ordinaire cous- 
tume, le trousse qui demoura en la main la 
lance rompue ; mais le porta tousjours baisse, 
et en courant, rencontra la teste du Roy, du 
quel il donna droit dedans la visiere qui le 
coup hauls a, et luy creva un ceil. 

The accuracy of this account happens to 
be of some' J *r?ftportance, because the course 
which the King's surgeons pursued in con- 
sequence illustrates the state of surgery at 
that time, and of manners and laws also ; 



* The *' Whitworth Doctors," as they were called, 
were all of one family, in our own country. Their rough- 
ness and their skill were about on a par. 



THE DOCTOK. 



303 



for with the hope of ascertaining in what 
direction the broken truncheon had entered 
the brain, and how they might best proceed 
to extract the splinters, they cut off the 
heads of four criminals, and drove broken 
truncheons into them, as nearly as they 
could judge at the same inclination, and 
then opened the heads. But after these 
lessons, five or six of the most expert sur- 
geons in France were as much at a loss 
as before. 

It was well that there were criminals ready 
upon the occasion, otherwise perhaps, in the 
then temper of the French Court, the first 
Huguenots who came to hand might have 
been made to serve the turn. And it was 
well for the subjects that it was not thought 
advisable to practise upon them alive ; for 
no scruples would have been entertained 
upon the score of humanity. When Philip 
Yon Huten, whom the Spanish writers call 
Felipe de Utre, made his expedition from 
Venezuela in search of the Omeguas, an 
Indian wounded him with a spear, under 
the right arm, through the ribs. One Diego 
de Montes, who was neither surgeon nor 
physician, undertook to treat the wound, 
because there was no person in the party 
better qualified to attempt it. A life was 
to be sacrificed for his instruction, and ac- 
cordingly a friendly Cacique placed the 
oldest Indian in the village at his disposal. 
This poor creature was dressed in Von 
Huten' s coat of mail (sayo o escaulpil) and 
set on horseback ; Montes then ran a spear 
into him through the hole in this armour, 
after which he opened him, and found that 
the integuments of the heart had not been 
touched, this being what he wished to ascer- 
tain. The Indian died; but Von Huten' s 
wound was opened and cleansed in full reli- 
ance upon the knoAvledge thus obtained, and 
he recovered. 



CHAPTER CXXIII. 

SOME ALLUSION TO, AND SOME USE OF THE 
FIGURE OF SPEECH CALLED PARENTHESIS. 

J'ecrirai ici mes pensees sans ordre, el non pas peut- 
etre dans une confusion sans dessein ; c'est le veritable 
ordre, et qui marquera toujour s man objet par le desordre 
m&me. Pascal. 

Gentle reader, — and if gentle, good read- 
er, — and if good, patient reader : for if not 
gentle, then not good ; and if not good, then 
not gentle ; and neither good nor gentle, if 
not patient ; — dear reader, who art happily 
for thyself all three, it is, I know, not less 
with thy good will than with my own, that 
I proceed with this part of my subject. 
Quelle matiere que je traite avec vous, c'est 
toujour s un plaisir pour mot. * You will say 
to me, " amuse yourself (and me) in your 
own way ; ride your own round-about, so 
you do but come to the right point at last." f 
To that point you are well assured that all 
my round-abouts tend ; and my care must 
be to eschew the error of that author, engi- 
neer, statesman, or adventurer of any kind, 

Which of a weak and niggardly projection, 
Doth like a miser spoil his coat with scanting 
A little cloth 4 

Lady Hester Stanhope had an English 
Physician with her in Syria, who, if he be 
living, can bear testimony tbat her Lady- 
ship did not commit this fault, when she 
superintended the cutting out of his scarlet 
galligaskins. Neither will I commit it. 

You indeed, dear reader, would express 
no displeasure if, instead of proceeding in 
the straight line of my purpose, I should 
sometimes find it expedient to retrograde ; 
or, borrowing a word of barbarous Latin 
coined in the musician's mint, cancrizare, 
which may be rendered to crab-grade. For 
as Roger North says, when, at the com- 
mencement of his incomparable account of 
his brother the Lord Keeper's life, he con- 
fesses that it would be hard to lead a thread 



* Madame de Maintenon. f Cumberland. 

t Shakespeare. 



304 



THE DOCTOR. 



in good order of time through it — " there 
are many and various incidents to be re- 
membered, which will interfere, and make 
it necessary to step back sometimes, and 
then again forwards ; — and in this manner 
I hope to evacuate my mind of every matter 
and thing I know and can remember mate- 
rially concerning him. And if some things 
are set down which -many may think too 
trivial, let it be considered that the smallest 
incidents are often as useful to be known, 
though not so diverting, as the greater, and 
profit must always share with entertain- 
ment." 

I am not, however, side-ling toward my 
object crab-like ; still less am I starting 
back from it, like a lobster, whose spring 
upon any alarm is stern-foremost : nor am I 
going I know not where, like the three 
Princes Zoile, Bariandel and Lyriamandre, 
when, having taken leave of Olivier King 
of England, to go in search of Rosicler, they 
took ship at London sans dessein (Taller 
plustot en un lieu qu'en un autre. Nor like 
the more famous Prince Don Florisel and 
Don Falanges, when having gone on board 
a small vessel, y mandada por ellos en lo alto 
de la mar meter, hazen con los marineros que 
no hagan otro camino mas de aquel que la nao 
movido por la fuerza de los ayres, quisiesse 
hazer, queriendo yr a buscar con la aventura 
lo que a ella Jiallar se permitia segun la poca 
certinidad que para la demanda podian llevar. 

I should say falsely were I to say with 
Petrarch, 

Vommene in guixa (Vorbo senza luce, 
Che non sa ove si vada, e pur si parte. 

But I may say with the Doctor's name- 
sake Daniel de Bosola in Webster's tragedy,* 
" I look no higher than I can reach : they 
are the gods that must ride on winged 
horses. A lawyer's mule, of a slow pace, 
will both suit my disposition and business ; 
for mark me, when a man's mind rides faster 
than his horse can gallop, they quickly both 
tire." — Moreover 



* Duchess of Malfi. 



This I hold 



A secret worth its weight in gold 
To those who write as I write now, 
Not to mind where they go, or how, 
Thro' ditch, thro' bog, o'er hedge and stile, 
Make it but worth the reader's while, 
And keep a passage fair and plain 
Always to bring him back again.f 

" You may run from major to minor," 
says Mrs. Bray in one of her letters to Dr. 
South ey, " and through a thousand changes, 
so long as you fall into the subject at last, 
and bring back the ear to the right key at 
the close." 

Where we are at this present reading, the 
attentive reader cannot but know ; and if 
the careless one has lost himself, it is his 
fault, not mine. We are in the parenthesis 
between the Doctor's courtship and his 
marriage. Life has been called a parenthesis 
between our birth and death J ; the history 
of the human race is but a parenthesis be- 
tween two cataclasms of the globe which it 
inhabits; time itself only a parenthesis in 
eternity. The interval here, as might be 
expected after so summary a wooing, was 
not long ; no settlements being required, 
and little preparation. But it is not equally 
necessary for me to fix the chapter, as it 
was for them to fix the day. 

Montaigne tells us that he liked better to 
forge his mind than to furnish it. I have a 
great liking for old Michel, Seigne ir de 
Montaigne, which the well-read reader may 
have perceived; — who indeed has ever 
made his acquaintance without liking him ? 
I have moreover some sympathies with him ; 
but upon this point we differ. It is more 
agreeable to me to furnish than to forge, — 
intellectually speaking, to lay in than to lay 
out ; — to eat than to digest. There is 
however (following the last similitude) an 
intermediate process enjoyed by the flocks 
and herds, but denied to Aldermen ; that 
process affords so apt a metaphor for an 
operation of the mind, that the word denot- 
ing it has passed into common parlance in 
its metaphorical acceptation, and its original 
meaning is not always known to those who 
use it. 



t Churchill. 



t See supra, p. 250. 



THE DOCTOR. 



305 



It is a pleasure to see the quiet full con- 
tentment which is manifested both in the 
posture and look of animals when thej are 
chewing the cud. The nearest approach 
which humanity makes toward a similar 
state of feeling, seems to be in smoking, when 
the smoker has any intellectual cud on which 
to chew. But ruminating is no whole- 
some habit for man, who, if he be good for 
anything, is born as surely to action as to 
trouble; it is akin to the habit of indulging 
in day-dreams, which is to be eschewed 
by every one who tenders his or her own 
welfare. 

There is, however, a time for everything. 
And though neither the Doctor nor Deborah 
had thought of each other .in the relation of 
husband and wife, before the proposal was 
made, and the silent assent given, they could 
not choose but ruminate upon the future as 
well as the past, during the parenthesis that 
ensued. And though both parties deli- 
berately approved of what had been suddenly 
determined, the parenthesis was an uneasy 
time for both. 

The commentators tell us that readers 
have found some difficulty in understanding 
what was Shakespeare's meaning when he 
made Macbeth say 

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well 
It were done quickly. 

Johnson says he never found them agreeing 
upon it. Most persons, however, are agreed 
in thinking, that when anything disagreeable 
must be done, the sooner it is done the 
better. Who but a child ever holds a dose 
of physic in his hand, — rhubarb to wit, — 
or Epsom salts, — delaying as long as pos- 
sible to take the nauseous draught ? Who 
ever, when he is ready for the plunge, stands 
lingering upon the side of the river, or the 
brink of the cold bath? — Who that has 
entered a shower-bath and closed the door, 
ever hesitates for a moment to pull the 
string ? It was upon a false notion of hu- 
manity that the House of Commons pro- 
ceeded, when it prolonged the interval 
between the sentence of a murderer and 
the execution. The merciful course in all 



cases would be, that execution should follow 
upon the sentence with the least possible 
delay. 

" Heaven help the man," says a good- 
natured and comely reader who has a ring 
on the fourth finger of her left hand, — 
" Heaven help the man ! Does he compare 
marriage to hanging, to a dose of physic, 
and to a plunge over head and ears in cold 
water ?" No, madam, not he : he makes no 
such unseemly comparisons. He only means 
to say that when any great change is about 
to take place in our circumstances and way 
of life, — anything that is looked on to 
with anxiety and restlessness, anything that 
occasions a yeasty sensation about the peri- 
cardium, — every one who is in that state 
wishes that the stage of fermentation were 
past," — that the transition were over. 

I have said that little preparation was 
needed for a marriage which gave little em- 
ployment to the upholsterers, less to the 
dress-makers, and none to the lawyers. 
Yet there was something to be done. Some 
part of the furniture was to be furbished, 
some to be renewed, and some to be added. 
The house required papering and painting, 
and would not be comfortably habitable 
while the smell of the paint overpowered or 
mingled with the odour of the shop. Here 
then was a cause of unavoidable delay ; and 
time which is necessarily employed, may be 
said to be well employed, though it may not 
be upon the business which we have most 
at heart. If there be an impatient reader, 
that is to say an unreasonable one, who 
complains that, instead of passing rapidly 
over this interval or parenthesis (as afore- 
said), I proceed in such a manner with the 
relation, that many of my chapters are as 
parenthetical as the Euterpe of Herodotus, 
which whole book, as the present Bishop 
Butler used to say, is one long parenthesis, 
and the longest that ever was written ; — if, 
I say, there be so censorious a reader, I 
shall neither contradict him, nor defend my- 
self, nor yet plead guilty to the fault of which 
he accuses me. But I will tell him what 
passed on a certain occasion, between Doctor, 
afterwards Archbishop, Sharp, when he was 



306* 



THE DOCTOR. 



Rector of St. Giles's, and the Lord Chan- 
cellor Jefferies. 

In the year 16S6, Dr. Sharp preached a 
sermon wherein he drew some conclusions 
against the Church of Rome, to show the 
vanity of her pretensions in engrossing the 
name of Catholic to herself. The sermon 
was complained of to James II., and the 
Lord Chancellor Jeneries was directed to 
send for the preacher, and acquaint him 
with the King's displeasure. Dr. Sharp 
accordingly waited upon his Lordship with 
the notes of his sermon, and read it over to 
him. ki "Whether," says his son, " the Doctor 
did this for his own justification, and to 
satisfy his Lordship that he had been mis- 
represented, or whether my Lord ordered 
him to bring his sermon and repeat it before 
him. is not certain ; but the latter seems 
most probable : because Dr. Sharp after- 
wards understood that his Lordship's design 
in sending for him and discoursing with 
him. was. that he might tell the King that 
he had reprimanded the Doctor, and that 
he was sorry for having given occasion of 
offence to his Majesty, hoping by this means 
to release Dr. Sharp from any further 
trouble. However it was, his Lordship took 
upon him, while the Doctor was reading 
over his sermon, to chide him for several 
passages which the Doctor thought gave no 
occasion for chiding ; and he desired his 
Lordship when he objected to these less 
obnoxious passages, to be patient, for there 
was a great deal worse yet to come." 

The sermon nevertheless was a good ser- 
mon, as temperate as it was properly timed, 
and the circumstance was as important in 
English history, as the anecdote is pertinent 
in this place. For that sermon gave rise to 
the Ecclesiastical Commission, which, in its 
consequences, produced, within two years, 
the Revolution. 



CHAPTER CXXIY. 

THE AETHOR MORALISES UPON" THE VANITY 
OE FAME I AXT> WISHES THAT HE HAD 
BOSWELEISED WHILE IT WAS IX HIS TOWER 
TO HAVE DOXE SO. 



Mitcho taigo qu< ILvar, 
Mucho tengo que reir. 



Gongora. 



It is a melancholy consideration that Fame 
is as unjust as Fortune. To Fortune, in- 
deed, injustice ought not to be imputed; for 
Fortune is blind, and disposes of her favours 
at random. But Fame, with all her eyes 
and ears and tongues, overlooks more than 
she perceives, and sees things often in a 
wrong light, and hears and reports as many 
falsehoods as truths. 

We need not regret that the warriors who 
lived before Agamemnon should be for- 
gotten, for the world would have been no 
worse if many of those who lived after him 
had been forgotten in like manner. But 
the wise also perish, and leave no memorial. 
"What do we know of " Ethan the Ezrahite, 
and Heman and Chalcol, and Darda. the 
sons of Hanoi," whom it was accounted an 
honour for Solomon to have excelled in 
wisdom? Where is now the knowledge for 
which Gwalchmai ab Gwyar, and Llechau 
ab Arthur, and Rhiwallawn Wallt Banadlen 
were leashed in a Triad as the three Phy- 
siologists or Philosophers of the Isle of 
Britain : because " there was nothing of 
which they did not know its material es- 
sence, and its properties, whether of kind. 
or of part, or of quality, or of compound, or 
of coincidence, or of tendency, or of nature, 
or of essence, whatever it might be?" 
Where is their knowledge ? where their 
renown? They are now "merely nuda 
nomina, naked names ! " " For there is no 
remembrance of the wise, more than of the 
fool for ever ; seeing that which now is. in 
the days to come shall all be forgotten !" 

If our virtues 

Did not go forth of US, 'twere all alike 
As if we had them not.* 

* Shakespeare. 



THE DOCTOR. 



307 



The Seven Wise Men have left almost as 
little as the Sybils. 

" What satisfaction," says Sir John Haw- 
kins, "does the mind receive from the 
recital of the names of those who are said 
to have increased the chords of the primitive 
lyre from four to seven, Chorebus, Hyagius, 
and Terpander ? Or when we are told that 
Olympus invented the enarmonic genus, as 
also the Harmatian mood? Or that Eu- 
molpus and Melampus were excellent mu- 
sicians, and Pronomus, Antigenides and 
Lamia celebrated players on the flute ? In 
all these instances, where there are no cir- 
cumstances that constitute a character, and 
familiarise to us the person spoken of, we 
naturally inquire who he is, and for want of 
farther information become indifferent as to 
what is recorded of him." The same most 
learned and judicious historian of his fa- 
vourite art, laments that most of the many 
excellent musicians who flourished in the 
ages preceding our own are all but utterly 
forgotten. " Of Tye," he says, " of Bedford, 
Shephard, Douland, Weelkes, Welbye, Est, 
Bateson, Hilton and Brewer, we know little 
more than their names. These men composed 
volumes which are now dispersed and irre- 
trievably lost ; yet did their compositions 
suggest those ideas of the power and efficacy 
of music, and those descriptions of its mani- 
fold charms, that occur in the verses of our 
best poets." 

Is there one of my Readers in a thousand 
who knows that Philistes was a Greco-Phoe- 
nician, or Phoenico-Grecian Queen of Malta 
and Gozo, before the Carthaginians obtained 
the dominion of those islands, in which their 
language continues living, though corrupted, 
to this day ? — Are there ten men in Corn- 
wall who know that Medacritus was the 
name of the first man who carried tin from 
that part of the world ? 

What but his name is now known of Ro- 
manianus, who in St. Augustin's opinion was 
the greatest genius that ever lived; and how 
little is his very name known now ! What 
is now remembered " of the men of renown 
before the Flood?" Sir Walter Raleigh 
hath a chapter concerning them, wherein he 



says, " of the war, peace, government and 
policy of these strong and mighty men, so 
able both in body and wit, there is no 
memory remaining ; whose stories if they 
had been preserved, and what else was then 
performed in that newness of the world, 
there could nothing of more delight have 
been left to posterity. .For the exceeding long 
lives of men, (who to their strength of body 
and natural wits had the experience added of 
eight hundred and nine hundred years,) how 
much of necessity must the same add of 
wisdom and understanding ? * Likely it is 
that their works excelled all whatsoever can 
be told of after- times ; especially in respect 
of this old age of the world, when we no 
sooner begin to know than we begin to die : 
according to Hippocrates, Vita brevis, ars 
longa, tempus prceceps; wnich is, Life is short, 
art is long, and time is headlong. And that 
those people of the first age performed many 
things worthy of admiration, it may be 
gathered out of these words of Moses, These 
were mighty men, which in old time were 
men of renown^ What is known of them 
now ? Their very names have perished ! 

Who now can explain the difference be- 
tween the Agenorian, the Eratoclean, the 
Epigonian, and the Damonian sects of musi- 
cians, or knows anything more than the 
names of their respective founders, except 
that one of them was Socrates's music- 
master ? 

What Roman of the age of Horace would 
have believed that a contemporaneous Con- 
sul's name should only live to posterity, as a 
record of the date of some one of the Poet's 
odes ? 

Who now remembers that memorable Mr. 
Clinch, " whose single voice, as he had 
learned to manage it, could admirably re- 
present a number of persons at sport and in 
hunting, and the very dogs and other ani- 
mals," — himself a whole pack and a whole 



* The passnge will be found in Book i. c. v. § vii. of 
the History of the World. The reading in the Oxford 
Edition is " undertakings," but Soutbey, it is likely, 
preferred to write as in the text, and had authority for it. 
He had no opinion of this edition, and once told me 
that letters were not used which might have been, as an 
Appendix to the Life. 



X 3 



30S 



THE DOCTOR. 



j field in full cry : " but none better than a 
i quire of choristers chanting an Anthem" — 
himself a whole quire. 

" How subdued," — says Mr. David Laing, 
who has rescued from oblivion so much that 
is worthy of being held in remembrance, — 
" how subdued is the interest that attaches 
to a mere name, as for instance, to that of 
Dunbar' s contemporaries, Stobo, Quintyne. 
or St. John the Ross, whose works have 
perished ! " 

Who was that famous singer nick-named 
Bonny Boots, who, because of his excellent 
voice, or as Sir John Hawkins says, " for 
j some other reason, had permission to call 
Queen Elizabeth his Lady : " and of whom it 
is said in the canzonet, 

Our Bonny Boots could toot it, 
Yea and foot it, 
Say, lusty lads, who now shall Bonny-Boot it ? 

Sir John thinks it might "possibly be one 
Mr. Hale." But what is Fame when it ends 
in a poor possibility that Bonny Boots who 
called the Queen his Lady, and that Queen, 
not Bergami's popular Queen, but Queen 
Elizabeth, the nation's glorious Queen Eli- 
zabeth, the people's good Queen Bess, — 
what, I repeat, is Fame, when it ends in a 
mere conjecture that the Bonny Boots who 
was permitted to call such a Queen his 
Lady, might be " one Hale or Hales in 
whose voice she took some pleasure." Well 
| might Southey say 

Fame's loudest blast upon the ear of Time 
Leaves but a dying echo ! 

And what would posterity have heard of 
my Dove, my Daniel, my Doctor, — my 
Doctor Daniel Dove, — had it not been for 
these my patient and humble labours ; — 
patient, but all too slow; humble, if compared 
with what the subject deserves, and yet am- 
bitious, in contemplation of that desert, that 
inadequate as they are, they will however 
make the subject known ; so that my Dove, 
my Daniel, my Doctor, shall be everybody's 
Dove, everybody's Daniel, every-body's 
Doctor, — yea the World's Doctor, the 
World's Doctor Daniel Dove ! 

O his desert speaks loud ; and I should wrong it, 
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom, 



When it deserves with characters of brass 
A forted residence, 'gainst the tooth of time 
And razure of oblivion.* 

Alas that there should have been in that 
generation but one Boswell. Why did 
Nature break his mould ? Why did she not 
make two ? for I would not have had 
Johnson deprived of what may almost be 
called his better part-; — but why were there 
not two Boswells, as there are two Dromios 
in the Comedy of Errors, and two Mr. 
Bulwers at this day, and three Hunchbacks 
in the Arabian Tale. Why was there not a 
duplicate Boswell, a fac-simile of the Laird 
of Auchinleck, an undistinguishable twin- 
brother, to have lived at Doncaster, and 
have followed my Doctor, like his dog, or 
his shadow, or St. Anthony's pig, and have 
gathered up the fragments of his wit and his 
wisdom, so that nothing should have been 
lost ? Sinner that I am, that I should have 
had so little forethought in the golden days 
of youth and opportunity ! As Brantome 
says when speaking of Montluc, J'etois fort 
souvent avec luy, et ntaymoit fort, et prenoit 
grand plaisir quand je le mettois en propos et 
on train et luy faisois quelques demandes, — 
car je ne suis jamais este si jeune, que je 
naye tousjours este fort eurieux dt apprendre ; 
et luy, me voyant en eette volonte, il me re- 
spondoit de bon cceur, et en beaux termes ; car 
il avoit une fort belle eloquence. Truly 
therefore may I say of thee, O my friend 
and Master ! 

S' alcun belfrntto 

Nasce di me, da voi men prima il seme. 
Io per me son qziasi tni terreno asciutto 
Culto da voi, e 'ipiegio e vostro in tutto.f 

Sinner that I was ! not to have treasured 
up all his words when I enjoyed and de- 
lighted in his presence: improvident wretch! 
that I did not faithfully record them every 
night before I went to bed, while they were 
yet fresh in memory ! How many thing* 
would I fain recall, which are now irrecover- 
ably lost! How muf»h is there, that if it 
were possible to call back the days that are 
past, I would eagerly ask and learn! But 
the hand of Time is on me. Kon solebai 



* Mbasuhe for Measure. 



t Petr\rce 



THE DOCTQE. 



309 



mate tarn relax tempos videri ; nunc incredi- 
bilis cursus apparet : sive quia admoveri 
lineas sentio, sive quia attendere ccepi et com- 
putare damnum meum.* I linger over these 
precious pages while I write, pausing and 
pondering in the hope that more recollec- 
tions niay be awakened from their long 
sleep ; that one may jog and stir up another, 
Bv thus rummaging in the stores of memory 
manv things which had long been buried 
there have been brought to light ; — but O 
reader ! how little is this all to what it 
might have been ! It is but as a poor arm- 
ful of gleanings compared to a waggon well 
piled with full sheaves, carrying the harvest 
home. 

Here too I may apply with the alteration of 
only one word what that good man Gotthilf 
Franck says in his Preface to the History of 
the Danish Mission in India, as translated 
into Latin from Xiecamp's German Work. 
Quamquam vero huic aquo desiderio gratiji- 
candi anirnum tanto promptiorem gessirnus, 
quanto plus ad illustrationem nominis dilecti ex 
tali compendio redundaturum esse perspeximus, 
madia tamen impedimenta in dies subnata sunt, 
quo minus res in effectum dari potuerit. Si- 
quidem ad ejusmodi epitomen accurate conscri- 
bendum et res prcecipuas breviter complectendas 
non solum multum tenporis. patientia et labor is, 
sed singularis etiam epitomatoris itcavSzrje et 
dexteritas requiritur. 

The Doctor himself was careless of Fame. 
As he did nothing to be seen of men, so he 
took no thought for anything through which 
he might be remembered by them. It was 
enough for him if his jests,- and whims, and 
fancies, and speculations, whether sportive or 
serious, pleased himself, brought a smile to 
his wife's lips and a dimple to her cheek, or 
a good-humoured frown, which was hardly 
less agreeable, to her brow: — it was enough 
for him if they amused or astonished those 
to whom they were addressed. Something 
he had for every one within the sphere of 
his little rounds ; a quip for this person and 
a crank for that; ;i nods and becks and 
wreathed smiles " for those who were in the 

* Seneca. 



May-day of youth, or the hey-day of hilarity 
and welfare ; a moral saying in its place and 
a grave word in season ; wise counsel kindly 
given for those who needed it, and kind 
words for all, — with which kind actions 
always kept pace, instead of limping slowly 
and ungraciously behind. But of the world 
beyond that circle, he thought as little as 
that world thought of him; nor had he 
the slightest wish for its applause. The 
passion which has been called u the last 
infirmity of noble minds" had no place in 
his ; — for he was a man in quo, as Erasmus 
says of his Tutor Hegius, unum illud vel 
Momus ipse calumniari fortasse potuisset, 
quod famcB plus aquo negligens, nullum poste~ 
ritatis haberet rationem. 



CHAPTEE CXXY. 

FAME 12f THE BOROUGH ROAD. THE AUTHOR 
DANIELISES. 

Due, Fama, — 

Due me insolenti tramite j devius 
Tentabo inaccessos profanis 
Invidice pedibus recessus. 

Vincent Bourne. 

Guess, Eeader, where I once saw a full- 
sized figure of Fame, erect, tip-toe, in the 
act of springing to take flight and soar 
aloft, her neck extended, her head raised, 
the trumpet at her lips, and her cheeks in- 
flated, as if about to send forth a blast which 
the whole city of London was to hear ? 
Perhaps thou niayest have seen this very 
figure thyself, and surely if thou hast, thou 
wilt not have forgotten it. It was in the 
Borough Eoad, placed above a shop-board 
which announced that Mr. Somebody fitted 
up Water-Closets upon a new and improved 
principle. 

But it would be well for mankind if Fame 
were never employed in trumpeting any- 
thing worse. There is a certain stage of 
depravity, in which men derive an unnatu- 
ral satisfaction from the notoriety of their 
wickedness, and seek for celebrity ob mag- 
nitudinem infamiip, cujus apud prodigos noma- 



310 



THE DOCTOR. 



sima voluptas est. * — lis veulent /aire par- 
ler d'eux, says Bayle, et leur vanite ne seroit 
pas satisfaiie s y il riy avoit quelque chose de 
superlatif et d'eminent dans leur mauvaise 
reputation. Le plus haut degre de Vinfamie 
est le but de leurs souhaits, et il y a des choses 
qiiils ne feroient pas si elles n'etoient extraor- 
dinairement odieuses. 

Plutarch has preserved the name of Chasre- 
phanes, who was notorious among the an- 
cients for having painted such subjects as 
Julio Romano has the everlasting infamy of 
having designed for the flagitious Aretine. 
He has also transmitted to posterity the 
name of Parmeno, famous for grunting like 
a pig, and of Theodorus, not less famous 
for the more difficult accomplishment of 
mimicking the sound of a creaking cart- 
wheel. Who would wish to have his name 
preserved for his beggarliness, like Pauson 
the painter, and Codrus the poet ? Or for 
his rascality and wickedness like Phrynon- 
das? Or like Callianax the physician for 
callous brutality ? Our Doctor used to in- 
stance these examples when he talked of 
" the bubble reputation," which is sometimes 
to be had so cheaply, and yet for which so 
dear a price has often been paid in vain. It 
amused him to think by what odd or piti- 
ful accidents that bubble might be raised. 
" Whether the regular practitioner may 
sneer at Mr. Ching," says the Historian of 
Cornwall, " I know not ; but the Patent 
Worm-Lozenges have gained our Launceston 
Apothecary a large fortune, and secured to 

| him perpetual fame." 

Would not John Dory's name have died 
with him, and so been long ago dead as a 

; door-nail, if a grotesque likeness for him had 
not been discovered in the Fish, which being 
called after him has immortalised him and 
his ugliness ? But if John Dory could 
have anticipated this sort of immortality 
when he saw his own face in the glass, he 
might very well have " blushed to find it 
fame." There would have been no other 
memorial of Richard Jaquett at this day, 
than the letters of his name in an old dead 



and obsolete hand, now well nigh rendered 
illegible by time, if he had not in the reign 
of Edward VI. been Lord of the. Manor of 
Tyburn with its appurtenances, wherein the 
gallows was included, wherefore, from the 
said Jaquett it is presumed by antiquaries 
that the hangman hath been ever since 
corruptly called Jack Ketch. A certain 
William Dowsing, who during the Great 
Rebellion was one of the Parliamentary 
Visitors for demolishing superstitious pic- 
tures and ornaments of Churches, is supposed 
by a learned critic to have given rise to an 
expression in common use among school- 
boys and blackguards. For this worshipful 
Commissioner broke so many " mighty great 
Angels" in glass, knocked so many Apostles 
and Cherubims to pieces, demolished so 
many pictures and stone-crosses, and boasted 
with such puritanical rancour of what he 
had done, that it is conjectured the threat 
of giving any one a dowsing preserves his 
rascally name. So too while Bracton and 
Fleta rest on the shelves of some public 
Library, Nokes and Stiles are living names 
in the Courts of Law : and for John Doe 
and Richard Roe, were there ever two liti- 
gious fellows so universally known as these 
eternal antagonists ? 

Johnson tells a story of a man who was 
standing in an inn kitchen with his back to 
the fire, and thus accosted a traveller who 
stood next to him, "Do you know, Sir, who 
I am?" " No, Sir," replied the traveller — 
" I have not that advantage." " Sir," said 
the man, " I am the great Twalmley who 
invented the new Flood-gate Iron." — Who 
but for Johnson would have heard of the 
great Twalmley now ? Reader, I will answer 
the question which thou hast already asked, 
and tell thee that his invention consisted 
in applying a sliding door, like a flood-gate, 
to an ironing- box, flat-irons having till 
then been used, or box-irons with a door 
and bolt. 

Who was Tom Long the Carrier ? when 
did he flourish ? what road did he travel ? 
did he drive carte, or waggons, or was it in 
the age of pack-horses ? Who was Jack 
Robinson ? not the once well-known Jack 



THE DOCTOR. 



311 



Eobinaon of the Treasury, (for his celebrity 
is now like a tale that is told,) but the one 
whose name is in every body's mouth, be- 
cause it is so easily and so soon said. Who 
was Magg ? and what was his diversion ? 
was it brutal, or merely boorish ? the bois- 
~ :- 5 hs exuberance of rude and unruly mirth 
or the gratification of a tyrannical temper 
and a cruel disposition ? Who was Crop 
the Conjuror, famous in trivial speech, as 
Merlin in romantic lore, or Doctor Faustus 
in the school of German extravagance ? 
I ia remembered now of Bully Dawson? 
all I have read of him is, that he lived three 
weeks on the credit of a brass shilling be- 
cause nobody would take it of him. " There ; 
. : ; i story of Queen Elizabeth/' says liay, 
u that being presented with a Collection of 
English Proverbs, and told by the Author 
that it contained them all, ' Nay* replied 
she, ; Bate me an ace, quoth Bolton ! ' which 
proverb being instantly looked for, happened 
to be wanting in his collection." "Who 
this Bolton was," Ray says, " I know not, 
neither is it worth inquiring." Neverthe- 
less I ask who was Bolton ? and when Echo 
answers " who ? " say in my heart Yanitas 
Vamtatum, omnia Yanitas. And having said 
this, conscience smites me with the recollec- 
tion of what Pascal has said, Ceux qui ecri- 
verit contre la gloire. veident avoir la gloire 
hien ecrit; et ceux qui le lisent, voulent 
avoir la gloire de T avoir lu ; et moi qui ecris 
ceci, fai peut-etre cette envie, et peut-etre 
rix qui le liront, Vauront axis si. 
Who was old Ross of Pottern, who lived 
till all the world was weary of him ? All the 
world has forgotten him now. Who was 
Jack Raker, once so well known that he 
was named proverbially as a scapegrace by 
Skelton, and in the Ralph Roister Doister 
nf Nicholas ITiill, — that Udall, who on 
poor Tom Tusser's account, ought always to 
be called the bloody schoolmaster ? Who 
illiam Dickins, whose wooden dishes 
were sold so badly, that when any one lost 
by the sale of his wares, the said Dickins 
and his dishes were brought up in scornful 
comparison ? Out-roaring Dick was a stroll- 
ing singer of such repute that he got twenty 



shillings a day by singing at Braintree 
Fair: but who was that Desperate Dick 
that was such a terrible cutter at a chine of 
beef, and devoured more meat at ordinaries 
in discoursing of his frays and deep acting 
of his flashing and hewing, than would serve 
half a dozen brewers' draymen ? It is at 
this day doubtful whether it was Jack Drum 
or Tom Drum, whose mode of entertain- 
ment no one wishes to receive ; — for it was 
to haul a man in by the head and thrust 
him out by the neck and shoulders. Who 
was that other Dick who wore so queer a 
hat-band that it has ever since served as a 
standing comparison for all queer things ? 
By what name besides Richard was he 
known ? Where did he live and when ? 
His birth, parentage, education, life, cha- 
racter and behaviour, who can tell ? " Xo- 
thing," said the Doctor, "is remembered of 
him now, except that he was familiarly called 
Dick, and that his queer hat-band went 
nine times round and would not tie." 

O vain World's glory, and unstedfast state 
Of all that lives on face of sinful earth ! * 

Who was Betty Martin, and wherefore 
should she so often be mentioned in connex- 
ion with my precious eye or your's ? Who 
was Ludlam, whose dog was so lazy that he 
leant his head against a wall to bark ? And 
who was Old Cole whose dog was so proud 
that he took the wall of a dung-cart and got 
squeezed to death by the wheel ? Was he 
the same person of whom the song says, 

Old King Cole 
Was a merry old soul, 
And a merry old soul was he ? 

And was his dog proud because his master 
was called King ? Here are questions to 
be proposed in the Examination papers of 
some Australian Cambridge, two thousand 
years hence, when the people of that part of 
the world shall be as reasonably inquisitive 
concerning our affairs, as we are now con- 
cerning those of the Greeks. But the 
Burneys, the Parrs and the Porsons, the 
Elmslevs, Monks and Blomfiekls of that 



312 



THE DOCTOR. 



age, will puzzle over them in vain, for we 
cannot answer them now. * 

" Who was the Vicar of Bray ? I have had 
a long chase after him," said Mr. Brome to 
Mr. Rawlins, in 1735. " Simon Aleyn, or 
Allen, was his name ; he was Vicar of Bray- 
about 1540, and died in 1588 ; so he held 
the living near fifty years. You now par- 
take of the sport that has cost me some 
pains to take. And if the pursuit after such 
game seems mean, one Mr. Vernon followed 
a butterfly nine miles before he could catch 
him." Reader, do not refuse your belief of 
this fact, when I can state to you on my 
own recollection that the late Dr. Shaw, the 
celebrated Naturalist, a librarian of the 
British Museum and known by the name of 
the learned Shavius, from the facility and 
abundance of his Latin compositions, pointed 
out to my notice there many years ago two 
volumes written by a Dutchman upon the 
wings of a butterfly. " The dissertation is 
rather voluminous, Sir, perhaps you will 
think," said the Doctor, with somewhat of 
that apologetic air, which modest science is 
wont occasionally to assume in her commu- 
nications with ignorance, " but it is im- 
mensely important." f Good-natured, excel- 
lent enthusiast! fully didst thou appreciate 
the Book, the Dutchman, and above all the 
Butterfly. 

" I have known a great man," says Taylor 
the Water-Poet, " very expert on the Jews'- 
harp ; a rich heir excellent at Noddy ; a 
Justice of the Peace skilful at Quoytes ; a 
Merchant's Wife a quick gamester at Irish, 
especially when she came to bearing of men, 
that she would seldom miss entering." In- 
j urious John Taylor ! thus to defraud thy 
friends of their fame, and leave in irremedi- 
able oblivion the proper name of that expert 
Jews'-Harper, that person excellent at 
Noddy, that great Quoytes-man, and that 



* On Elmsley's putting forth his edition of the CEdipus 
Coloneus, some one asked him how it came about that he 
lefl --> much unexplained? "Mow should it be other- 
wise," said he, ' when we are unable to explain our own 
Shakespeare? " 

t This anecdote was inserted by the late Grosvenor 
IJcdford, Southey's old and tried friend. 



Mistress who played so masterly a game at 
Irish! — But I thank thee for this, good 
John the Water-Poet ; thou hast told us 
that Monsieur La Ferr, a Frenchman, was 
the first inventor of the admirable game of 
Double-hand, Hot Cockles, &c, and that 
Gregory Dawson, an Englishman, devised 
the unmatchable mystery of Blind-man's- 
buff. But who can tell me what the game 
of Carps was, the Ludus Carparurn, which 
Hearne says was used in Oxford much, and 
being joined with cards, and reckoned as a 
kind of alea, is prohibited in some statutes ? 
When Thomas Hearne, who learned what- 
ever' Time forgot, was uncertain what game 
or play it really was, and could only con- 
jecture that perhaps it might be a sort of 
Back-gammon, what antiquary can hope to 
ascertain it ? 

"Elizabeth Canning, Mary Squires the 
Gipsey, and Miss Blandy," says one who 
remembered their days of celebrity, " were 
such universal topics in 1752, that you 
would have supposed it the business of 
mankind to talk only of them ; yet now, in 
1790, ask a young man of twenty-five or 
thirty a question relative to these extra- 
ordinary personages, and he will be puzzled 
to answer." 

Who now knows the steps of that dance, 
or has heard the name of its author, of which 
in our fathers' days it was said in verse, that 

— Isaac's rigadoon shall live as long 
As Rafael's painting, or as Virgil's song. 

Nay, who reads the poem wherein those 
lines are found, though the author predicted 
for them in self- applauding pleasantry, that 

Whilst birds in air, or fish in streams we find, 
Or damsels fresh with aged partners join'd, 
As long as nymphs shall with attentive ear 
A fiddle rather than a sermon hear, 
So long the brightest eyes shall oft peruse 
These useful lines of my instructive muse. 

Even of the most useful of those lines, the 
" uses are gone by." Ladies before they 
leave the ball-room are now no longer 
fortified against the sudden change of tem- 
perature by a cup of generous white wine 
mulled with ginger ; nor is it necessary now 
to caution them at such times against a 



THE DOCTOR. 



313 



draught of cold small beer, because, as the 
Poet iu his own experience assured them, 

Destruction lurks within the poisonous dose, 
A fatal fever, or a pimpled nose.* 



CHAPTER CXXVI. 

mr. Baxter's offices, miller's character 
of mason ; "with a few remarks in 
vindication of grays friend and the 
doctor's ACQUAINTANCE. 

Te sonars guis mihi 

Gcnique vim dabit tuif 
Stylo quis cequor hocc-: ararc chartcum, 

En arra per papyrina 
Satu loquacc semmare literas f 

Janus Docs a. 

That dwelling house which the reader may 
find represented in Miller's History of Don- 
caster, as it was in his time, and in the 
Doctor's, and in mine, — that house in which 
the paper-hangers and painters were em- 
ployed during the parenthesis, or to use a 
more historical term, the Interim of this 
part of our history, — that house which 
when, after an interval of many years, I saw 
it last, had the name R. Dennison on the 
door, is now, the Sheffield Mercury tells me, 
occupied as Mr. Baxter's Offices. I mean 
no disrespect to Mr. R. Dennison. I mean 
no disrespect to Mr. Baxter. I know nothing 
of these gentlemen, except that in 1830 the 
one had his dwelling there, and in 1836 the 
other his offices. But for the house itself, 
which can now be ascertained only by its 
site, totally altered as it is in structure and 
appearance, without and within, — when I 
think of it I cannot but exclaim, in what 
Wordsworth would call "that inward voice" 
with which we speak to ourselves in solitude, 
" If thou be'est it," with reference to that 
alteration, — and with reference to its change 
of tenants and present appropriation, I 
cannot but carry on the verse, and say — 
" but oh how fallen, how changed ! " 

In that house Peter Hopkins had enter- 
tained his old friend Guy ; and the elder 



SOAME JENYNS. 



Daniel once, upon an often pressed and 
special invitation, had taken the longest 
journey he ever performed in his life, to 
pass a week there. For many years Mr. 
Allison and Mr. Bacon made it their house 
of call whenever they went to Doncaster. 
In that house Miller introduced Herschel to 
Dr. Dove ; and Mason, when he was Mr. 
Copley's guest, never failed to call there, and 
inquire of the Doctor what books he had 
added to his stores, — for to have an oppor- 
tunity of conversing with him was one of 
the pleasures which Mason looked for in his 
visits at IsTetherhall. 

Miller disliked Mason : described him as 
sullen, reserved, capricious and unamiable ; 
and this which he declared to be " the real 
character of this celebrated poet," he inserted, 
he said, " as a lesson to mankind, to show 
them what little judgment can be formed of 
the heart of an author, either by the sub- 
limity of his conceptions, the beauty of his 
descriptions, or the purity of his sentiments." 

Often as Miller was in company with 
Mason, there are conclusive proofs that the 
knowledge which he attained of Mason's 
character was as superficial as the poet's 
knowledge of music, for which, as has here- 
tofore been intimated, the Organist regarded 
him with some contempt. 

He says that the reason which Mason as- 
signed for making an offer to the lady whom 
he married, was, that he had been a whole 
evening in her company with others, and ob- 
served, that during all that time she never 
spoke a single word. Mason is very likely 
to have said this ; but the person who could 
suppose that he said it in strict and serious 
sincerity, meaning that it should be believed 
to the letter, must have been quite in- 
capable of appreciating the character of the 
speaker. 

Mason whom Gray described, a little 
before this offer, as repining at his four-and- 
twenty weeks' residence at York, and long- 
ing for the flesh-pots and coffee-houses of 
Cambridge, was notwithstanding in his friend 
and fellow-poet's phrase, a long while mart- 
turient, " and praying to heaven to give him 
a good and gentle governess." "No man," 



314 



THE DOCTOR. 



says Gray, " wants such a thing more in all 
senses ; but his greatest wants do not make 
him move a foot faster, nor has he, properly 
speaking, anything one can call a passion 
about him, except a little malice and re- 
venge." Elsewhere he speaks of Mason's 
"insatiable repining mouth." Yet there 
was no malice in these expressions. Gray 
loved him, taking him for all in all, and to 
have been the friend of Gray will always be 
considered as evidence of no ordinary Avorth ; 
for it is not on intellect alone that the 
friendship of so good and wise a man as 
Gray could be founded. 

AVhen Gray first became acquainted with 
Mason he wrote concerning him thus. " He 
has much fancy, little judgment, and a good 
deal of modesty. I take him for a good and 
well-meaning creature ; but then he is really 
in simplicity a child, and loves everybody 
he meets with : he reads little or nothing, 
writes abundance, and that with a design to 
make his fortune by it." In another letter 
" Mason grows apace in my good graces ; he 
is very ingenious, with great good-nature 
and simplicity; a little vain, but in so harm- 
less and so comical a way that it does not 
offend one at all ; a little ambitious, but 
withal so ignorant in the world and its ways, 
that this does not hurt him in one's opinion. 
So sincere and so undisguised, that no mind 
with a spark of generosity would ever think 
of hurting him, he lies so open to injury ; 
but so indolent that if he cannot overcome 
this habit, all his good qualities will signify 
nothing at all." 

This surely is the character of an amiable 
and very likeable man. Mason said when 
he printed it, " my friends, I am sure,* will be 
much amused at this ; my enemies (if they 
please) may sneer at it, and say (which they 
will very truly) that twenty-five years have 
made a very considerable abatement in my 
general philanthropy. Men of the world 
will not blame me for writing from so 
prudent a motive, as that of making my 
fortune by it ; and yet the truth, I believe, 
at the time was, that I was perfectly well 
satisfied if my publications furnished me with 
ew guineas to see a Play, or an Opera." 



During the short time that his wife lived 
after his marriage, Miller observed that he 
appeared more animated and agreeable in 
his conversation, that is to say, he was 
cheerful because he was happy. After her 
death (and who has ever perused her epitaph 
without emotion ?) he relapsed into a dis- 
contented habit of mind, as might be ex- 
pected from one who had remained un- 
married too long, and who, although he. 
might be said in the worldly sense of the 
word to have been a fortunate man, was 
never, except during the short duration of 
his marriage, a happy one. He had no near 
relations, none to whom he was in any 
degree attached ; and in Gray he lost the 
most intimate of his friends, probably the 
only one towards whom he ever felt any- 
thing approaching to a warmth of friendship. 
This produced a most uncomfortable effect 
upon him in the decline of life ; for knowing 
that he was looked upon as tone who had 
wealth to leave for which there were no near 
or natural claimants, he suspected that any 
marks of attention which were shown him, 
whether from kindness or from respect, 
proceeded from selfish views. That in many 
cases such suspicions may be well-founded, 
any one who knows what the world is will 
readily believe ; and if they made him 
capricious, and rendered him liable to be 
accused of injustice and want of feeling, 
the effect is not so extraordinary as it is 
pitiable. It is one of the evils attendant 
upon the possession of riches where there is 
no certain heir ; it is part of the punishment 
which those persons bring upon themselves 
who accumulate unnecessary wealth, without 
any just or definite object.* 

But Mason is chargeable with no such 
sin. When a young man he made a resolu- 
tion that if he came into possession of an 
estate whicrTwas entailed upon him, he would 
accept of no additional preferment; and he 
adhered to that resolution, though many offers 
were made to him which might have induced 



* How applicable is this to the history of the late Dr. 
Bell ! Pity 'tis he did not apply his riches, as he told 
Southey he would, to the increase of poor livings. What 
came from the church might well have been returned. 



THE DOCTOR. 



315 



a worldly man to depart from it. The first 
thing he did after the inheritance fell to 
him was to resign his King's Chaplainship : 
" a priest in that situation," he said, " could 
not help looking forward to a bishopriek, a 
species of ambition incompatible with the 
simplicity and purity of the Christian cha- 
racter, for, the moment a man aspires to the 
purple, that moment virtue goes out of him." 
Mr. Greville, who, after a visit to Mason, 
related this in a letter to his friend Polwhele, 
was informed that his income was about 
,=£1500 a-year, and that of this one-third 
was appropriated to patronage and charity. 
He had made another resolution, which 
was not kept, because it was not reason- 
able. When the Earl of Holdernesse offered 
him the Rectory of Aston, he was not in 
orders, and he called upon Warburton to 
ask his advice. " I found him," says War- 
burton, " yet unresolved whether he should 
take the Living. I said, was the question 
about a mere secular employment, I should 
blame him without reserve if he refused 
the offer. But as I regarded going into 
orders in another light, I frankly owned to 
him he ought not to go, unless he had a 
call : by which I meant, I told him, nothing 
fanatical or superstitious ; but an inclina- 
tion, and, on that, a resolution, to dedicate 
all his studies to the service of religion, and 
totally to abandon his poetry. This sacri- 
fice, I said, I thought was required at any 
time, but more indispensably so in this, 
when we are fighting with infidelity pro 
aris et focis. This was what I said ; and I 
will do him the justice to say, that he en- 
tirely agreed with me in thinking that de- 
cency, reputation, and religion, all required 
this sacrifice of him ; and, that if he went 
into orders, he intended to give it." " How 
much shall I honour him," says Warburton 
in another letter, " if he performs his pro- 
mise to me of putting away those idle 
baggages after his sacred espousals ! " This 
unwise promise explains Mason's long si- 
lence as a poet, and may partly account for 
his uncomfortable state of mind as long as 
he considered himself bound by it. 

There were other circumstances about 



him which were unfavourable to happiness ; 
he seems never to have been of a cheerful, 
because never of a hopeful temper, other- 
wise Gray would not have spoken of his 
"insatiable repining mouth," — the lively 
expression of one who clearly perceived his 
constitutional faults, and yet loved him as 
he deserved to be loved, in spite of them. 
The degree of malice also, which Gray noticed 
as the strongest passion in his nature, is 
to be reckoned among those circumstances. 
By far the most popular of his compositions 
were those well-known satires which he never 
owned, and which professional critics, with 
their usual lack of acumen, pronounced not 
to be his because of their sarcastic humour 
and the strength of their language. He 
had a great deal of that sarcastic humour, 
and this it was which Gray called malice ; 
in truth it partakes of maliciousness, and a 
man is the worse for indulging it, if he ever 
allows himself to give it a personal direc- 
tion, except in cases where strong provoca- 
tion may warrant and strict justice require 
it. That these satires were written by Mason 
will appear upon the most indisputable proof 
whenever his letters shall be published ; and 
it is earnestly hoped those letters may not 
be allowed to perish, for in them and in 
them only will the character of the writer 
appear in its natural lights and shades. 

Mason would not (especially after their 
signal success) have refrained from acknow- 
ledging these satires, which are the most 
vigorous of his compositions, unless he had 
been conscious that the turn of mind they 
indicated was not that which ought to be 
found in a member of his profession. And 
it can only have been the same feeling which 
induced the Editor to withhold them from 
the only collective edition of his works. 
That edition was delayed till fourteen years 
after his death, and then appeared without 
any memoir of the author, or any the slight- 
est prefatory mark of respect : it seems, 
therefore, that he had left none by whom his 
memory was cherished. But though this 
may have been in some degree his fault, 
it was probably in a far greater degree his 
misfortune. 



316 



THE DOCTOR. 



Mason had obtained preferment for his 
literary deserts, and in such just measure 
as to satisfy himself, and those also who 
would wish that ecclesiastical preferment 
were always so properly bestowed. But he 
was not satisfied with his literary fame. 
Others passed him upon the stream of popu- 
larity with all their sails set, full speed before 
the wind, while he lay quietly upon his oars 
in a pleasant creek ; and he did not suffi- 
ciently bear in mind that he was safe at 
his ease, when some of those who so trium- 
phantly left him behind were upset and went 
to the bottom. He had done enough to 
secure for himself a respectable place among 
the poets of his country, and a distinguished 
one among those of his age. But more 
through indolence than from any deficiency 
or decay of power, he had fallen short of 
the promise of his youth, and of his own 
early aspirations. Discontent, especially 
when mingled with self-reproach, is an un- 
easv feeling, and like many others he appears 
to Lave sought relief by projecting it, and 
transferring as much of it as he could upon 
the world. He became an acrimonious whig, 
and took an active part in the factious mea- 
sures by which Yorkshire was agitated about 
the close of the American war. Gray, if 
he had been then living, might perhaps have 
been able to have rendered him more tem- 
perate and more reasonable in his political 
views ; certainly he would have prevailed 
upon him not to write, or having written 
not to publish or preserve, the last book of 
his English Garden, which is in every re- 
spect miserably bad : bad in taste as recom- 
mending sham castles and modern ruins ; 
bad in morals, as endeavouring to serve a 
political cause and excite indignation against 
the measures of Government by a fictitious 
story, (which if it had been true could have 
had no bearing whatever upon the justice 
or injustice of the American war ;) and bad 
in poetry, because the story is in itself 
absurd. Not the least absurd part of this 
puerile tale is the sudden death of the heroine, 
at the unexpected sight of her betrothed 
husband, whom she was neither glad nor 
sorry to see ; and the description of the 



facie*, Hippocratica is applied to this : 
thus dying in health, youth, and beauty! 
Dr. Dove used to instance this as a re- 
markable example of knowledge ignorantly 
misapplied. 

Yet though the Doctor did not rank him 
higher as a physiologist than Miller did as a 
musician, or than Sir Joshua must have 
done as a painter, he found more pleasure 
than the organist could do in his conversa- 
tion ; partly because there was an air of 
patronage in Mason's intercourse with Miller 
at first, and afterwards an air of estrange- 
ment, (a sufficient reason) ; and partly be- 
cause Mason was more capable of enjoying 
the richness of the Doctor's mind, and such 
of its eccentricities as were allowed to 
appear in company where he was not wholly 
without reserve, than he was of appreciating 
the simplicity of Miller's. That vein of 
humour which he indulged in his corre- 
spondence opened when he was conversing 
with one, like the Doctor, upon whom 
nothing was lost ; at such times the heavy 
saturnine character of Mason's countenance, 
which might almost be called morose, seemed 
to be cast off; and pleasantry and g 
nature animated its intellectual strength. 
But according to Polwhele's' friend, there 
was a " sedate benignity in his countenance, 
which taught me," says Mr. Greville, u in- 
stantaneously to rely on him as a man the 
leading traits of whose disposition were 
feeling and reflection. This immediate im- 
pression of his character I found afterwards 
:.rietly just. I never yet met with a 
human being whose head and heart appear 
to act and react so reciprocally, so con- 
cordantly upon each other as his. — In his 
stvle of conversation, you can trace nothing 
of the via vivida of the poet. Here his 
inventive powers apparently lie dormant. 
Those flashes of genius, those intellectual 
emanations which we are taught to believe 
great men cannot help darting forward in 
order to lighten up the gloom of colloquial 
' communication, he seems to consider as 
affected: he therefore rejects them when- 
ever they occur, and appears to pride him- 
self on the preference which fa 



THE DOCTOR. 



; - 



simplicity and perspicuity. Conversation, 
(if you will excuse a pedantic allusion,) 
with him resembles the style of painting 
mentioned in the earlier part of the Athe- 
nian History, which consisted in represent- 
ing the artist's ideas in a simple nnafife c : e 1 
point of view, through the medium of one 
colour only ; whereas his writings are like 
the pictures of Polygnotus. They glow 
with all the warmth of an invigorated ima- 
gination, an animated diction, and a rich 
luxuriant phraseology. 

- His manners, too, are equally as chaste 
and unaffected as his conversation. The 
stream that winds its easy way through 
woods and verdant meads, is not less artificial 
or more insinuating than he is in doing the 
honours of the table, or promoting the 
graces of the drawing-room. That peculiar 
happiness which sir fe -~ I have me: with 

issess, of reconciling you implicitly to their 
superiority, he enjoys in an eminent degree. 
by the amiability of his sentiments, the 
benignity of his attention, and particularly 
by an indescribable way with him, of making 
you appear to advantage, even when he 
convinces von of the erroneousness of your 
opinions, or the inconclusiveness of your 
reasoning. 

•■ In regard to his morals. I believe from 
what I have collected, that few can look 
back upon a period of six:y years' exist :-:: ; a, 
spent so uniformly pure and correct. In 
the course of our chit-chat, he informed me, 
in an unostentatious unaffected manner, 
that he never was intoxicated but once." 

There was another point of resemblance, 
besides their vein of humour, between Mason 
and the Doctor, in their latter days ; they 
were nearly of the same age. and time had 
brought with it to both the same sober, 
contemplative, deep feeling of the realities 
of religion. 

The French Revolution cured Mason of 
his whiggery, and he had the manliness to 
sing his palinode. The fearful prevalence 
of a false and impious philosophy made him 
more and more sensible of the inestimable 
importance of his faith. On his three last 
birth-days he composed three sonnets, which 



for their sentiment and their beaurv ought : 
to be inserted in every volume of 
poems for popular use. And he left fin 
posthumous publication a poem called Rbxi- 

: [ ierici : as a whole it is very inferior to 
that spirited satire irf Smedley's which bears 
the same title, and which is the bes: satire 

: i: 5 age ; but its concluding paragraph will 
leave the reader with a just and very favour- 
able impression of the poet and the man. 

Father, Redeemer, Comforter dittm 

This humble offering to thy equal shrine 

Here thy unworthy servant grateful pays. 

Of undivided thanks, united praise, 

For all those mercies which at birth began, 

A.-Z rriir'.esi £:- 

Front my frail frame thro' all the varied scene, 

~" .:.:-::.' ■ -: • -.".:. z . i ; serene : 

I y ugh of science clearly to discern 

How few important truths the wisest learn ; 

Enough of arts ingenuous to employ 

The vacant hours, when graver studies cloy ; 

Enough of wealth to serve each honest end, 

T;.e::::::f;::::r. :: f.is:. ; : ; :'r>:r.i : 

Enough of faith in Scripture to descry, 

That the sure hope of immortality, 

"Which o^y can the fear of death remove, 

Flows from the fountain of Redeeming Lotr, 

One who visiTf 1 York a few years after 
the death of the Poet, says, "the Verger 
who showed us the Minster upon my in- 
quiring of him concerning Mason, began an 
encomium upon him in an humble way 
indeed, but more honourable than all the 
factitious praises of learned ostentation ; his 
countenance brightened up when I asked 
him the question ; his very looks told me 
thai Mason's charities did not evaporate in 
etrusions of sensibility : I learned that he 
was humble, mild, and generous : the father 
of his family : the delight of all that came 
within the sphere of his notice. Then he 
was so good in his parish. My soul con- 
templates] with ::nd exultation, the picture 
of a man, endowed with genius, wit and 

:alent to please the great, bu: 
rirtute involventem, resigning himse.: 
complacency to the humble duties of a 
country pastor, — turning select Psalms into 
to be sung in his Church : simplifying 
and arranging, and directing to the purposes 
of devotion his church music : and per- 
forming his duties as a minister with meek- 
] brotherly love." 



318 



THE DOCTOR, 



Enough has now been adduced to vin- 
dicate Mason's character from Miller's 
aspersion. They who desire to see his merits 
as a poet appreciated with great ability and 
equal justice should peruse his life in 
Hartley Coleridge's Boreal Biography, — 
what a boisterous title for a book in which 
there is not one blustering sentence, and 
so many sweet strains of feeling and of 
thought ! 



CHAPTER CXXVII. 

THE DOCTOR'S THEORY OF PROGRESSIVE 
EXISTENCE. 

Quam multce pecudes humano in corpore vivunt ! 

Palingenius. 

Like Mason, Dr. Dove looked to the future 
in that sure and certain hope without which 
the present would be intolerable to a think- 
ing mind and feeling heart. But in his spe- 
culations he looked to the past also. 

Watson Bishop of Llandaff amused him- 
self with asking from whom his mind de- 
scended ? where it existed before he was 
born ? and who he should have been if he 
had not been Richard Watson ? " The 
Bishop was a philosopher," says Dr. Jarrold, 
"and ought not to have asked such idle 
questions." 

My Doctor would not have agreed with 
Dr. Jarrold in this opinion. Who the Bishop 
might have been if he had not been the 
discontented hero of his own autobiography, 
he could not indeed have pretended to 
divine ; but what he was before he was 
Richard Watson, where his mind had existed 
before he was born, and from whom, or 
rather from what, it had been transmitted, 
were questions which, according to his 
notions, might admit of a probable solution. 

It will not surprise the judicious reader to 
be told that the Doctor was a professed phy- 
siognomist, though Lavater had not in those 
days made it fashionable to talk of phy- 
siognomy as a science. Baptista Porta led 
him to consider the subject ; and the coarse 
wood-cuts of a bungling Italian elucidated 



the system as effectually as has since been 
done by Mr. Holloway's graver. But Dr. 
Dove carried it farther than the Swiss 
enthusiast after, or the Neapolitan physician 
before him. Conceiving in a deeper sense 
than Lebrun, que chacun avail sa bete dans 
la figure, he insisted that the strong animal 
likenesses which are often so distinctly to be 
traced in men, and the correspondent pro- 
pensities wherewith they are frequently 
accompanied, are evidence of our having 
pre-existed in an inferior state of being. And 
he deduced from it a theory, or notion as he 
modestly called it, which he would have 
firmly believed to be a part of the patriarchal 
faith, if he had known how much it resem- 
bled the doctrine of the Druids. 

His notion was that the Archeus, or living- 
principle, acquires that perfect wisdom with 
which it acts, by passing through a long 
progression in the lower world, before it 
becomes capable of being united to a rational 
and immortal soul in the human body. He 
even persuaded himself that he could dis- 
cover in particular individuals indications of 
the line by which their Archeus had tra- 
velled through the vegetable and animal 
kingdoms. 

There was a little pragmatical exciseman, 
with a hungry face, sharp nose, red eyes, and 
thin, coarse, straggling hair of a yellow cast, 
(what was formerly called Judas-colour,) 
whom he pronounced to have been a ferret 
in his last stage. "Depend upon it," he 
said, " no rat will come under the roof 
where he resides ! " And he was parti- 
cularly careful when they met in the open 
air always to take the wind of him. 

One lawyer, a man of ability and fair cha- 
racter, but ready to avail himself of every 
advantage which his profession afforded, he 
traced from a bramble into a wasp, thence 
into a butcher-bird, and lastly into a fox, 
the vulpine character being manifestly re- 
tained in his countenance. There was 
another, who, from sweeping his master's 
office and blacking his shoes, had risen to be 
the most noted pettifogger in those parts. 
This fellow was his peculiar abhorrence ; 
his living principle, he affirmed, could never 



THE DOCTOR. 



319 



have existed in any other form than that of 
a nuisance ; and accordingly he made out 
his genealogy thus : — a stinker (which is 
the trivial name of the phallus impudicus,) 
a London bug, an ear-wig, a pole-cat, — 
and, still worsening as he went on, a knavish 
attorney. 

He convicted an old Major in the West 
York Militia of having been a turkey cock ; 
and all who knew the Major were satisfied 
of the likeness, whatever they might be of 
the theory. 

One of the neighbouring justices was a 
large, square-built, heavy person, with a 
huge head, a wide mouth, little eyes, and a 
slender proportion of intellect. Him he set 
down for a hippopotamus. 

A brother magistrate of the Major's had 
been a goose, beyond all dispute. There 
was even proof of the fact ; for it was per- 
fectly well remembered that he had been 
born web-fingered. 

All those persons who habitually sit up 
till night is far spent, and as regularly pass 
the best hours of the morning in bed, he 
supposed to have been bats, night-birds, 
night-prowling beasts, and insects whose por- 
tion of active life has been assigned to them 
during the hours of darkness. One indi- 
cation of this was, that candle-light could 
not have such attractions for them unless 
they had been moths. 

The dog was frequently detected in all 
its varieties, from the lap-dog, who had 
passed into the whipper-snapper petit- mattre, 
and the turn-spit, who was now the bandy- 
legged baker's boy, — to the Squire's eldest 
son, who had been a lurcher, — the Butcher, 
who had been a bull-dog, and so continued 

still in the same line of life ; — Lord A 's 

domestic chaplain, harmless, good-natured, 
sleek, obsequious, and as fond of ease, in- 
dulgence and the fire-side, as when he had 

been a parlour spaniel ; Sir William B 's 

huntsman, who exercised now the whip 
which he had felt when last upon four legs, 
and who was still an ugly hound, though 
staunch ; and the Doctor's own man, Bar- 
naby, whom, for steadiness, fidelity, and 
courage, he pronounced to have been a true 



old English mastiff, and one of the best of 
his kind. 

Chloris had been a lily. You saw it in the 
sickly delicacy of her complexion. More- 
over she toiled not, neither did she spin. 

A young lady, in whose family he was 
perfectly familiar, had the singular habit of 
sitting always upon one or other foot, which 
as she sat down she conveyed so dexterously 
into the seat of her chair, that no one who 
was not previously acquainted with her 
ways, could possibly perceive the movement. 
Upon her mother's observing one day that 
this was a most unaccountable peculiarity, 
the Doctor replied, " No, madam ! I can 
account for it to my own entire satisfaction. 
Your daughter was a bird of some gentle 
and beautiful species, in her last stage of 
existence ; in that state she used always to 
draw up one leg when at rest, The habits 
that we acquire in our pre-existent state, 
continue with us through many stages of 
our progress ; your daughter will be an 
Angel in her next promotion, and then, if 
Angels close their eyes in slumber, she will 
sleep with her head under her wing." 

The landlady of the White Lion had been 
a cabbage, a blue-bottle fly, a tame duck, 
and a bacon-pig. 

Who could doubt that Yauban had been 
an earthworm, a mole, and a rabbit ? that 
Euclid acquired the practical knowledge of 
geometry when he was a spider ; and that 
the first builder of a pyramid imitated un- 
consciously the proportionately far greater 
edifices which he had been employed in 
raising when he was one of a nation of 
white ants? 

Mrs. Dove had been a cowslip, a humble 
bee, and, lastly, a cushat. 

He himself had been a Dove and a Ser- 
pent — for "Dan was a Serpent by the way ;" 
and moreover, he flattered himself that he 
had the wisdom of the one, and the sim- 
plicity of the other. Of his other stages he 
was not so certain, — except that he had 
probably once been an inhabitant of the 
waters, in the shape of some queer fish. 



320 



THE DOCTOK. 



CHAPTER CXXVIIL 

ELUCIDATIONS OF THE COLUMBIAN THEORY. 

Thou almost makest me waver in my faith, 
To hold opinion with Pythagoras, 
That souls of animals infuse themselves 
Into the trunks of men. 

Merchant of Venice. 

Many facts in illustration or exemplifica- 
tion of the Doctor's theory concerning pro- 
gressive existence must have occurred to 
every one within the circle of his own ob- 
servations. One of the scientific persons 
who abridged the Philosophical Transactions 
says, he " was acquainted with a medical 
practitioner of considerable eminence who 
could not refrain from eating toasted cheese, 
though he was subject to an alarming pul- 
monary complaint which was uniformly ag- 
gravated by it, and which terminated fatally 
at an age by no means advanced." This 
practitioner, the Doctor would have said, 
had been either a mouse or a rat, and in that 
pre-existent form had nibbled at such a 
bait, — perhaps once too often. This would 
account for the propensity, even if he were 
not a Welshman to boot. 

The same author says " there is now 
living a physician of my acquaintance who 
at an autumnal dessert never ceases eating 
all the filberts he can lay his hands upon, 
although he very candidly acknowledges 
that they are extremely indigestible and 
hurtful things." Upon the Doctor's theory, 
who can doubt that he had been a squirrel ? 

" I remember," says a certain Mr. George 
Garden, in a letter written from Aberdeen 
in 1676, "when Mrs. Scougall and I were 
with you last summer, we had occasion to 
speak of a man in this country very remark- 
able for something peculiar in his temper, 
that inclines him to imitate unawares all the 
gestures and motions of those with whom 
he converses. We then had never seen him 
ourselves. Since our return we were toge- 
ther at Strathbogie where he dwells, and 
notwithstanding all we had heard of him 
before, were somewhat surprised with the 
oddness of this dotterel quality. This per- 



son named Donald Munro, being a little old 
and very plain man, of a thin slender body, 
has been subject to this infirmity, as he 
told us, from his very infancy. He is very 
loath to have it observed, and therefore 
casts down his eyes when he walks in the 
streets, and turns them aside when he is in 
company. We had made several trials before 
he perceived our design, and afterwards 
had much ado to make him stay. We ca- 
ressed him as much as we could, and had 
then the opportunity to observe that he 
imitated not only the scratching of the head, 
but also the wringing of the hands, wiping 
of the nose, stretching forth of the arms, 
&c, and we needed not strain compliments 
to persuade him to be covered, for he still 
put off and on as he saw us do* and all this 
with so much exactness, and yet with such 
a natural and unaffected air, that we could 
not so much as suspect that he did it on 
design. When we held both his hands and 
caused another to make such motions, he 
pressed to get free ; but when we would have 
known more particularly how he found him- 
self affected, he could only give us this 
simple answer, that it vexed his heart and 
his brain." 

The writer of this letter had hit upon the 
solution of the idiosyncracy which he de- 
scribes, but had not perceived it. The man 
had been a dotterel. 

" Have we not heard," said the Doctor, 
" of persons who have ruminated ? Do we 
not read well-authenticated cases of some 
whose skins were tuberculated ? Is it not 
recorded of Dioscorides, not the botanist, 
but the Alexandrian physician of Cleopatra's 
time, that he was called Phacas because his 
body was covered with warts ? And where 
was this so likely to have happened as in 
Egypt? He had been a crocodile. The 
cases are more frequent of people who in the 
scaliness of their skins have borne testimony 
of their piscine origin. 

Was not Margaret Griffith, wife of David 
Owen of Llan Gaduain in Montgomeryshire 
shown in London, because a crooked horn 
four inches long grew out of the middle of 
her forehead ? "A miraculous and mon- 



THE DOCTOR. 



321 



strous, but yet most true and certain ac- 
count " of her, with her rude portrait affixed, 
was imprinted at London by Thomas Owen, 
in the year of the Spanish Armada, and sold 
by Edward White, at the little north door of 
St. Paul's Church, at the Sign of the Gun. 
And in the British Museum there is not 
only the picture of another horned woman, 
Davies by name, who was born at Shotwick 
in Cheshire, but one of the horns also which 
she shed. 

There was a Mistress Bomby, (not the 
Mother Bombie of the old play, but a per- 
son of our own times,) who having been a 
schoolmistress till the age of fifty, married 
at that age, and on the day of her marriage 
became deranged. She never recovered her 
reason, but she lived to be fourscore ; and 
in the latter year of her life a crooked horn 
sprouted from the side of her forehead, and 
grew to the length of nearly six inches. 
Another made its appearance, but its growth 
was stopped. It is to be regretted that the 
person who recorded this did not say whe- 
ther the second horn made its appearance 
on the other side of the forehead, so as to 
correspond with the former and form a pair. 

Blumenbach had three human horns in 
his collection, all the growth of one woman. 
She had broken her head by a fall, and the 
first of them grew from the wound ; it con- 
tinued growing for thirty years, till it was 
about ten inches long, then it dropped off; 
a second grew from its place, this was short, 
thick, and nearly straight, and she shed it in 
less time ; the third was growing when she 
died, and the Professor had it cut from the 
corpse. The first was completely twisted 
like a ram's horn, was round and rough, of 
a brownish colour, and full half an inch in 
diameter at the roots. All three appeared 
to be hollow, and were blunt, and rounded 
at the termination. It has been said that 
all the cases of this kind which have been 
observed have been in women ; the remark, 
whether it were made by Blumenbach, or 
by the intelligent traveller who describes 
this part of his collection, would, if it were 
true, be unimportant, because of the paucity 
of cases that have been recorded : but there 



is a case of a male subject, and it is remark- 
able for the circumstances attending it. 

Marshal Laverdin in the year 1599 was 
hunting in the province of Maine, when his 
attendants came in sight of a peasant who, 
instead of waiting to pay his obeisance to 
their master, fled from them. They pursued 
and overtook him ; and as he did not un- 
cover to salute the Marshal, they plucked off 
his cap, and discovered that he had a horn 
growing on his head. Francois Trouillu 
was this poor man's name, and he was then 
aged thirty -four years : the horn began to 
sprout when he was about seven years old ; 
it was shaped almost like that of a ram, only 
the flutings were straight instead of spiral, 
and the end bowed inwards toward the 
cranium. The fore part of his head was 
bald, and his beard red and tufted, such as 
painters bestow upon Satyrs. He had re- 
tired to the woods hoping to escape exposure 
there, and there he wrought in the coal-pits. 
Marshal Laverdin took possession of him 
as he would of a wild beast, and sent him as 
a present to Henry IV. ; and that King, 
with even more inhumanity than the Mar- 
shal, bestowed him upon somebody who 
carried him about as a show. Mezeray, who 
relates this without any comment upon the 
abominable tyranny of the Marshal and the 
King, concludes the story by saying, "the 
poor man took it so much to heart to be 
thus led about like a bear and exposed to 
the laughter and mockery of his fellow crea- 
tures, that he very soon died." 

Blumenbach says "it has been ascertained 
by chemical analysis that such horns have a 
greater affinity in their composition with the 
horns of the rhinoceros than of any other 
animal." It may be so ; but the short and 
straight horns were stunted in their growth ; 
their natural tendency was to twist like a 
sheep's horn ; — and the habit of cornifica- 
tion is more likely to have been formed 
nearer home than in the interior of Africa. 

The first rope-dancer, or as Johnson 
would have called him "funambulist," the 
Doctor said, had been a monkey ; the first 
fellow who threw a somerset, a tumbler 
pigeon. 



322 



THE DOCTOR. 



The Oneirocrites, or Oneirologists, as 
they who pretended to lay down rules for 
the interpretation of dreams called them- 
selves, say that if any one dreams he has the 
head of a horse on his shoulders instead of 
his own, it betokens poverty and servitude. 
The Doctor was of opinion that it presaged 
nothing, but that it bore a retrospective in- 
terpretation, being the confused reminiscence 
of a prior state. 

Amateur thieves, — for there are persons 
who commit petty larcenies with no other 
motive than the pleasure of stealing, — he 
supposed to have been tame magpies or 
jackdaws. And in the vulgar appellation 
which is sometimes bestowed upon an odious 
woman, he thought that though there was 
not more meant than meets the ear, there 
was more truth conveyed than was intended. 

A dramatist of Charles the First's reign, 
says, 

'Tis thought the hairy child that's shown about 
Came by the mother's thinking on the picture 
Of Saint John Baptist, in his camel's coat. 

But for this and other recorded cases of the 
same kind the Doctor accounted more satis- 
factorily to himself by his own theory. For 
though imagination, he said, might explain 
these perfectly well, (which he fully ad- 
mitted,) yet it could not explain the horned, 
nor the tubercular, nor the ruminating cases; 
nor the case of John Ferguisson, of the 
parish of Killmelfoord in Argyleshire, who 
lived eighteen years without taking any 
other sustenance than water, and must there- 
fore either have been a leech, tortoise, or 
some other creature capable of being so 
supported. ISTor could anything so well as 
his hypothesis explain the cases in which 
various parts of the human body had been 
covered with incrustations, which were shed 
and reproduced in continual succession, a 
habit retained from some crustaceous stage 
of existence, and probably acquired in the 
form of a crab or lobster. Still more re- 
markable was the case of a German, com- 
municated by Dr. Steyerthall to the Royal 
Society : this poor man cast his leg by an 
eftbrt of nature, not by an immediate act of 
volition, as he would have done in his crab 



or lobster state, for the power had not been 
retained with the habit, but after long and 
severe suffering ; the limb, however, at last 
separated of itself, and the wound healed. 

Neither, he said, could imagination ex- 
plain the marvellous and yet well-attested 
story of the Danish woman who lay in, like 
Leda, of two eggs. The neighbours who 
were called in at the delivery, most im- 
properly broke one and found that it con- 
tained a yolk and white, to all appearance as 
in that of a hen, which it also resembled in 
size. The other, instead of endeavouring to 
hatch it, they sent to Olaus Wormius, and 
it is still to be seen at Copenhagen. 

How, he would ask, was the case of Samuel 
Chilton, near Bath, to be explained, who 
used to sleep for weeks and months at a 
time ; but as an old habit of hibernation, 
acting at irregular times, because it was no 
longer under the direction of a sane instinct. 
And how that of the idiot at Ostend, who 
died at last in consequence of his appetite 
for iron, no fewer than eight-and-twenty 
pieces to the amount of nearly three pounds 
in weight, having been found in his stomach 
after death. Who but must acknowledge 
that he had retained this habit from an 
ostrich ? 

This poor creature was really ferrivorous. 
The Doctor, though he sometimes pressed 
into his service a case to which some excep- 
tions might have been taken, would not 
have classed as a quondam ostrich the 
sailor who used to swallow knives for a feat 
of desperate bravery, and died miserably, as 
might be expected. JNor would he have 
formed any such conclusion concerning the 
person of whom Adam Clarke has preserved 
the following remarkable story, in the words 
of Dr. Fox, who kept a lunatic asylum near 
Bristol. 

"In my visits among my patients, one 
morning, I went into a room where two, who 
were acquaintances of each other, were ac- 
customed to live : immediately I entered, I 
noticed an unusual degree of dejection about 
one of them, and a feverish kind of excite- 
ment in the other. I inquired what was 
the matter ? ' Matter ! ' said the excited 



THE DOCTOR. 



323 



one* ' matter enough ! he has done for him- 
self ! ' — ' Why ? what has he done ? ' — ' Oh 
he has only swallowed the poker !' During 
this short conversation the other looked in- 
creasingly mournful; and on my inquiring 
what was the matter with him, he replied, 
' He has told you true enough ; I have swal- 
lowed the poker, and do not know what I 
shall do with it ! ' 'I will tell you how it 
happened,' said the first. * My friend and 
I were sitting by the fire talking on different 
things, when I offered to lay him a wager 
that he could not eat any of the poker : he 
said he could and would ; took it up, twisted 
the end of it backward and forward between 
the bars of the grate, and at last broke off 
some inches of it, and instantly swallowed 
it ; and he has looked melancholy ever since.' 
I did not believe," said Dr. Fox, " a word 
of this tale ; and I suppose the narrator 
guessed as much, for he added, 'O, you can 
see that it is true, for there is the rest of the 
poker.' I went to the grate and examined 
the poker, which, being an old one, had been 
much burned ; and where the action of the 
fire had been fiercest and had worn away 
the iron, a piece of between two and three 
inches had been wrenched off, and was miss- 
ing. Still I could hardly credit that the 
human stomach could receive such a dose 
and remain ' feeling,' as the professed 
swallower of it said, 'nothing particular.' 
However the constant affirming of the first, 
united to the assent and rueful looks of the 
second, induced me to use the patient as 
though the account were true : I adminis- 
tered very strong medicines, and watched 
their effects constantly. The man ate, and 
drank, and slept as usual, and appeared to 
suffer nothing but from the effect of the 
medicines. At last, to my astonishment, 
the piece of the poker came away, and the 
man was as well as ever. The iron had un- 
dergone a regular process of digestion, and 
the surface of it was deeply honey-combed 
by the action of the juices. This was a most, 
singular case, and proves how the God of 
Nature has endowed our system with powers 
of sustaining and redressing the effects of 
our own follies." 



The tales of lycanthropy which are found 
in such different ages and remote countries 
strongly supported the Doctor's theory. 
Virgil, and Ovid in his story of Lycaon, had 
only adapted a popular superstition to their 
purposes. And like its relator he regarded 
as a mere fable the legend which Pliny has 
preserved from the lost works of Evanthes, a 
Greek author not to be despised. Evanthes 
had found it written among the Arcadians 
that a man from the family of a certain 
Antaeus * in that country was chosen by lot, 
and taken to a certain lake ; there he stript, 
hung his garments upon an oak, swam across 
and going into the wilderness, became a 
wolf, and herded with wolves for nine years ; 
and if during that time he abstained from 
doing any hurt to men, he returned to the 
lake, recrossed it, resumed his human form, 
with the only change of being the worse, 
not for the wear indeed, but for the lapse of 
those nine years ; and moreover found his 
clothes where he had left them. Upon 
which Pliny observes, Mirum est quo pro- 
cedat Grceca credidHas ! Nullum tarn im- 
pudens mendacium est quod teste careat. 

A worse manner of effecting the same 
metamorphosis Pliny relates from the Olym- 
pionics of Agriopas ; that at a human sacri- 
fice offered by the Arcadians to Jupiter 
Lycaeus, one Demasnetus Parrhasius tasted 
the entrails, and was transformed into a 
wolf; . at the expiration of ten years he 
resumed his original form, and obtained the 
prize of pugilism at the Olympic games. 

But the Doctor differed from Pliny's 
opinion that all which is related concerning 
lycanthropy must be rejected or all believed; 
— Homines in lupos verti rursumque restitui 
sibi, falsum esse confidenter existimare de- 
bemus ; aid credere omnia, quce fabidosa tot 
seculis comperimus. The belief, however, he 
admits, was so firmly fixed in the common 
people that their word for turncoat was 
derived from it ; — Unde tamen ista vidgo 
infixa sit fama in tantum, ut in maledictis 

* The original is ex gente Antcei cujusdam. Cf. Lib. 
viii. c. xxiii. In the original edition Antasus is written 
author by mistake, which is the occasion of this note, and 
must have puzzled many a reader. 



324 



THE DOCTOR. 



versipelles habeat, indicabitur. These fables, 
the Doctor argued, could not invalidate the 
testimony of ancient physicians, that there 
was an actual and well-known species of 
madness, in which men howled like wolves, 
and wandered by night about in lonely 
places or among the tombs. It was most 
severe at the commencement of spring ; and 
was sometimes epidemic in certain countries. 
Pieter Forest, whose character for accuracy 
and sagacity stands high among medical 
writers, affirms that he, in the sixteenth 
century, had seen the disease, and that it 
was as it had been described by the ancients. 
He must have been a credulous person who 
believed Constantinople had been so in- 
fested by these wolf-men, that the Grand 
Seignior and his guards had been obliged to 
go out against them ; killing a hundred and 
fifty, and putting the rest of the pack to 
flight. This was a traveller's tale ; and the 
stories related in books of demonology and 
witchcraft, concerning wretches who had 
been tried and executed for having, in the 
shape of wolves, killed and eaten children, 
and who had confessed their guilt, might be 
explained, like other confessions of witch- 
craft, by the effects of fear and tortures ; yet 
there were cases upon which the Doctor 
thought no doubt could be entertained. 

One case upon which the Doctor insisted 
was that of an Italian peasant near Pavia, 
who in the year 1541 was seized with this 
madness, and fancying himself to be a wolf, 
attacked several persons in the fields and 
killed some of them. He was taken at last, 
but not without great difficulty ; and when 
in the hands of his captors he declared that 
he was a wolf, however much they might 
doubt the avowal, and that the only dif- 
ference between him and other wolves was, 
that they had their fur on the outside of the 
skin, but his was between the skin and the 
flesh. The madman asserted this so posi- 
tively that some of the party, trop inhumains 
et hups par effect, as Simon Goulart says 
with a humanity above the standard of his 
age, determined to see, and made several 
slashes in his arms and legs. Repenting of 
their cruelty, when they had convinced 



themselves by this experiment that the poor 
wretch was really insane, they put him 
under the care of a surgeon ; and he died in 
the course of a few days under his hands. 
" Now," said the Doctor, " if this were a 
solitary case, it would evidently be a case 
of madness ; but as lycanthropy is re- 
cognised by physicians of different times 
and countries, as a specific and well-known 
affection of the human mind, can it be so satis- 
factorily explained in any other manner, as 
by the theory of progressive existence, — by 
the resurrection of a habit belonging to the 
preceding stage of the individual's progress?" 

The superstition was not disbelieved by 
Bishop Hall. In the account of what he 
observed in the Netherlands, he says of 
Spa, " the wide deserts on which it borders 
are haunted with three kinds of ill cattle, 
free-booters, wolves, and witches, though 
these two last are often one." 

"When Spenser tells us it was said of the 
Irish, as of the Scythians, how they were 
once a year turned into wolves, " though 
Master Camden in a better sense doth sup- 
pose it was the disease called Lycanthropia," 
— he adds these remarkable words, "yet 
some of the Irish do use to make the wolf 
their gossip." Now it must be observed 
that gossip is not here used in its secondary 
meaning of a talking, tattling, or tippling 
companion, but in its original import, though 
wickedly detorted here : " Our Christian 
ancestors," says Verstegan, " understanding 
a spiritual affinity to grow between the 
parents and such as undertook for the child 
at baptism, called each other by the name 
of God-sib, which is as much as to say as 
that they were sib together, that is, of kin 
together, through God." The Limerick 
schoolmaster whose words are transcribed 
by Camden, says, " they receive wolves as 
gossips, calling them Chari- Christ, praying 
for them, and wishing them happy ; upon 
which account they are not afraid of them." 
There was great store of wolves in Ireland 
at that time ; and the Doctor asked whether 
so strange a custom could be satisfactorily 
explained in any way but by a blind con- 
sciousness of physical affinity, — by suppos- 



THE DOCTOK. 



325 



ing that those who chose wolves to be god- 
fathers and godmothers for their children, 
had in the preceding stage of their own 
existence been wolves themselves ? 

How triumphantly would be have ap- 
pealed to a story which Captain Beaver 
relates in his African Memoranda. " In the 
evening," says that most enterprising, re- 
solute, able, and right-minded man, " two or 
three of the grumetas came to me and said 
that Francisco, one of their party, was not a 
good man : that he wanted to eat one of 
them, John Basse, who had been this day 
taken very ill. As I could not comprehend 
what they meant by saying that one of them 
wanted to eat another, I sent for Johnson to 
explain. He said that the man accused of 
eating the other was a witch, and that he 
was the cause of John Basse's illness, by 
sucking his blood with his infernal witch- 
craft; and that these people had come to 
request that I would let them tie him to a 
tree and flog him, after they had finished 
their work. I told them that there was no 
such thing as a witch ; that it was impossible 
for this man to suck the blood of another, 
by any art which he could possibly possess ; 
that he could not be the cause of another 
man's illness by such means ; and that with 
respect to flogging, no one punished on the 
island but myself. Johnson, who is as 
bigoted in this instance as any of them, 
says that he is well known to be a witch : 
that he has killed many people with his 
infernal art, and that this is the cause of his 
leaving his own country, where, if he should 
ever be caught, he would be sold as a slave ; 
and that he with difficulty had prevented the 
other grumetas from throwing him overboard 
on their passage from Bissao hither. John- 
son moreover told me that there was another 
witch among the grumetas, who had the 
power of changing himself into an alligator, 
and that he also had killed many people by 
his witchcraft, and was consequently obliged 
to run from his country. They therefore 
most earnestly entreated me to let them 
punish them, country fashion, and they pro- 
mised not to kill either of them. Astonished 
at the assurance that neither of them should 



be killed if they were permitted to punish 
them, I told Johnson that if such a thing 
should occur, I would immediately hang all 
those concerned in it, and then endeavoured 
to reason them out of their foolish notions 
respecting these two poor men. Johnson 
replied, that it was the custom of the country 
for white men never to interfere in these 
cases, and that at Bissao the governor never 
took notice of their thus punishing one 
another according to their own country 
fashion, and that they expected the same 
indulgence here ; for that if these people 
were in their own country, they would 
either be killed or sold, as witchcraft was 
never forgiven, and its professors never 
suffered to remain in their own country, 
when once found out. I had now all the 
grumetas round me, among whom were the 
accused themselves, and endeavoured again 
to convince them of the innocence of these 
people, by pointing out the impossibility of 
their hurting others by any magic or spell, 
or of transforming themselves into any other 
shape. When many of them said this man 
had often avowed his turning himself into 
an alligator to devour people : ' How say 
you, Corasmo,' said I, ' did you ever say so 
to any of these people ? ' ' Yes,' was his 
reply. t What do you mean ? do you mean 
to say that you ever transformed yourself 
into any other shape than that which you 
now bear ? ' 'Yes,' was the answer. ' Xow, 
Corasmo, you know that white man knows 
everything ; you cannot deceive me ; there- 
fore avow to those people, that you never 
changed yourself into an alligator, and that 
these are all lies.' ' ISTo,' was his reply, — 
who can believe it ? 'I can change myself 
into an alligator, and have often done it." 
This was such an incorrigible witch that I 
immediately gave him up to the grumetas to 
punish him, but desired them to be merciful. 
— It is scarcely credible that a man can so 
work upon his own weak imagination as to 
believe, which I doubt not this man did, its 
own fanciful creations to be realities. — 
After the grumetas had left me last night I 
regretted having delivered up to them the 
two poor miserable wretches accused of 



32G 



THE DOCTOR. 



witchcraft. From ten till twelve at night 
their cries were most piteous and loud, 
and though distant a full half mile, were 
distinctly heard. This morning they cannot 
move." 

There was a Mr. William Wright, of 
Saham Tony in Norfolk, who used to cast 
his skin every year, sometimes once, some- 
times twice ; it was an uneasy and distress- 
ing effort of nature, preceded by itching, red 
spots, and swellings ; the fingers became 
stiff, hard, and painful at the ends, and about 
the nails the pain was exquisite. The whole 
process of changing was completed in from 
ten to twelve days, but it was about six 
months before the nails were perfectly re- 
newed. From the hands the skin came off 
whole like a glove : and a print representing 
one of these gloves is given with the account 
of the case in the Gentleman's Magazine. 

When this was related to the Doctor it 
perplexed him. The habit was evidently 
that of a snake ; and it did not agree with 
his theory to suppose that the Archeus would 
pass, as it were per saltum, from so low a 
stage of existence to the human form. But 
upon reading the account himself he was 
completely satisfied as soon as he found that 
the subject was an Attorney. 

He did not know, because it was not 
known till Mr. Wilkin published his excel- 
lent edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Works, 
that that Philosopher sent to his son Dr. 
Edward Browne, " the skin of the palm of 
a woman's hand, cast off at the end of a 
fever, or in the declination thereof. I called 
it," he says, " exuvium pahnce muliebris, the 
Latin word being exuvia in the plural, but 
I named it exuvium, or exuvia in the singular 
number. It is neat, and worthy to be shown 
when you speak of the skin. Snakes, and 
lizards, and divers insects cast their skins, 
and they are very neat ones : men also in 
some diseases, by pieces, but I have not met 
with any so neat as this : a palmister might 
read a lecture of it. The whole soles of 
the feet came off, and I have one." If the 
Doctor had heard of this case, and had not 
suspected the woman of having once be- 
longed to a generation of vipers, or some 



snekki-famili as the words are rendered in 
the Talkee-talkee version, he would have 
derived her from an eel, and expressed a 
charitable hope that she might not still be 
a slippery subject. 



CHAPTER CXXIX. 

WHEREIN THE AUTHOR SPEAKS OF A TRAGEDY 
FOR THE LADIES, AND INTRODUCES ONE OF 
WXLLIAM DOVE'S STORIES FOR CHILDREN. 

Y dondc sobre todo de su dueno 

El gran tesoro y el caudal se infierc, 
Es que al grande, al mediano, y al pequeno, 

Todo se da de balde a quien lo quiere. 

Balbuena. 

Here might be the place for inquiring how 
far the Doctor's opinions or fancies upon 
this mysterious subject were original. His 
notion he used to call it ; but a person to 
whom the reader will be introduced ere long, 
and who regarded him with the highest 
admiration and the profoundest respect, 
always spoke of it as the Columbian Theory 
of Progressive Existence. Original indeed 
in the Doctor it was not ; he said that he 
had learned it from his poor Uncle William ; 
but that William Dove originated it him- 
self there can be little doubt. From books 
it was impossible that he should have de- 
rived it, because he could not read ; and 
nothing can be more unlikely than that he 
should have met with it as a traditional 
opinion. The Doctor believed that this poor 
Uncle, of whom he never spoke without 
some expression of compassionate kindness, 
had deduced it intuitively as an inference 
from his instinctive skill in physiognomy. 

When subjects like these are treated of, 
it should be done discreetly. There should 
be, in the words of Bishop Andrewes, 
" OiKovo/xia, a dispensation, not a dissipa- 
tion ; a laying forth, not Siao-Kopwio-iJ.bc, a 
casting away ; a wary sowing, not a heedless 
scattering; and a sowing x ei p\ o]j 3-uAa/cw, 
by handfulls, not by basket-fulls, as the 
heathen-man well said." Bearing this in 
mind I have given a Chapterfull, not a 



THE DOCTOR. 



327 



Yoluinefull, and that Chapter is for physiolo- 
gists and philosophers ; but this Opus is 
not intended for them alone ; 'they consti- 
tute but a part only of that " fit. audience " 
and not " few," which it will find. 

One Andrew Henderson, a Scotchman, 
who kept a booksellers^ shop, or stand, in 
Westminster Hall, at a time when lawyers' 
tongues and witnesses' . souls were not the 
only commodities exposed for sale there, 
published a tragedy called " Arsinoe, or The 
Incestuous Marriage." The story was Egyp- 
tian ; but the drama deserves to be called 
Hendersonian, after its incomparable author ; 
for he assured the reader, in a prefatory 
advertisement, that there were to be found in 
it " the most convincing arguments against 
incest and self-murder, interspersed with an 
inestimable treasure of ancient and modern 
learning, and the substance of the principles 
of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton, adapted 
to the meanest capacity, and very entertain- 
ing to the Ladies, containing a nice descrip- 
tion of the passions and behaviour of the 
Fair Sex." 

The Biographer, or Historian, or Anec- 
dotist, or rather the reminiscent relator of 
circumstances concerning the birth, parent- 
age and education, life, character and be- 
haviour, of Dr. Daniel Dove, prefers not so 
wide a claim upon the gratitude of his 
readers as Andrew Henderson has advanced. 
Yet, like the author of " Arsinoe," he trusts 
that his work is " adapted to the meanest 
capacity ;" that the lamb may wade in it, 
though the elephant may swim, and also that 
it will be found " very entertaining to the 
Ladies." Indeed, he natters himself that it 
will be found profitable for old and young, 
for men and for women, the married and the 
single, the idle and the studious, the merry 
and the sad ; that it may sometimes inspire 
the thoughtless with thought, and some- 
times beguile the careful of their cares. One 
thing alone might hitherto seem wanting to 
render it a catholic, which is to say, an uni- 
versal book, and that is, that as there are 
Chapters in it for the closet, for the library, 
for the breakfast room, for the boudoir, 
(which is in modern habitations what the 



oriel was in ancient ones,) for the drawing- 
room, and for the kitchen, if you please, — 
(for whatever you may think, good reader, 
I am of opinion, that books which at once 
amuse and instruct may be as useful to 
servant men and maids, as to their masters 
and mistresses) — so should there be one at 
least for the nursery. With such a chapter, 
therefore, will I brighten the countenance 
of many a dear child, and gladden the heart 
of many a happy father, and tender mother, 
and nepotious uncle or aunt, and fond 
brother or sister ; 

For their sakes I will relate one of William 
Dove's stories, with which he used to de- 
light young Daniel, and with which the 
Doctor in his turn used to delight his young 
favourites ; and which never fails of effect 
with that fit audience for which it is de- 
signed, if it be told with dramatic spirit, in 
the manner that our way of printing it may 
sufficiently indicate, without the aid of 
musical notation. Experto crede. Prick up 
your ears then, 

My good little women and men t ; 
and ye who are neither so little, nor so good, 
favete Unguis, for here follows the Story of 
the Three Bears. 



THE STORY OF THE THREE 
BEARS. 

A tale which may content the minds 
Of learned men and grave philosophers. 

Gascoyne. 

Once upon a time there were Three Bears. 
who lived together in a house of their own. 
in a wood. One of them was a Little, Small, 
Wee Bear; and one was a Middle-sized 
Bear, and the other was a Great, Huge 
Bear. They had each a pot for their por- 
ridge, a little pot for the Little, Small, Wee 
Bear; and a middle-sized pot for the Middle 
Bear, and a great pot for the Great, Huge 



Sophocles. 



t Southey. 



328 



THE DOCTOR. 



Bear. And they had each a chair to sit in ; 
a little chair for the Little, Small, Wee 
Bear ; and a middle-sized chair for the 
Middle Bear ; and a great chair for the 
Great, Huge Bear. And they had each a 
bed to sleep in ; a little bed for the Little, 
Small, Wee Bear ; and a middle-sized bed 
for the Middle Bear; and a great bed for 
the Great, Huge Bear. 

One day, after they had made the porridge 
for their breakfast, and poured it into their 
porridge-pots, they walked out into the 
wood while the porridge was cooling, that 
they might not burn their mouths, by be- 
ginning too soon to eat it. And while they 
were walking, a little old Woman came to 
the house. She could not have been a good, 
honest old Woman ; for first she looked in 
at the window, and then she peeped in at 
the keyhole ; and seeing nobody in the 
house, she lifted the latch. The door was 
not fastened, because the Bears were good 
Bears, who did nobody any harm, and never 
suspected that any body would harm them. 
So the little old Woman opened the door, 
and went in ; and well pleased she was when 
she saw the porridge on the table. If she 
had been a good little old Woman, she would 
have waited till the Bears came home, 
and then, perhaps, they would have asked 
her to breakfast ; for they were good Bears, 
— a little rough or so, as the manner of 
Bears is, but for all that very good-natured 
and hospitable. But she was an impudent, 
bad old Woman, and set about helping her- 
self. 

So first she tasted the porridge of the 
Great, Huge Bear, and that was too hot for 
her ; and she said a bad word about that. 
And then she tasted the porridge of the 
Middle Bear, and that was too cold for her ; 
and she said a bad word about that too. 
And then she went to the porridge of the 
Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; 
and that was neither too hot, nor too cold, 
but just right ; and she liked it so well, that 
she ate it all up : but the naughty old 
Woman said a bad word about the little por- 
ridge-pot, because it did not hold enough 
for her. 



Then the little old Woman sate down in 
the chair of the Great, Huge Bear, and that 
was too hard for her. And then she sate 
down in the chair of the Middle Bear, and 
that was too soft for her. And then she 
sate down in the chair of the Little, Small, 
Wee Bear, and that was neither too hard, 
nor too soft, but just right. So she seated 
herself in it, and there she sate till the 
bottom of the chair came out, and down 
came her's, plump upon the ground. And 
the naughty old Woman said a wicked word 
about that too. 

Then the little old Woman went up stairs 
into the bed-chamber in which the three 
Bears slept. And first she lay down upon 
the bed of the Great, Huge Bear ; but that 
was too high at the head for her. And next 
she lay down upon the bed of the Middle 
Bear ; and that was too high at the foot 
for her. And then she lay down upon the 
bed of the Little, Small, Wee Bear ; and 
that was neither too high at the head, nor at 
the foot, but just right. So she covered 
herself up comfortably, and lay there till she 
fell fast asleep. 

By this time the Three Bears thought 
their porridge would be cool enough; so 
they came home to breakfast. Now the 
little old Woman had left the spoon of the 
Great, Huge Bear, standing in his porridge. 



U 



&ott«t>ot>£ Sag f>tm 
at tug poxvitf Qtv 



said the Great, Huge Bear, in his great, 
rough, gruff voice. And when the Middle 
Bear looked at his, he saw that the spoon 
was standing in it too. They were wooden 
spoons ; if they had been silver ones, the 
naughty old Woman would have put them 
in her pocket. 
p 

" Somebody has been at my 
porridge ! " 

said the Middle Bear, in his middle voice. 
Then the Little, Small, Wee Bear looked 



THE DOCTOR. 



329 



at his, and there was the spoon in the por- 
ridge-pot, but the porridge was all gone. 

" Somebody has been at my porridge, and has eaten it all 
up ! " 

said the Little, Small, Wee Bear, in his 
little, small, wee voice. 

Upon this the Three Bears, seeing that 
some one had entered their house, and eaten 
up the Little, Small, Wee Bear's breakfast, 
began to look about them. ISTow the little 
old Woman had not put the hard cushion 
straight when she rose from the chair of the 
Great, Huge Bear. 

" £omci)otn> fjag bttn 
Sitting in ms ttwitl" 

said the Great, Huge Bear, in his great, 
rough, gruff voice. 

And the little old Woman had squatted 
down the soft cushion of the Middle Bear. 

" Somebody has been sitting 
in my chair ! " 

said the Middle Bear, in his middle voice. 

And you know what the little old Woman 
had done to the third chair. 

" Somebody has been sitting in my chair, and has sate the 
bottom of it out! " 

said the Little, Small, Wee Bear, in his little, 
small, wee voice. 

Then the Three Bears thought it neces- 
sary that they should make farther search ; 
so they went up stairs into their bed-cham- 
ber. Now the little old Woman had pulled 
the pillow of the Great, Huge Bear, out of 
its place. 



<* 






said the Great, Huge Bear, in his great, 
rough, gruff voice. 

And the little old Woman had pulled the 
bolster of the Middle Bear out of its place. 



" Somebody has been lying in 
my bed ! " 

said the Middle Bear, in his middle voice. 

And when the Little, Small, Wee Bear 
came to look at his bed, there was the bolster 
in its place ; and the pillow in its place upon 
the bolster ; and upon the pillow was the 
little old Woman's ugly, dirty head, — which 
was not in its place, for she had no business 
there. 

" Somebody has been lying in my bed, — and here she is!" 

said the Little, Small, Wee Bear, in his 
little, small, wee voice. 

The little old Woman had heard in her 
sleep the great, rough, gruff voice of the 
Great, Huge Bear ; but she was so fast 
asleep that it was no more to her than 
the roaring of wind, or the rumbling of 
thunder. And she had heard the middle 
voice of the Middle Bear, but it was only as 
if she had heard some one speaking in a 
dream. But when she heard the little, small, 
wee voice of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, 
it was so sharp, and so shrill, that it 
awakened her at once. Up she started ; 
and when she saw the Three Bears on one 
side of the bed, she tumbled herself out at 
the other, and ran to the window. ISTow the 
window was open, because the Bears, like 
good, tidy Bears, as they were, always 
opened their bed-chamber window when they 
got up in the morning. Out the little old 
Woman jumped ; and whether she broke 
her neck in the fall ; or ran into the wood 
and was lost there ; or found her way out 
of the wood, and was taken up by the con- 
stable and sent to the House of Correction 
for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But 
the Three Bears never saw anything more 
of her.* 



* The lamented Southey was very much pleased with 
the Story of the Three Bears as versified by G. N., and 
published specially for the amusement of " little people," 
lest in the volumes of " The Doctor, &c," it should 
"escape their sight." 



330 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CXXX. 

CHILDREN AND KITTENS. APHORISMS 

ASCRIBED TO THE LAUREATE, DOCTOR 
SOTJTHEY. MORE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

Oh ! if in after life we could but gather 
The very refuse of our youthful hours ! 

Charles Lloyd. 

O dear little children, you who are in the 
happiest season of human life, how will you 
delight in the Story of the Three Bears, 
when Mamma reads it to you out of this 
nice book, or Papa, or some fond Uncle, 
kind Aunt, or doting Sister; Papa and 
Uncle will do the Great, Huge Bear, best ; 
but Sister, and Aunt, and Mamma, will ex- 
cel them in the Little, Small, Wee Bear, 
with his little, small, wee voice. And O Papa 
and Uncle, if you are like such a Father and 
such an Uncle as are at this moment in my 
mind's eye, how will you delight in it, both 
for the sake of that small, but "fit audience," 
and because you will perceive how justly it 
may be said to be 

— a well-writ story, 
Where each word stands so well placed that it passes 
Inquisitive detraction to correct.* 

It is said to be a saying of Dr. Southey's, 
that " a house is never perfectly furnished 
for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it 
rising three years old, and a kitten rising six 
weeks." 

Observe, reader ; this is repeated upon 
On-diis authority, which is never to be taken 
for more than it is worth. I do not affirm 
that Dr. South ey has said this, but he is 
likely enough to have said it ; for I know 
that he sometimes dates his letters from Cat's 
Eden. And if he did say so, I agree with 
him, and so did the Doctor ; he specialiter 
as regards the child, I specialiter as regards 
the kitten. 

Kitten is in the animal world what the 
rosebud is in the garden ; the one the most 
beautiful of all young creatures, the other 
the loveliest of all opening flowers. The 



* Davenport. 



rose loses only something in delicacy by 
its development, — enough to make it a 
serious emblem to a pensive mind ; but if a 
cat could remember kittenhood, as we re- 
member our youth, it were enough to break 
a cat's heart, even if it had nine times nine 
heart strings. 

Do not the flowers spring fresh and gay, 
Pleasant and sweet, in the month of May ; 
And when their time cometh they fade away.f 

It is another saying of the Laureate's, 
according to On-dit, that, " live as long as 
you may, the first twenty years are the 
longest half of your life." They appear so 
while they are passing ; they seem to have 
been so when we look back upon them; and 
they take up more room in our memory than 
all the years that succeed them. 

But in how strong a light has this been 
placed by the American teacher Jacob Ab- 
bott, whose writings have obtained so wide a 
circulation in England. " Life," he says, " if 
you understand by it the season of prepara- 
tion for eternity, is more than half gone ; — 
life so far as it presents opportunities and 
facilities for penitence and pardon, — so far 
as it bears on the formation of character, 
and is to be considered as a period of pro- 
bation, — is unquestionably more than half 
gone, to those who are between fifteen and 
twenty. In a vast number of cases it is more 
than half gone, even in duration: and if we 
consider the thousand influences which crowd 
around the years of childhood and youth, 
winning us to religion, and making a sur- 
render of ourselves to Jehovah easy and 
pleasant, — and, on the other hand, look 
forward beyond the years of maturity, and 
see these influences losing all their power, 
and the heart becoming harder and harder 
under the deadening effects of continuance 
in sin, — we shall not doubt a moment 
that the years of immaturity make a far 
more important part of our time of probation 
than all those that follow." 

That pious man, who, while he lived, was 
the Honourable Charles How, and might 
properly now be called the honoured, says 



t Lusty Juventus. 



THE DOCTOR. 



331 



that " twenty years might be deducted for 
education, from the three-score and ten 
which are the allotted sum of human life ; 
this portion," he observes, " is a time of dis- 
cipline and restraint, and young people are 
never easy till they are got over it." 

There is, indeed, during those years, 
much of restraint, of wearisomeness, of 
hope, and of impatience ; all which feelings 
lengthen the apparent duration of time. 
Suffering, I have not included here ; but 
with a large portion of the human race, in 
all Christian countries, (to our shame be it 
spoken !) it makes a large item in the ac- 
count : there is no other stage of life in 
which so much gratuitous suffering is en- 
dured, — so much that might have been 
spared, — so much that is a mere wanton, 
wicked addition to the sum of human misery, 
— arising solely and directly from want of 
feeling in others, their obduracy, their 
caprice, their stupidity, their malignity, 
their cupidity, and their cruelty. 

Algunos sabios han die ho que para lo que 
el hornbre tiene aprender es muy corta la vida; 
mas yo anado que es muy larga para los que 
hemos de padecer. " Some wise men," writes 
Capmany, " have said that life is very short 
for what man has to learn, — but I (he says) 
must add, that it is very long for what we 
have to suffer." Too surely this is but too 
true ; and yet a more consolatory view may 
be taken of human existence. The shortest 
life is long enough for those who are more 
sinned against than sinning; whose good 
instincts have not been corrupted, and whose 
evil propensities have either not been called 
into action^ or have been successfully resisted 
and overcome. 

The Philosopher of Doncaster found, in 
his theory of progressive existence, an easy 
solution for some of those questions on which 
it is more presumptuous than edifying to 
speculate, yet whereon that restless curiosity 
which man derives from the leaven of the 
forbidden fruit makes it difficult for a busy 
mind to refrain from speculating. The hor- 
rid opinion which certain Fathers entertained 
concerning the souls of unbaptized infants, 
he never characterised by any lighter epithet 



than damnable, for he used to say, " it would 
be wicked to use a weaker expression : " and 
the more charitable notion of the Limbo he 
regarded as a cold fancy, neither consonant 
to the heart of man, nor consistent with the 
wisdom and goodness of the Creator. He 
thought that when the ascent of being has 
been from good to better through all its 
stages, in moral qualities as well as in phy- 
sical development, the immortal spirit might 
reach its human stage in such a state that it 
required nothing more than the vehicle of 
humanity, and might be spared its probation. 
As Enoch had been translated without pass- 
ing through death, so he thought such happy 
spirits might be admitted into a higher 
sphere of existence without passing through 
the trials of sin and the discipline of sorrow. 



CHAPTER CXXXI. 

THE DOCTOR ABSTAINS FROM SPECULATING 
ON PERILOUS SUBJECTS. A STORY OP 
ST. ANSELM. 

This field is so spacious, that it were easy for a man to 
lose himself in it ; and if I should spend all my pilgrimage 
in this walk, my time would sooner end than my way. 

Bishop Hall. 

The Doctor, though he played with many 
of his theories as if they were rather mush- 
rooms of the fancy than fruits of the under- 
standing, never expressed himself sportively 
upon this. He thought that it rested upon 
something more solid than the inductions 
of a speculative imagination, because there 
is- a feeling in human nature which answers 
to it, acknowledges, and confirms it. Often 
and often, in the course of his painful prac- 
tice, he had seen bereaved parents seek for 
consolation in the same conclusion, to which 
faith and instinctive reason led them, though 
no such hypothesis as his had prepared them 
for it. They believed it simply and sin- 
cerely ; and it is a belief, according to his 
philosophy, which nature has implanted in 
the heart for consolation, under one of the 
griefs that affect it most. 

He had not the same confidence in another 



332 



THE DOCTOR. 



view of the same branch of his hypothesis, 
relating to the early death of less hopeful 
subjects. Their term, he supposed, might 
be cut short in mercy, if the predisposing 
qualities which they had contracted on their 
ascent were such as would have rendered 
their tendency toward evil fatally predomi- 
nant. But this, as he clearly saw, led to 
the brink of a bottomless question ; and 
when he was asked after what manner he 
could explain why so many in whom this 
tendency predominates are, to their own 
destruction, permitted to live out their term, 
he confessed himself at fault. It was among 
the things, he said, which are inexplicable 
by our limited powers of mind. When we 
attain a higher sphere of existence, all things 
will be made clear. Meantime, believing in 
the infinite goodness of God, it is enough 
for us to confide in His infinite mercy, and 
in that confidence to rest. 

When St. Anselm, at the age of seventy- 
six, lay down in his last illness, and one of 
the Priests who stood around his bed said to 
him, it being then Palm Sunday, "Lord 
Father, it appears to us, that, leaving this 
world, you are about to keep the Passover 
in the Palace of your Lord!" the ambitious 
old theologue made answer, — et quidem, 
si voluntas ejus in hoc est, voluntati ejus non 
contradico. Verum si mallet me adhuc inter 
vos saltern tamdiu manere, donee qucestionem 
quam de animce origine mente revolvo, absol- 
vere possem, gratiosus acciperem, eo quod 
nescio, utrum aliquis earn, me defuncto, sit 
absoluturus. — " If indeed this be his will, I 
gainsay it not. But if He should chuse 
rather that I should yet remain among you 
at least long enough to settle the question 
which I am revolving in my mind concern- 
ing the origin of the Soul, I should take it 
gratefully ; because I do not know whether 
any one will be able to determine it, after 
I am dead." He added, Ego quippe, si come- 
dere possem, spero convalescere ; nam nihil 
doloris in aliqua parte sentio, nisi quod las- 
sescente stomacho, ob cibum quern capere nequit, 
totus dejicio. * — " If I could but eat, I might 



* Eadmer. 



hope to recover, for I feel no pain in any 
part, except that as my stomach sinks for 
lack of food, w] 
failing all over. 

The Saint must have been in a most satis- 
factory state of self-sufficiency when he thus 
reckoned upon his own ability for disposing 
of a question which he thought it doubtful 
whether any one who came after him would 
be able to solve. All other appetite had 
forsaken him ; but that for unprofitable spe- 
culation and impossible knowledge clung to 
him to the last ; so strong a relish had he 
retained of the forbidden fruit : 

Letting down buckets into empty wells, 
And growing old in drawing nothing up ! f 

So had the Saint lived beyond the allotted 
term of three- score years and ten, and his 
hand was still upon the windlass when the 
hand of death was upon him. One of our 
old Dramatists j represented a seven years' 
apprenticeship to such a craft as sufficient 
for bringing a man to a just estimate of it : 

I was a scholar ; seven useful springs 
Did I deflower in quotations 
Of cross'd opinions 'bout the soul of man ; 
The more I learnt, the more I learnt to doubt. 
Delight, my spaniel, slept, whilst I baused§ leaves, 
Toss'd o'er the dunces, pored on the old print 
Of titled words ; and still my spaniel slept. 
Whilst I wasted lamp-oil, baited my flesh, 
Shrunk up my veins : and still my spaniel slept. 
And still I held converse with Zabarell, 
Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saw 
Of antick Donate ; still my spaniel slept. 
Still on went I ; first, an sit anima ? 
Then an it were mortal ? O hold, hold ; at that 
They're at brain-buffets, fell by the ears amain 
Pell-mell together : still my spaniel slept. 
Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, flxt, 
Ex traduce, but whether't had free will 
Or no, hot Philosophers 
Stood banding factions, all so strongly propt, 
I staggered, knew not which was firmer part, 
But thought, quoted, read, observed and pryed, 
Stufft noting-books ; and still my spaniel slept. 
At length he waked and yawn'd ; and by yon sky, 
For aught I know he knew as much as I. 

In a more serious mood than that of this 
scholar, and in a humbler and holier state 
of mind than belonged to the Saint, our 
philosopher used to say, " little indeed does 



t Cowper. X Makston. 

§ Baisser, Fr., and in vulgar English " Buss," which is 
the same as Bause. 



THE DOCTOR. 



833 



it concern us, in this our mortal stage, to 
inquire whence the spirit hath come, — but 
of what infinite concern is the consideration 
whither is it going ! " 



CHAPTER CXXXH. 

DOCTOR CADOGAN. A REMARKABLE CASE OF 
HEREDITARY LONGEVITY. REMARKS ON 
THE ORDINARY TERM OF HUMAN LIFE. 

Live well, and then how soon so e'er thou die, 
Thou art of age to claim eternity. Randolph. 

Dr. Cadogan used to say that the life of 
man is properly ninety years instead of three- 
score and ten ; thirty to go up, thirty to 
stand still, and thirty to go down. 

Who told him so ? said Dr. Dove ; and 
who made him better informed upon that 
point than the Psalmist ? 

Any one who far exceeded the ordinary 
term, beyond which " our strength is but 
labour and sorrow," was supposed by our 
philosopher, to have contracted an obstinate 
habit of longevity in some previous stage of 
existence. Centenaries he thought must 
have been ravens and tortoises ; and Henry 
Jenkins, like Old Parr, could have been 
nothing in his preceding state, but a toad in 
a block of stone or in the heart of a tree. 

Cardinal D'Armagnac, when on a visitation 
in the Cevennes, noticed a fine old man 
sitting upon the threshold of his own door 
and weeping ; and as, like the Poet, he had 

not often seen 

A healthy man, a man full-grown, 
Weep in the public roads, alone, 

he went up to him, and asked wherefore he 
was weeping? The old man replied he 
wept because his father had just beaten him. 
The Cardinal, who was amazed to hear that 
so old a man had a father still living, was 
curious enough to inquire what he had 
beaten him for : " because," said the old 
man, " I passed by my grandfather without 
paying my respects to him." The Cardinal 
then entered the house that he might see 
this extraordinary family, and there indeed 



he saw both father and grandfather, the 
former still a hale though a very aged man ; 
the latter unable to move because of his 
extreme age, but regarded by all about him 
with the greatest reverence. 

That the habit in this instance, as in most 
others of the kind, should have been heredi- 
tary, was what the Doctor would have 
expected : good constitutions and ill habits 
of body are both so; — two things which 
seldom co-exist, but this obstinate longevity, 
as he called it, was proof both of the one 
and the other. A remarkable instance of 
hereditary longevity is noticed in the Statis- 
tical Account of Arklow. A woman who 
died at the age of an hundred and ten, 
speaking of her children, said that her 
youngest boy was eighty ; and that old boy 
was living several years afterwards, when 
the account was drawn up. The habit, 
however, he thought, was likely in such 
cases to correct itself and become weaker in 
every generation. An ill habit he deemed 
it, because no circumstances can render 
extreme old age desirable : it cannot be so 
in a good man, for his own sake ; nor in a 
bad one for the sake of everybody con- 
nected with him. On all accounts the ap- 
pointed term is best, and the wise and pious 
Mr. How has given us one cogent reason 
why it is so. 

" The viciousness of mankind," that excel- 
lent person says, " occasioned the flood ; and 
very probably God thought fit to drown the 
world for these two reasons ; first to punish 
the then living offenders ; and next to 
prevent men's plunging into these prodigious 
depths of impiety, for all future ages. For 
if in the short term of life, which is now 
allotted to mankind, men are capable of 
being puffed up to such an insolent degree 
of pride and folly, as to forget God and 
their own mortality, his power and their own 
weakness ; if a prosperity bounded by 
three- score and ten years, (and what mortal's 
prosperity, since the deluge, ever lasted so 
long ?) can swell the mind of so frail a crea- 
ture to such a prodigious size of vanity, 
what boundaries could be set to his arro- 
gance, if his life and prosperity, like that 



334 



THE DOCTOR. 



of the Patriarchs, were likely to continue 
eight or nine hundred years together ? If 
under the existing circumstances of life, 
men's passions can rise so high; if the present 
short and uncertain enjoyments of the world 
are able to occasion such an extravagant 
pride, such unmeasurable ambition, such 
sordid avarice, such barbarous rapine and 
injustice, such malice and envy, and so 
many other detestable things, which compose 
the numerous train of vice, — how then 
would the passions have flamed, and to 
what a monstrous stature would every vice 
have grown, if those enjoyments which pro- 
voked and increased them were of eight 
or nine hundred years' duration ? If eternal 
happiness and eternal punishment are able 
to make no stronger impressions upon 
men's minds, so near at hand, it may well 
be imagined that at so great a distance, 
they would have made no impression at all ; 
that eternal happiness would have been 
entirely divested of its allurements, and 
eternal misery of its terrors ; and the Great 
Creator would have been deprived of that 
obedience and adoration, which are so justly 
due to him from his creatures. Thus, the 
inundation of vice has in some measure, by 
the goodness of God, been prevented by an 
inundation of water. That which was the 
punishment of one generation may be said 
to have been the preservation of all those 
which have succeeded. For if life had not 
been thus clipped, one Tiberius, one Caligula, 
one Nero, one Louis XIV. had been suffi- 
cient to have destroyed the whole race of 
mankind ; each of whose lives had they been 
ten times as long, and the mischiefs they 
occasioned multiplied by that number, it 
might easily be computed how great a plague 
one such long-lived monster would have 
been to the world." 

Reflect, reader, upon this extract. The 
reasoning is neither fantastic, nor far- 
fetched ; but it will probably be as new to 
you as it was to me, when I met with it in 
Mr. How's Devout Meditations. The re- 
publication of that book is one of those good 
works for which this country is beholden to 
the late excellent Bishop Jebb. Mr. Hether- 



ington in his very original and able treatise 
upon the Fullness of Time, has seen this 
subject in the same point of view. . He says 
" Even our three-score and ten years, broken 
and uncertain as that little span is, can de- 
lude us into the folly of putting death and 
its dread reckoning far from us, as if we 
were never to die, and might therefore neg- 
lect any preparation for the after judgment. 
But if we were to see before us the prospect 
of a life of one thousand years, we should 
doubtless regard death as a bugbear in- 
deed, and throw off all the salutary restraint 
which the fear of it now exercises. Suppose 
our tendencies to every kind of sinful in- 
dulgence as strong as at present, with the 
prospect of such lengthened enjoyment and 
immunity from danger, and we may easily 
imagine with what hundred-fold eagerness 
we should plunge into all kinds of enormity, 
and revel in the wildest licentiousness. But 
this is the very consummation to which the 
race of Adam had reached, when ' God 
looked on the earth, and behold it was cor- 
rupt and filled with violence ;' and God 
determined to destroy the earth with its 
inhabitants." 

A remark of Brantome's may be quoted 
as the curious confirmation of a pious man's 
opinion by a thoroughly corrupt one. It 
occurs in his Discourse upon the Emperor 
Charles the Fifth. II faut certes confesser, 
he says, comme fouy dire une fois a un 
vieux Capitaine Espagnol, que si ce grand 
Empereur eust ete immortel, ou seulement de 
cent ans Men sain et dispos, il auroit este par 
guerre le vray Fleau du Monde, tant il estoit 
frappe d'ambition, si jamais Empereur le 
fut. 



CHAPTER CXXXIII. 

MORE THOUGHTS CONCERNING LIFE, DEATH, 
AND IMMORTALITY. 

Clericus es ? legito hate. Laicus f legilo ista libcnter, 
Crede mild, invenies hie quod uterque voles. 

- D. Du-Tr. Med. 

If we look to the better part of the human 
race as well as the worse, with regard to 



THE DOCTOR. 



335 



them also the ordinary term of human life 
will be found the best that could have been 
appointed both for themselves and for the 
purposes of society, the wisdom and the 
goodness of the ways of Providence becom- 
ing evident in this, as in all other things 
upon which our limited faculties are capable 
of forming a comprehensive judgment. 

The term is long enough for all we have 
to learn. Madame de Sevigne said spor- 
tively, that she should be a very wise person 
if she could but live about two hundred 
years : je tdche tous les jours a profiter de 
mes reflexions ; et si je pouvois vivre settle- 
ment deux cents cms, il me semble que je serois 
une personne bien admirable. This the Doctor, 
thought might hold good in the case of 
Madame de Sevigne herself, and of all other 
persons who regarded the acquirement of 
information as an amusement, or at most an 
accomplishment ; " One small head might 
carry all they knew," though their lives 
should be prolonged to the length of ante- 
diluvian old age. But in his opinion it would 
be otherwise with those who devoted them- 
selves to the pursuit of knowledge, for the 
purpose of storing their own minds, and 
enabling themselves to instruct their fellow 
creatures. For although the mind would 
retain its faculties unimpaired for a length 
of time in proportion to the greater length 
of life, it by no means follows that its capa- 
city would be enlarged. Horace Walpole 
lived forty years after he had said " my 
mould has taken all its impressions, and can 
receive no more. I must grow old upon the 
stock I have." It is indeed highly probable 
that the most industrious students for some 
time before they reach the confines of seni- 
lity forget as much as they learn. A short 
life is long enough for making us wise to 
salvation, if we will but give our hearts to 
the wisdom which is from above : and this is 
the one thing needful. 

There are some, however, who in their 
eulogistic and extravagant lamentations 
seem to have thought no lease long enough 
for the objects of their admiration. A certain 
John Fellows published an elegy oi* the 
death of the Reverend John Gill, D.D. 



This learned Doctor in Dissent died at a 
good old age ; nevertheless the passionate 
mourner in rhyme considered his death as a 
special mark of the Almighty's displeasure, 
and exclaimed, 

How are the mighty fallen ! Lord when will 

Thine anger cease ? The great, the learned Gill r 

Now pale and breathless lies ! 

Upon which a reviewer not improperly 
remarked that without dwelling upon the 
presumption of the writer, he could not but 
notice the folly of thus lamenting, as though 
it were an untimely stroke, the natural de- 
parture of a venerable old man of near 
eighty. " Was this," said he, " sufficient 
cause for raising such an outcry in Zion, 
and calling on her sons and daughters to 
weep and wail as if the Day of Judgment 
were come." 

Nothing, however, in former times excited 
so great a sensation in the small world of 
Noncons as the death of one of their Divines. 
Their favourite poet Dr. Watts wished 
when the Reverend Mr. Gouge died that he 
could make the stones hear and the rocks 
weep, 

And teach the Seas and teach the Skies 

Wailings and sobs and sympathies. 

Heaven was impatient of our crimes, 

And sent his minister of death 
To scourge the bold rebellion of the times, 

And to demand our prophet's breath. 

He came commissioned for the fates 

Of awful Mead and charming Bates : 

There he essay'd the vengeance first, 
Then took a dismal aim, and brought great Gouge to dust. 
Great Godge to dust ! how doleful is the sound ! 
How vast the stroke is ! and how wide the wound ! 

Sion grows weak and England poor; 

Nature herself with all her store 
Can furnish such a pomp for death no more. 

This was pretty well for a threnodial 
flight. But Dr. Watts went farther. When 
Mr. How should die, (and How was then 
seventy years of age,) he thought it would 
be time that the world should be at an end, 
— and prayed that it might be so. 

Eternal God ! command his stay ! 

Stretch the dear months of his delay ; — 
O we could wish his age were one immortal day ! 

But when the flaming chariot's come 
And shining guards to attend thy Prophet home, 

Amidst a thousand weeping eyes, 
Send an Elisha down, a soul of equal size ; 
Or burn this worthless globe, and take us to the skies ! 



336 



THE DOCTOR. 



What would the Dissenters have said if a 
clerical poet had written in such a strain upon 
the decease of a Bishop or Archbishop ? 

We pray in the Litany to be delivered 
from sudden death. Any death is to be 
deprecated which should find us unprepared : 
but as a temporal calamity with more reason 
might we pray to be spared from the misery 
of an infirm old age. It was once my 
fortune to see a frightful instance of extreme 
longevity, — a woman who was nearly in her 
hundredth year. Her sight was greatly 
decayed, though not lost ; it was very dif- 
ficult to make her hear, and not easy then 
to make her understand what was said, 
though when her torpid intellect was 
awakened she was, legally, of sane mind. 
She was unable to walk, or to assist herself 
in any way. Her neck hung in such wrinkles 
that it might almost be likened to a turkey's ; 
and the skin of her face and of her arms 
was cleft like the bark of an oak, as rough, 
and almost of as dark a colour. In this 
condition, without any apparent suffering, 
she passed her time in a state between 
sleeping and waking, fortunate that she 
could thus beguile the wearisomeness of 
such an existence. 

Instances of this kind are much rarer in 
Europe than in tropical climates. Negresses 
in the West Indies sometimes attain an age 
which is seldom ascertained because it is far 
beyond living memory. They outlive all 
voluntary power, and their descendants of 
the third or fourth generation carry them 
out of their cabins into the open air, and 
lay them, like logs, as the season may re- 
quire, in the sunshine, or in the shade. 
Methinks if Mecsenas had seen such an 
object, he would have composed a palinode 
to those verses in which he has perpetuated 
his most pitiable love for life. A woman 
in New Hampshire, North America, had 
reached the miserable age of 102, when one 
day as some people were visiting her, the 
bell tolled for a funeral ; she burst into tears 
and said, "Oh when will the bell toll for me! 
It seems as if it never would toll for me ! 
I am afraid that I shall never die ! " This 
reminds me that I have either read, or 



heard, an affecting story of a poor old woman 
in England, — very old, and very poor, — 
who retained her senses long after the body 
had become a weary burden ; she too when 
she heard the bell toll for a funeral used to 
weep, and say she was afraid God had 
forgotten her ! Poor creature, ignorantly 
as she spake, she had not forgotten Him ; 
and such impatience will not be accounted 
to her for a sin. 

These are extreme cases, as rare as they 
are mournful. Life indeed is long enough 
for what we have to suffer, as well as what 
we have to learn ; but it was wisely said by 
an old Scottish Minister (I wish I knew his 
name, for this saying ought to have im- 
mortalised it,) " Time is short ; and if 
your cross is heavy you have not far to 
carry it." 

Chi ha travaglio, in pace il porti ; 
Dolce e Dio, se il mondo e amaro. 
Sappia I'uom, che al Cielo e caro ; 

Abbiafede, e aura conforti* 

Were the term shorter it would not suffice 
for the development of those moral quali- 
ties which belong peculiarly to the latter 
stage of life ; nor could the wholesome 
influence which age exercises over the young 
in every country where manners are not so 
thoroughly corrupted as to threaten the dis- 
solution of society, be in any other manner 
supplied. 

// me semhle que le mal physique attendrit 
autant que le mal moral endurcit le cceur, said 
Lord Chesterfield, when he was growing 
old, and suffering under the infirmities of 
a broken constitution. Affliction in its 
lightest form, with the aid of time, had 
brought his heart into this wholesome state. 

OflgliuoV d'Adam, grida Nalura, 
Onde i tormenti? Io vifara tranquilli, 
Se voi non rebellate alia mia legge.\ 

There is indeed a tranquillity whicti Nature 
brings with it as duly toward the close of 
life, as it induces sleep at the close of day. 
We may resist the salutary influence in both 
cases, and too often it is resisted, at the cost 
of health in the one, and at a still dearer 



Maggi 



t Chiabrera. 



THE DOCTOR. 



337 



cost in the other : but if we do this, we do 
it wilfully, the resistance is our own act and 
deed, — it is our own error, our own fault, 
our sin, and we must abide the consequences. 
The greatest happiness to which we can 
attain in this world is the peace of God. 
Ask those who have attained the height of 
their ambition, whether in the pursuit of 
wealth, or power, or fame, if it be not so ? 
Ask them in their sane mind and serious 
hours, and they will confess that all else is 
vanity, 

Fond man, that looks on earth for happiness, 
And here long seeks what here is never found ! * 

This His own peace, which is his last and 
crowning gift, our Heavenly Father reserves 
for us in declining life, when we have earned 
our discharge from its business and its 
cares ; and He prepares us for it by the 
course of nature which he has appointed. 

O all the good we hope, and all we see, 
That Thee we know and love, comes from Thy love and 
Thee.* 

Hear, reader, the eloquent language of Adam 
Littleton when speaking of one who has re- 
ceived this gift : — it occurs in a funeral 
sermon, and the preacher's heart went with 
his words. After describing the state of a 
justified Christian, he rises into the following 
strain : " And now what has this happy 
person to do in this world any longer, 
having his debts paid and his sins pardoned, 
his God reconciled, his conscience quieted 
and assured, his accusers silenced, his enemies 
vanquished, the law satisfied, and himself 
justified, and his Saviour glorified, and a 
cpown of Immortality, and a robe of righte- 
ousness prepared for him ? What has he to 
do here more, than to get him up to the top 
of Pisgah and take a view of his heavenly 
Canaan ; to stand upon the Confines of 
Eternity, and in the contemplation of those 
joys and glories, despise and slight the 
vanities and troubles of this sinful and 
miserable world; and to breathe after his 
better life, and be preparing himself for his 
change ; when he shall be called off to weigh 



anchor, and hoist sail for another world, 
where he is to make discoveries of unutter- 
able felicities, and inconceivable pleasures ? 

" Oh what a happy and blest condition is 
it to live, or to die in the midst of such 
gracious deliverances and glorious assur- 
ances ; with this fastening consideration to 
boot, that ' neither life nor death, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor any creature 
is able to separate him from the love of God, 
which is in Jesus Christ his Lord ! ' " 



Phineas Fletcher. 



CHAPTER CXXXIY. 

A TRANSITION, AN ANECDOTE, AN APO- 
STROPHE, AND A PUN, PUNNET, OR PUN- 
DIGRION. 

Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se 

Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures ; 

Et ser?none opus est, modo trisli, scepejocoso. Horace. 

The Reader is now so far acquainted with 
the Doctor and his bride elect, — (for we are 
still in the Interim,) — he knows so much 
of the birth, parentage, and education of 
both, so much of their respective characters, 
his way of thinking and her way of life, that 
we may pass to another of those questions 
propounded in the second post-initial chap- 
ter. 

The minister of a very heterodox con- 
gregation in a certain large city, accosted 
one of his friends one day in the street with 
these words, which were so characteristic 
and remarkable that it was impossible not 
to remember and repeat them, — " I am con- 
sidering whether I shall marry or keep a 
horse." — He was an eccentric person, as 
this anecdote may show ; and his inspirited 
sermons (I must not call them inspired) were 
thought in their style of eloquence and sub- 
limity to resemble Klopstock's Odes. 

No such dubitation could ever have en- 
tered the Doctor's head. Happy man, he 
had already one of the best horses in the 
world : — (Forgive me, O Shade of Nobs in 
thine Elysian pastures, that I have so long 
delayed thy eulogy !) — and in Deborah 



338 



THE DOCTOK. 



he was about to have one of the best of 
wives. 

If he had hesitated between a horse and a 
wife, he would have deserved to meet with a 
Grey Mare. 



CHAPTER CXXXV. 

REGINALD HEBEB. A MISTAKE OBVIATED, 
WHICH MIGHT OTHERWISE EASILY BE MADE. 

Perhaps some Gull, as witty as a Goose, 
Says with a coy skew look, " it's pretty, pretty ! 

But yet that so much wit he should dispose 
For so small purpose, faith," saith he, " 'tis pity ! " 
Davies of Hereford. 

Who was Nobs ? 

Nobs, I may venture to affirm, is not 
mentioned by Reginald Heber. I have 
never had an opportunity of ascertaining 
the fact by a careful examination of his 
volumes, but the inqiiiries which it has 
been in my power to make have led to this 
conclusion. Judicious readers will, I hope, 
acknowledge, that in consequence of the 
scrupulous care with which I guard against 
even the appearance of speaking positively 
upon subjects whereon there may be any 
reasonable doubt, I am, comparatively with 
most authors, superlatively correct. 

Now as Reginald Heber must have seen 
Nobs, and having seen could not but have 
remarked him, and having remarked must 
also have perceived how remarkable he was 
for all the outward and visible signs of a 
good horse, this omission is to be lamented. 
A culpable omission it must not be called, 
because it was not required that he should 
mention him ; but it could not have been 
considered as hors cTceuvre to have noticed 
his surpassing merits, merits which Reginald 
Heber could have appreciated, and which 
no one perhaps could have described so 
well ; for of Nobs it may veritably be said 
that he was a horse 

— — tanto buorto c brllo, 
Che chi volesse dir le lodi sue, 
Bisognarebbc haver un gran ccrvello, 
Bisognarebbe un capo come un bue.* 

* Vakchi. 



Perhaps some captious reader may sup- 
pose that he has here detected a notable 
error in my chronology. Nobs, he may say, 
was made dog's-meat before Reginald Heber 
was born, or at least before he had ex- 
changed his petticoats for the garb-mascu- 
line, denominated galligaskins in philippic 
verse. 

Pardon me, reader; the mistake is on 
your part ; and you have committed two in 
this your supposition. Mistakes indeed, like 
misfortunes, seldom come single. 

First, it is a mistake, and what, if it were 
not altogether inconsiderate, would be a 
calumnious one, — to suppose that Nobs 
ever was made dog's-meat. The Doctor had 
far too much regard for his good horse, to 
let his remains be treated with such indignity. 
He had too much sense of obligation and 
humanity to part with an old dumb servant 
when his strength began to fail, and consign 
him to the hard usage which is the common 
lot of these poor creatures, in this, in this 
respect, hard-hearted and wicked nation. 
Nobs, when his labour was past, had for the 
remainder of his days the run of the fields 
at Thaxted Grange. And, when, in due 
course of nature, he died of old age, instead 
of being sent to the tanners and the dogs, 
he became, like " brave Percy " food for— 
worms. — A grave was dug, wherein he was 
decently deposited, with his shoes on, and 
Barnaby and his master planted a horse- 
chesnut on the spot. Matthew Montagu 
and Montagu Matthew ought to have visited 
it in joint pilgrimage. 

Hadst thou been a bay horse, Nobs, it 
would have been a bay-tree instead. But 
though the tree which was thy monument 
was deciduous, and has perhaps been doomed 
to fall by some irreverent or ignorant hand, 
thy honours are perennial. 

Secondly, the captious reader is mistaken 
in supposing me to have spoken of Bishop 
Heber, — that Heber, who if he had been a 
Romish Bishop would already have been 
Saint Reginald by the courtesy of Rome, as 
in due time he must have been by right of 
canonisation. Sir Edward Lloyd would 
smile at such a mistake. So would a York- 



THE DOCTOR. 



339 



shire or a Shropshire Genealogist. I am 
not enough of one to know in what degree 
the two Reginalds were related ; but that 
they were of the same family is apparent, 
and the elder, who is of the equestrian order 
of Authors and ought to have taken the 
name of Philip, was contemporary with the 
Doctor. He published yearly lists of horse 
matches run from 1753 to 1758, — I know 
not how much longer. If such registers as 
his had been preserved of the Olympic 
Games, precious would they be to historians 
and commentators, examining Masters, and 
aspirant Under- Graduates. 



CHAPTER CXXXVI. 

THE PEDIGREE AND BIRTH OF NOBS, GIVEN 
IN REPLY TO THE FIE ST QUERY IN THE 
SECOND CHAPTER P. I. 

Theo. Look to my Horse, I pray you, well. 

Diego. He shall, Sir, 

Inc. Oh ! how beneath his rank and call was that now ! 

Your Horse shall be entreated as becomes 

A Horse of fashion, and his inches. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Who was ISobs ? 

A troop of British cavalry which had 
served on the continent was disbanded in 
the City of York, and the horses were sold. 
Their commander Sir Robert Clayton was a 
wealthy man, and happening to be a noble- 
minded man also, he could not bear to 
think that his old fellow campaigners, who 
had borne brave men to battle, should be 
ridden to death as butchers' hacks, or 
worked in dung-carts till they became dog's 
meat. So he purchased a piece of ground 
upon Knavesmire heath, and turned out the 
old horses to have their run there for life. 
There may be persons living who remember 
to have heard of this honourable act, and 
the curious circumstance which has pre- 
served it from being forgotten. For once 
these horses were grazing promiscuously 
while a summer storm gathered, and when 
the first lightnings flashed from the cloud, 
and the distant thunder began to roll ; but 
presently, as if they supposed these fires and 
sounds to be the signal of approaching 



battle, they were seen to get together and 
form in line, almost in as perfect order as 
if they had had their old masters upon their 
backs. 

One of these old soldiers was what the 
Spaniards with the gravity peculiar to their 
language call a Caballo Padre ; or what 
some of our own writers, with a decorum 
not less becoming, appellate an Entire 
horse ; — or what a French interpreter ac- 
companying an Englishman to obtain a 
passport wherein the horse as well as the 
rider was to be described, denominated un 
cJieval de pierre to the astonishment of the 
clerks in the office, whose difficulty was not 
at all removed by the subsequent definition 
of the English applicant, which the said 
interpreter faithfully rendered thus, un cheval 
de pierre est un cheval qui couvre les officers 
municipaux. He had found his way in a 
Cossack regiment from the Steppes of Tar- 
tary to the plains of Prussia ; had run 
loose from a field of battle in which his 
master was killed, and passing from hand to 
hand had finally been sold by a Jew into 
the service of his Majesty King George H. 
In the course of this eventful life he had 
lost his Sclavonic name, and when he en- 
tered the British regiment was naturalised 
by that of Moses in honour of his late pos- 
sessor. 

It so happened that a filly by name Miss 
Jenny had been turned out to recover from 
a sprain in a field sufficiently near Knaves- 
mire heath for a Honyhnhnm voice to be 
within hearing of Houyhnhnm ears. In this 
field did Miss Jenny one day beguile the 
solitude by exclaiming " heigh-ho for a hus- 
band ! " an exclamation which exists in the 
Equine as well as in the English language. 
It is also found in the Feline tongue, but 
Grimalkin has set it to very unpleasant 
music. Moses heard the strain and listened 
to the voice of love. The breezes did for 
him what many a lover has in vain re- 
quested them to do in sonnet, and in 
elegy, and in song ; — they wafted back his 
sympathetic wishes, and the wooing was 
carried on at a quarter of a mile distance : 
after which the Innamorato made no more 



340 



THE DOCTOR. 



of hedge and ditch than Jupiter was wont 
to do of a brazen Tower. Goonhilly in 
Cornwall was indebted for its once famous 
breed of horses to a Barb, which was turned 
loose (like Moses) by one of the Erisey 
family, — the Erisey estate joining the down. 
A few days afterwards, Miss Jenny, having 
perfectly recovered of her sprain, was pur- 
chased by Dr. Dove. The alteration which 
took place in her shape was so little that 
it excited no suspicion in any person : — a 
circumstance which will not appear extra- 
ordinary to those who remember that the 
great Mr. Taplin himself having once booked 
his expectations of a colt, kept the mare 
eleven lunar months and a fortnight by 
the Almanack, and then parted with her, 
after taking the opinion of almost every 
farmer and breeder in the country, upon an 
universal decision that she had no foal in 
her ; — ten days afterwards the mare showed 
cause why the decision of the judges should 
be reversed. Those persons, I say, who 
know the supereminent accuracy of Mr. 
Taplin, and that in matters of this kind 
everything passed under his own eye, (for 
he tells you that it was a trust which he 
never delegated to another), will not be so 
much surprised as the Doctor was at what 
happened on the present occasion. The 
Doctor and Nicholas were returning from 
Adwick-in-the- Street where they had been 
performing an operation. It was on the 
eleventh of June ; the day had been un- 
usually hot ; they were overtaken by a thun- 
derstorm, and took shelter in a barn. The 
Doctor had no sooner alighted than Miss 
Jenny appeared greatly distressed; and to 
the utter astonishment both of Dr. Dove 
and Nicholas, who could scarcely believe 
their own eyes, there was — almost as soon 
as they could take off the saddle — what I 
once saw called in the letter of a waiting 
gentlewoman — dishion to the family. To 
express the same event in loftier language, 

llvog r izMToi; NO"*" 
'E; <p6co; 



• In the original "lufjuo; takes the place of Nobs. Cf. 
Olymp. vi. 72. 



It is for the gratification of the learned 
Thebans who will peruse this history that I 
quote Pindar here. 



INTERCHAPTER XVI. 

THE AUTHOR RELATES SOME ANECDOTES, 
REFERS TO AN OPINION EXPRESSED BY 
A CRITIC ON THE PRESENT OPUS, AND 
DESCANTS THEREON. 

Erery man can say B to a battledore, and write in praise 
of virtue and the seven liberal sciences ; thrash corn out 
of full sheaves, and fetch water out of the Thames. But 
out of dry stubble to make an after-harvest, and a plenti- 
ful crop without sowing, and wring juice out of a flint, 
that is Pierce a God's name, and the right trick of a work- 
man. Nash. 

There is an anecdote related of the Speaker 
in one of Queen Elizabeth's Parliaments, 
who when the Queen, during a session in 
which small progress had been made in the 
public business, asked him what the House 
had got through, made answer, " May it 
please your Majesty, eight weeks." In like 
manner, if it be asked what I have got 
through in the prosecution of this my Opus, 
I reply, " May it please your Readership, 
four volumes." 

This brings to my recollection another 
anecdote, which, though not matter of history 
like the former, is matter of fact, and oc- 
curred in the good town of Truro. A lady 
in that town hired a servant, who at the 
time of hiring thought herself bound to let 
the lady know that she had once "had a 
misfortune." When she had been some 
time in service, she spoke of something to 
her Mistress, inadvertently, as having hap- 
pened just after the birth of her first child. 
"Your first!" said the Lady; "why how 
many have you had then ? " — " Oh, Ma'am," 
said she, "I've had four." "Four!" ex- 
claimed the Mistress ; " why you told me you 
had had but one. However I hope you mean 
to have no more." " Ma'am," replied the wo- 
man, "that must be as it may please God." 

"We are," says Lord Camelford, " as it 
pleases God, — and sometimes as it dis- 
pleases him." 



THE DOCTOR. 



341 



The reflection is for every one ; but the 
anecdote is recommended to the special 
notice of a Critic on the Athenaeum estab- 
lishment, who in delivering his opinion upon 
the third volume of this Opus, pronounced 
it to be "clear to him," that the Author 
had " expended" on the two former " a 
large portion of his intellectual resources, no 
less than of his lengthy common -place book." 

The aforesaid Critic has also pronounced 
that the Opus entitled The Doctor might 
have been and ought to have been a Novel. 
Might have been is one consideration, ought 
to have been is another, and whether it 
would have been better that it should have 
been, is a third ; but without discussing 
either of these propositions, because as 
Calderon says, 

Sobre impossibles yfalsas 
proposiciones, no hai 
argumento ; 

without, I say, inquiring into what might, 
would, could, or should have been, neither 
of which imports of the preterperfect tense, 
optative, potential or subjunctive, are suit- 
able to the present case, the Author of this 
Opus replies to the aforesaid Critic's asser- 
tion that the Opus might have been a Novel, 
— That, Sir, must have been as it pleased me. 
When Corporal Trim in one of his many 
attempts to begin the immortal story of the 
King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, 
called that King unfortunate, and Uncle 
Toby compassionately asked " was he unfor- 
tunate then?" the Corporal replied, the 
King of Bohemia, an' please your honour 
was unfortunate, as thus, — that taking great 
pleasure and delight in navigation and all 
sort of sea affairs, and there happening 
throughout the whole Kingdom of Bohemia 
to be no sea-port town whatever, — " How 
the Deuce should there, Trim ? cried my 
Uncle Toby ; for Bohemia being totally in- 
land, it could have happened no otherwise." 
— " It might, said Trim, if it had pleased 
God." — "I believe not, replied my Uncle 
Toby, after some pause — for being inland, 
as I said, and having Silesia and Moravia to 
the East; Lusatia and Upper Saxony to the 
North : Franconia to the West, and Bavaria 



to the South, Bohemia could not have been 
propelled to the sea, without ceasing to be 
Bohemia, — nor could the sea, on the other 
hand, have come up to Bohemia, without 
overflowing a great part of Germany, and 
destroying millions of unfortunate inhabit- 
ants who could make no defence against 
it, which would bespeak, added my Uncle 
Toby, mildly, such a want of compassion in 
Him who is the Father of it, — that, I 
think, Trim — the thing could have hap- 
pened no way." 

Were I to say of a Homo on any estab- 
lishment whatsoever, political, commercial 
or literary, public or private, legal or eccle- 
siastical, orthodox or heterodox, military or 
naval, — I include them all that no indivi- 
dual in any may fancy the observation was 
intended for himself and so take it in snuff 

— (a phrase of which I would explain* the 
origin if I could), — and moreover that no 
one may apply to himself the illustration 
which is about to be made, I use the most 
generic term that could be applied, — Were 
I to say of any Homo (and how many are 
there of whom it might be said !) that he 
might have been whelped or foaled, instead 
of having been born, no judicious reader 
would understand me as predicating this to 
be possible, but as denoting an opinion that 
such an animal might as well have been a 
quadruped as what he is ; and that for any 
use which he makes of his intellect, it might 
have been better for society if he had gone 
on four legs and carried panniers. 

" There stands the Honourable Baronet, 
hesitating between two bundles of opinions" 

— said a certain noble Lord of a certain 
County Member in the course of an ani- 
mated debate in the House of Commons on 
a subject now long since forgotten. I will 
not say of any Homo on any establishment 
that his fault is that of hesitating too long 
or hazarding too little ; but I will say of 
any such hypothetical Homo as might better 



* The explanation is probably to be drawn from the 
idea expressed in the words of Horace: Naso suspendis 
adunco. Nasibus uti Formido. Cf. 1 Sat. vi. 5. ; 1 Epist. 
xix. 45. Doering quotes the German phrase " iibcr einen 
die Nase r'dvipfcn. For examples see Nare's Gloss, in v. 



342 



THE DOCTOR. 



have been foaled, that I wish his panniers 
had supplied him with better bundles to 
choose of. 

" How," says Warburton, " happened it 
in the definitions of Man, that reason is 
always made essential to him ? Nobody ever 
thought of making goodness so. And yet it 
is certain that there are as few reasonable 
men as there are good. To tell you my 
mind, I think Man might as properly be de- 
fined, an animal to whom a sword is essential, 
as one to whom reason is essential. For 
there are as few that can, and yet fewer that 
dare, use the one as the other." — And yet, 
he might have added, too many that misuse 
both. 

The aforesaid Critic on the Athenaeum 
establishment spoke with as little considera- 
tion as Trim, when he said that the Opus 
might have been a novel, implying the 
while — if it had so pleased the Author; and 
I make answer advisedly like my Uncle 
Toby in saying that it could not have pleased 
me. 

The moving accident is not my trade ; 
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts.* 

Wherefore should I write a novel ? There 
is no lack of novels nor of novel-writers in 
these days, good, bad, and indifferent. Is 
there not Mr. James, who since the demise 
of Sir Walter, is by common consent justly 
deemed King of the historical Novelists ? 
And is there not Mrs. Bray, who is as pro- 
perly the Queen ? Would the Earl of Mul- 
grave be less worthily employed in writing 
fashionable tales upon his own views of mo- 
rality, than he is in governing Ireland as he 
governs it ? Is there any season in which 
some sprigs of nobility and fashion do not 
bring forth hothouse flowers of this kind ? 
And if some of them are rank or sickly, 
there are others (tell us, Anne Grey ! are 
there not ?) that are of delicate penciling, 
rich colours, and sweet scent. What are 
the Annuals but schools for Novelists, male 
and female ? and if any lady in high life has 
conceived a fashionable tale, and when the 
critical time arrives wishes for a temporary 

* Wordsworth. 



concealment, is not Lady Charlotte Bury 
kindly ready to officiate as Sage Femme ? 

The Critic was not so wide of the mark 
in saying that this Opus ought to have been a 
novel — to have pleased him, being under- 
stood. 

Oh, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er ; 
But there's more in me than thou understandest.f 

And indeed, as Chapman says in his Com- 
mentary on the Iliad, " where a man is un- 
derstood there is ever a proportion between 
the writer's wit and the writees, — that I may 
speak with authority, according to my old 
lesson in philosophy, intellectus in ipsa in- 
telligibilia transit'"' 

Le role dun auteur est un role assez vain, 
says Diderot, c'est celui dun homme qui se 
croit en etat de dormer des leqons au public. Et 
le role du critique ? II est plus vain encore ; 
dest celui dun homme qui se croit en etat de 
donner des leqons a celui qui se croit en etat 
den donner au 'public. Hauteur dit, Mes- 
sieurs, ecoutez-moi, car je suis votre maitre. 
Et le critique, Cest moi, Messieurs, qu!il 
faut ecouter, car je suis le maitre de vos 
maitres. 

The Athenaeum Critic plays the Master 
with me, — and tops his part. " It is clear," 
he says, " from every page of this book that 
the Author does not, in vulgar parlance, 
think Small Beer of himself." Right, my 
Master ? certainly I do not. I do not think 
that the contents of this book would be truly 
compared to small beer, which is either weak 
and frisky, or weak and flat ; that they would 
turn sour upon a sound, that is to say, an 
orthodox stomach, or generate flatulence ex- 
cept in an empty one. I am more inclined, 
as my Master insinuates, to think Strong 
Beer of myself, Cwrw, Burton, Audit 
Ale, Old October, — what in his par- 
lance used to be called Stingo ; or Porter, 
such as Thrale's Entire, and old Whitbread's, 
in days when the ingredients came from the 
malster and the hop merchant, not from the 
Brewer's druggist. Or Cider, whether of 
Herefordshire, Somersetshire, or Devonshire 
growth, no matter ; Stire, Cokaghee, or Fox- 



t Troilus and Cressida. 



THE DOCTOR. 



343 



whelp, a beverage as much better than Cham- 
pagne, as it is honester, wholesomer, and 
cheaper. Or Perry, the Teignton- Squash. 
These are right old English liquors, and I 
like them all. ISTay, I am willing if my Mas- 
ter pleases, to think Metheglin of myself 
also, though it be a Welsh liquor, for there 
is Welsh blood in my veins, and Metheglin 
has helped to make it, and it is not the worse 
for the ingredient. Moreover with especial 
reference to the present Opus, there is this 
reason why I should think Metheglin of my- 
self, — that Metheglin is made of honey, and 
honey is collected from all the flowers of the 
fields and gardens : and how should I have 
been able to render this tribute to the Philo- 
sopher of Doncaster, my true Master, if 
I had not been busy as a bee in the fields 
and gardens of literature, yea in the woods 
and wilds also ? And in the orchards, — for 
have I not been plying early and late amongst 

the orchard trees 

Last left and earliest found by birds and bees ? * 

Of Bees, however, let me be likened to a 
Dumbledore, which Dr. Southey says is the 
most goodnatured of God's Insects ; because 
great must be the provocation that can ex- 
cite me to use my sting. 

My Master's mention of Small Beer, in 
vulgar parlance Swipes, reminds me of Old 
Tom of Oxford's Affectionate Condolence 
with the Ultras, some years ago, whereby it 
appears that he thought Small Beer at 
that time of some very great Patriots and 
Queenites. 

I see your noble rage too closely pent ; 
I hear you Whigs and Radicals ferment, 
Like close-cork'd bottles filled with fizzing barm. 

Now, Gentlemen, whose stopper is the strongest ? 
Whose eloquence will bottle-in the longest ? 

Who'll first explode, I wonder, or who last ? 
As weak small Beer is sure to fly the first, 
Lo ! poor Grey Bennet hath already burst, 

And daub'd with froth the Speaker as he past. 

Who next ? Is't Lambton, weak and pert and brisk, 
And spitting in one's face, like Ginger-frisk ? 

Lord John, keep in thy cork, for Heaven's sake do ! 
The strength and spirit of Champagne is thine, 
Powers that will mellow down to generous wine ; 

Thy premature explosion I should rue. 

* Ebenezer Elliott. 



The Oxford Satirist thought Champagne 
of Lord John in the reign of Queen Caro- 
line. I think Champagne of him still, which 
the Satirist assuredly does not, but we differ 
in opinion upon this point only because we 
differ concerning the merits of the wine so 
called. I request him to accept the assu- 
rance of my high consideration and good 
will ; I shake hands with him mentally and 
cordially, and entreat him to write more 
songs, such as gladden the hearts of true 
Englishmen. 

Dr. Clarke says in a note to his Travels, 
that Champagne is an artificial compound : 
that " the common champagne wine drunk 
in this country is made with green grapes 
and sugar ; and that the imitation of it, 
with green gooseberries and sugar, is full as 
salutary, and frequently as palatable." A 
Frenchman who translated these Travels 
remarks upon this passage thus, C'est sans 
doute par un sentiment de patriotisme, et pour 
degouter ses compatriotes du vin de Cham- 
pagne, que le Docteur Clarke se permet de 
hasarder de pareilles asse?*tions. Croit-il que 
le vin de Champagne se fasse avec du sucre 
et des raisins verts, ou des groseilles, et qxCun 
semblable melange puisse passer, meme en 
Angleterre, pour un analogue des vins d 'Ai et 
dEpernai? Dr. Clarke, as it became him 
to do, inserted this remark in his next 
edition, and said in reply to it, " It so hap- 
pens that the author's information does not 
at all depend upon any conjectures he may 
have formed ; it is the result of inquiries 
which he made upon the spot, and of posi- 
tive information relative to the chemical 
constituents ' des vins dAi et dEpernai,' 
from Messrs. Moett and Company, the prin- 
cipal persons concerned in their fabrication. 
It was in the town of Epernai, whither the 
author repaired for information upon this 
subject, that in answer to some written 
questions proposed to Mons. Moett, the 
following statement was given by that gen- 
tleman touching the admission of sugar 
into the composition of their wine : 

Peut-etre regarderoit-on en Champagne 
comme un indiscretion, la reponse a cette ques- 
tion, puisque la revelation de ce qiion appelle 



344 



THE DOCTOR. 



L.E SECRET DU PR0PRIETA1RE pOUWOit liuire 

a la reputation des vins de Champagne : mais 
les hommes instruits et eclair es doivent con- 
noitre les faits et les causes, parcequils savent 
apprecier et en tirer lesjustes consequences. 

II est tres vrai que dans les annees froides 
ou pluvieuses, le raisin riayant pas acquis 
assez de maturite, ou ayant ete prive de la 
chaleur du soleil, les vins riont plus cette 
liqueur douce et aimable qui les characterise : 
dans ce cas quelques proprietaires y ont sup- 
plee par V introduction dans leur vins d'une 
liqueur tres eclair e, dont la base est neces- 
sairement du sucre ; sa fabrication est un 
secret; cette liqueur meslee en tres petites 
quantites aux vins verts, corrige le vice de 
Vannee, et leur donne absolument la meme 
douceur que celle que procure le soleil dans 
les annees chaudes. II s'est Sieve en Cham- 
pagne meme des frequentes querelles entre des 
connoisseurs qui pretendoient pouvoir distin- 
guer au gout la liqueur artificielle de celle qui 
est naiurelle ; mais c'est une chimere. Le 
sucre produit dans le raisin, comme dans toute 
espece de fruit par le travail de la nature, est 
toujours du sucre, comme celui que Vartpour- 
roit y introduire, lorsque V intemperance des 
saisons les en a prive. Nous nous sommes 
plus tres souvent a mettre en defaut V expe- 
rience de ces pretendus connoisseurs ; et il est 
si rare de les voir rencontrer juste, que Von 
peut croire que c'est le hazard plus que leur 
gout qui les a guide. 

Having thus upon the best authority 
shown that Champagne in unfavourable 
years is doctored in the country, and leaving 
the reader to judge how large a portion of 
what is consumed in England is made from 
the produce of our own gardens, I repeat 
that I think Champagne of Lord John Rus- 
sell, — not such as my friend of Oxford 
intended in his verses, — but Gooseberry 
Champagne, by no means brisk, and with a 
very disagreeable taste of the Cork. 

If the Oxford Satirist and I should 
peradventure differ concerning Champagne, 
we are not likely to differ now concern- 
ing Lord John Russell. I am very well 
assured that we agree in thinking of 
his Lord Johnship as he is thought of in 



South Devonshire. Nor shall we differ in 
our notions of some of Lord John's Col- 
leagues, and their left-handed friends. If he 
were to work out another poem in the same 
vein of satire, some of the Whoie-hoggery 
in the House of Commons he would desig- 
nate by Deady, or Wet and Heavy, some 
by weak tea, others by Blue-Ruin, Old Tom 
which rises above Blue-Ruin to the tune of 
threepence a glass — and yet more fiery 
than Old Tom, as being a fit beverage for 
another Old one who shall be nameless, — 
Gin and Brimstone. 

There is a liquor peculiar to Cornwall, 
with which the fishermen regale, and which 
because of its colour they call Mahogany, 
being a mixture of two parts gin and one 
part treacle, well beaten together. Ma- 
hogany then may be the representative 
liqueur of Mr. Charles Buller, the represen- 
tative of a Cornish borough ; and for Sir 
John Campbell there is Athol porridge, 
which Boswell says is the counterpart of 
Mahogany, but which Johnson thought must 
be a better liquor, because being a similar 
mixture of whiskey and honey, both its 
component parts are better : qui non odit the 
one, amet the other. 

Mr. Sheil would put the Satirist in mind 
of Whiskey " unexcised by Kings," and con- 
sequently above proof. Mr. Roebuck of 
Bitters, Mr. Joseph Hume of Ditch Water, 
Mr. Lytton Bulwer of Pop, Mr. Ward of 
Pulque, Mr. O'Connell of Aqua Tofana, and 
Lord Palmerston of Parfait Amour. 

Observe, good Reader, it was to bottled 
Small Beer that the Oxford Satirist likened 
Grey Bennet, not to Brown Stout, which is 
a generous liquor having body and strength. 

Hops and Turkeys, Carp and Beer, 
Came into England all in one 3 r ear, 

and that year was in the reign of Henry VIII. 
The Turkeys could not have come before 
the discovery of America, nor the Beer be- 
fore the introduction of the Hops Bottled 
Beer we owe to the joint agency of Alexander 
Nowell, Bishop Bonner, and Mr. Francis 
Bowyer, afterwards Sheriff of London. 
Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's, 



THE DOCTOR. 



345 



A famous preacher in the halcyon days 
Of Queen Elizabeth of endless praise, 

was at the beginning of Queen Mary's cruel 
reign Master of Westminster School. Izaak 
"Walton would have pronounced him a very- 
honest man from his picture at Brazen Nose 
College (to which he was a great Benefactor), 
inasmuch as he is there represented " with 
his lines, hooks, and other tackling, lying in 
a round on one hand, and his angles of 
several sorts on the other." But, says Ful- 
ler, whilst Nowell was catching of Fishes, 
Bonner was catching of Nowell, and under- 
standing who he was, designed him to the 
shambles, whither he had certainly been 
sent, had not Mr. Francis Bowyer, then a 
London merchant, conveyed him upon the 
seas. Nowell was fishing upon the Banks 
of the Thames when he received the first 
intimation of his danger, which was so press- 
ing that he dared not go back to his own 
house to make any preparation for his flight. 
Like an honest angler he had taken with 
him provision for the day ; and when in the 
first year of England's deliverance he re- 
turned to his own country and his own 
haunts, he remembered that on the day of 
his flight he had left a bottle of beer in a 
safe place on the bank ; there he looked for 
it, and " found it no bottle, but a gun, such 
the sound at the opening thereof; and this," 
says Fuller, " is believed (casualty is mother 
of more inventions than industry), the 
original of Bottled Ale in England." 

Whatever my Master may think of me, 
whether he may class me with Grey Ben- 
net's weak and frothy, or Dean No well's 
wholesome and strong, be the quality of the 
liquor what it may, he certainly mistook the 
capacity of the vessel, even if he allowed it 
to be a Magnum Bonum or Scotch Pint. 
Greatly was he mistaken when he supposed 
that a large portion of my intellectual re- 
sources was expended, and of my common- 
place Book also. — The former come from a 
living spring, — and the latter is like the urn 
under a River God's arm. I might hint 
also at that Tun which the Pfalzgraf Jo- 
hannes Kasimir built at Heidelberg in the 
year 1591, 



Dessglrichen %u derselben zeit 
War keines in der Christenheit : 

but alas! it is now a more melancholy object 
than the Palace to which it appertained, — 
for the ruins of that Palace are so beautiful, 
that the first emotion with which you behold 
them is that of unmingled pleasure: — and 
the tun is empty! My Master, however, 
who imagines that my vat runs low, and is 
likely to be drawn dry, may look at one of 
the London Brewers' great casks. 



CHAPTER CXXXVII. 

DIFFERENCE OF OPINION BETWEEN THE 
DOCTOR AND NICHOLAS CONCERNING THE 
HIPPOGONY OR ORIGIN OF THE FOAE 
DROPPED IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER. 

his birth day, the eleventh of June 

When the Apostle Barnaby the bright 
Unto our year doth give the longest light. 

Ben Jonson. 

" It's as fine a foal as ever was dropped," said 
Nicholas ; — " but I should as soon thought 
of dropping one myself ! " 

" If thou hadst, Nicholas," replied the 
Doctor, "'twould have been a foal with longer 
ears, and a cross upon the shoulders. But I 
am heartily glad that it has happened to the 
Mare rather than to thee ; for in the first 
place thou wouldst hardly have got so well 
through it, as, with all my experience, I 
should have been at a loss how to have 
rendered thee any assistance ; and secondly, 
Nicholas, I should have been equally at a 
loss how to account for the circumstance, 
which certainly never could have been ac- 
counted for in so satisfactory a manner. 
The birth of this extraordinary foal supports 
a fact which the wise ancients have attested, 
and the moderns in their presumptuous 
ignorance have been pleased to disbelieve : 
it also agrees with a notion which I have 
long been disposed to entertain. But had it 
been thy case instead of the Mare's it would 
have been to no purpose except to con- 
tradict all facts and confound all notions. " 

" As for that matter," answered Nicholas, 



346 



THE DOCTOR. 



all my notions are struck in a heap. You 
bought that Mare on the 29th of July, by 
this token that it was my birth- day, and I 
said she would prove a lucky one. One, 
— two, — three, — four, — five, — six, — 
seven, — eight, — nine, — ten, — " he continued, 
counting upon his fingers, — " ten Kalendar 
months, and to-day the eleventh of June ; — 
in all that time I'll be sworn she has never 
been nearer a horse than to pass him on the 
road. It must have been the Devil's doing, 
and I wish he never did worse. However, 
Master, I hope you'll sell him, for, in spite 
of his looks, I should never like to trust my 
precious limbs upon the back of such a 
misbegotten beast." 

" C7wbegotten, Nicholas," replied the Doc- 
tor; " Mttbegotten, — or rather begotten by 
the winds, — for so with every appearance 
of probability we may fairly suppose him to 
have been." 

" The Winds ! " said Nicholas. —He lifted 
up the Eds of his little eyes as far as he could 
strain them, and breathed out a whistle of a 
half minute long, beginning in C alt and 
running down two whole octaves ! 

" It was common in Spain," pursued Dr. 
Dove, " and consequently may have happened 
in our less genial climate, but this is the 
first instance that has ever been clearly ob- 
served. I well remember," he continued, 
" that last July was peculiarly fine. The 
wind never varied more than from South 
South East to South West ; the little rain 
which fell descended in gentle, balmy, 
showers, and the atmosphere never could 
have been more full of the fecundating 
principle." 

That our friend really attached any credit 
to this fanciful opinion of the Ancients is 
what I will not affirm, nor perhaps would 
he himself have affirmed it. But Henry 
More, the Platonist, Milton's friend, un- 
doubtedly believed it. After quoting the 
well-known passage upon this subject in the 
Georgics, and a verse to the same effect from 
the Punics, he adds, that you may not 
suspect it " to be only the levity and credu- 
lity of Poets to report such things, I can 
inform you that St. Austin, and Solinus the 



historian, write the same of a race of horses 
in Cappadocia. Nay, which is more to the 
purpose, Columella and Varro, men expert 
in rural affairs, assert this matter for a most 
certain and known truth." Pliny also 
affirms it as an undoubted fact : the foals of 
the Wind, he says, were exceedingly swift, 
but short-lived, never outliving three years. 
And the Lampongs of Sumatra, according 
to Marsden, believe at this time that the 
Island Engano is inhabited entirely by 
females, whose progeny are all children of 
the Wind. 



CHAPTER CXXXVni. 

DOUBTFUL, PEDIGREE OF ECLIPSE. SHAKE- 
SPEARE (n. b. not william) and old 

MARSK. A PECULIARITY OF THE ENGLISH 
LAW. 

Lady Percy. But hear you, my Lord ! 
Hotspur. What say'st thou, my lady ? 
Lady Percy. What is it carries you away ? 
Hotspur. Why my Horse, my love, my Horse. 
Shakespeare. 

After having made arrangements with the 
owner of the barn for the accommodation of 
the Mare in-the-straw, the Doctor and Ni- 
cholas pursued their way to Doncaster on foot, 
the latter every now and then breaking out 
into exclamations of the " Lord bless me ! " 
and sometimes with a laugh of astonishment 
annexing the Lord's name to a verb of op- 
posite signification governing a neuter pro- 
noun. Then he would cry, "Who would 
have thought it ? Who'll believe it ? " and so 
with interjections benedictory or maledic- 
tory, applied indiscriminately to himself and 
Miss Jenny and the foal, he gave vent to 
his wonder, frequently, however, repeating 
his doubts how the come-by-chance, as he 
called it, would turn out. 

A doubt to the same purport had come 
across the Doctor ; for it so happened that 
one of his theories bore very much in support 
of Nicholas's unfavourable prepossession. 
Eclipse was at that time in his glory ; and 
Eclipse was in the case of those children who 



THE DOCTOR. 



347 



are said by our Law to be more than ordi- 
narily legitimate, tho' * lie was not, like one 
of these double legitimates, enabled at years of 
discretion to choose for himself between the 
two possible fathers. "Whether Eclipse was 
got by Shakespeare or by Old Marsk was a 
point of which the Duke of Cumberland 
and his Stud Groom at one time confessed 
themselves ignorant ; and though at length, 
as it was necessary that Eclipse should have 
a pedigree, they filiated him upon Old Marsk, 
Dr. Dove had amused himself with contend- 
ing that the real cause of the superiority of 
that wonderful horse to all other horses was. 
that in reality he was the Son of both, and 
being thus doubly begotten had derived a 
double portion of vigour. It is not ne- 
cessary to explain by what process of rea- 
soning he had arrived at this conclusion; but 
it followed as a necessary inference that if a 
horse with two Sires inherited a double 
stock of strength, a horse who had no Sire 
at all must, pari ratione, be in a like pro- 
portion deficient. And here the Doctor 
must have rested had he not luckily called 
to mind that Canto of the Faery Queen in 
which 



how 



The birth of fayre Belphcebe and 

Of Amorett is told: 



— wondrously they were begot and bred 
Through influence of the Heavens fruitful! ray. 

Miraculous may seem to him that reades 

So strange ensample of conception ; 
But reason teacheth that the fruitful! seedes 

Of all things living, through impression 

Of the sunbeames in moyst complexion 
Doe life conceive, and quick'ned are by kynd ; 

So after Nilus' inundation 

Infinite shapes of creatures men doe fynd 
Informed in the mud on which the Sunne hath shynd. 

Great Father he of Generation 
Is rightly called, th' Authour of life and light ; 

And his faire sister for creation 
Ministreth matter fit, which tempred right 
With heate and humour breedes the living wight. 

So delighted was he with this recollection, 
and with the beautiful picture of Belphoebe 
which it recalled, that he would instantly 
have named the foal Belphoebe, — if it had 

* It will be observed by critical readers that tho', thro', 
altho', are thus written in the latter portions of " The 
Doctor, &c," after Swift ; not in the earlier ones, or very 
rarely. 



happened to be a filly. For a moment it 
occurred to him to call him Belphcebus ; 
but then again he thought that Belphcebus 
was too like Belphegor, and he would not 
give any occasion for a mistake, which might 
lead to a suspicion that he favoured Xieho- 
las's notion of the Devil's concern in the 
business. 

But the naming of this horse was not so 
lightly to be decided. Would it have been 
fitting under all the circumstances of the 
case to have given him any such appellation 
as Buzzard, Trumpeter, Ploughboy, Master 
Jackey, Master Robert, Jerry Sneak, Trim- 
mer, Swindler, Deceiver, Diddler, Boxer, 
Bruiser, Buffer, Prize-fighter, Swordsman, 
Snap, — would it have been fitting, I say, to 
have given to a Colt who was dropped almost 
as unexpectedly as if he had dropped from 
the clouds, — would it, I repeat, have been 
fitting to have given him any one of these 
names, all known in their day upon the Turf, 
or of the numberless others commonly and 
with equal impropriety bestowed upon horses. 



CHAPTER CXXXIX. 

TACTS AXD OBSERVATIONS RELATING TO 
OXOMATOEOGY. 

Moreover there are many more things in the World 
than there are names for them ; according to the saying 
of the Philosopher; Nomina sunt finita. res autem infi- 
nites; ideo union nomen plura significat : which saying 
is by a certain, or rather uncertain, author approved : 
Multis speciebus non sunt nomina ; idcirco necessarium 
est nomina fingere, si nullum ante erit nomen impositum. 

GwiLLlM. 

Xames, Reader, are serious things ; and 
certain philosophers, as well as Mr. Shandy, 
have been, to use the French-English of the 
day, deeply penetrated with this truth 

The name of the Emperor of Japan is 
never known to his subjects during his life. 
And the people of ancient Rome never 
knew the true and proper name of their own 
City, which is indeed among the things that 
have utterly perished. It was concealed as 
the most awful of all mysteries, lest if it 
were known to the enemies of the City, they 



348 



THE DOCTOR. 



might by force of charms and incantations 
deprive it of the aid of its tutelary Gods. — 
As for that mystery which has occasioned 
among Hebrew Critics the Sect of the Ado- 
nists, I only hint thereat. — 

Names, Reader, are serious things, so 
serious that no man since Adam has been 
able, except by special inspiration, to invent 
one which should be perfectly significant. 

Adan, antes que el Men lefuera oposito, 

Fue tan grande filosofo y dialectico, 
Que a todo quanto Dios le dio en deposito, 

( Aunque pecandofue despues frenetico,) 
De nombres adorno tan a proposito 

Como quien tuvo espiritu profelico j 
Porque naturalexa en modo tacito 

Las causas descubrio a su beneplacito. 

Esta virtud tan alia fue perdiendose 
De los que del vinieron derivandose, 

Tanto que todos van desvaneciendose. 
En aplicar los nombres, y enganandose, 

Sino es por algun Angel descubriendose, 
por inspiration manifestandose* 

Names, Reader, I repeat, are serious 
things : and much ingenuity has been 
exerted in inventing appropriate ones, not 
only for man and beast, but for inanimate 
things. Godfathers and Godmothers, Navi- 
gators, Shipbuilders, Florists, Botanists, 
Chemists, Jockeys, Feeders, Stage Coach 
Proprietors, Quacks, Perfumers, Novelists 
and Dramatists, have all displayed their 
taste in the selection of Names. 

More whimsically consorted names will 
seldom be found than among the Lodges of 
the Manchester Unity of the Independent 
Order of Odd Fellows — You find there 
Apollo and St. Peter ; the Rose of Sharon, 
and the Rose of Cheetham ; Earl Fitz- 
william, Farmer's Glory, and Poor Man's 
Protection ; Philanthropic and Lord Byron, 
Lord John Russell and Good Intent ; Queen 
Caroline (Bergami's Queen not George the 
Second's) and Queen Adelaide. 

Reader, be pleased to walk into the Gar- 
den with me. You see that bush, — what 
would you call the fruit which it bears ? — 
The Gooseberry. — But its more particular 
name ? — Its botanical name is ribes — or 
grossularia, which you will, Mr. Author. — 
Still, Reader, we are in generals. For you 

* Cayrasco de Figueroa. 



and I, and our wives and children, and all 
plain eaters of gooseberry-pie and goose- 
berry-fool, the simple name gooseberry 
might suffice. Not so for the scientific in 
gooseberries, the gooseberry ologists. They 
could distinguish whether it were the King 
or the Duke of York ; the Yellow Seedling 
or the Prince of Orange ; Lord Hood or Sir 
Sidney Smith ; Atlas or Hercules ; the Green 
Goose, or the Green Bob, or the Green 
Chisel ; the Colossus or the Duke of Bed- 
ford ; Apollo or Tickle Toby ; the Royal 
Oak or the Royal Sovereign ; the Hero or 
the Jolly Smoaker ; the Game Keeper or 
the Sceptre ; the Golden Gourd, or the 
Golden Lion, or the Gold-finder ; Worth- 
ington's Conqueror or Somach's Victory; 
Robinson's Stump or Davenport's Lady ; 
Blakeley's Chisel or Read's Satisfaction; 
Bell's Farmer or the Creeping Ceres ; the 
White Muslin, the White Rose, the White 
Bear, the White Noble, or the White Smith; 
the Huntsman, the Gunner, the Thrasher, 
the Viper, the Independent, the Glory of 
Eccles, or the Glory of England ; Smith's 
Grim-Mask, Blomerly's John Bull, Hamlet's 
Beauty of England, Goodier's Nelson's Vic- 
tory, Parkinson's Scarlet Virgin, Milling's 
Crown Bob, Kitt's Bank of England, Yeat's 
Wild- Man of the Wood, Davenport's Jolly 
Hatter, or Leigh's Fiddler. — For all these 
are Gooseberries : and yet this is none of 
them : it is the Old Ironmonger. 

Lancashire is the County in which the 
Gooseberry has been most cultivated ; there 
is a Gooseberry book annually printed at 
Manchester ; and the Manchester News- 
papers recording the death of a person, and 
saying that he bore a severe illness with 
Christian fortitude and resignation, add that 
he was much esteemed among the Class of 
Gooseberry Growers. — A harmless class 
they must needs be deemed, but even in 
growing Gooseberries emulation may be 
carried too far. — 

The Royal Sovereign, which in 1794 was 
grown by George Cook of Ashton, near 
Preston, which weighed seventeen penny- 
weights, eighteen grains, wns thought a 
Royal Gooseberry at that day. But the 



THE DOCTOE. 



349 



growth of Gooseberries keeps pace with the 
March of Intellect. In 1830 the largest 
Yellow Gooseberry on record was shown at 
Stockport; it weighed thirty-two penny- 
weights, thirteen grains, and was named 
the Teazer. The largest Red one was the 
Roaring Lion, of thirty-one pennyweights, 
thirteen grains, shown at Xantwich ; and 
the largest White was the Ostrich, shown 
at Omiskirk ; falling far short of the others, 
and yet weighing twenty-four pennyweights, 
- grains. They have been grown as 
large as Pigeon's eggs. But the fruit is not 
improved bv the forced culture which in- 
creases its size. The Gooseberry growers, 
who show for the prizes which are annually 
offered, thin the fruit so as to leave but two 
or three berries on a branch; even then 
prizes are not gained by fair dealing : they 
contrive to support a small cup under each 
of these, so that the fruit shall for some 
weeks rest in water that covers about a 
fourth part, and this they call suckling the 
gooseberry. 

Your Orchard, Sir ! you are perhaps con- 
tent with Codlins and Pippins, Xon-pareils, 
and Russets, with a few nameless varieties. 
But Mr. Forsyth will tell you of the Beauty 
of Kent, of the Belle Grisdeline, the Boom- 
rev, the Hampshire Nonsuch, the Dalmahoy, 
the Golden Mundi, the Queening, the Oak 
he Xine Square, the Paradise Pippin, 
the Violet Apple, the Corpendu, the Tre- 
voider, the Raniborn, the Spanish Onion, 
the Royal George, the Pigeonette, the Nor- 
folk Paradise, the Long-laster, the Kentish 
Fill- baskets, the Maiden's Blush, the Lady's 
Finger, the Scarlet Admirable, the Hall- 
Door, the Green Dragon, the Fox's Whelp. 
the Fair Maid of Wishford, Coble-diek-lon- 
gerkin — an apple in the Xorth of Devon 
rnwall, which Mr. Polwhele supposes 
to have been introduced into the parish of 
Stratton by one Longerkin who was called 
Cobble-dick, because his name was Richard 
and he was a Cobler by trade. John Apple, 

— whose withered rind, intrench'd 
With many a furrow, aptly repr^ i 
Decrepid age *. — 



the King of the Pippins (of him hereafter in 
the Chapter of Kings) and the Seek-no- 
farther, — after which, no farther will we 
seek. 

Of Pears, the Bon Chretien, called by 
English Gardeners the Bum-Gritton, the 
Teton de Venus, and the Cuisse Madame, 
three names which equally mark the country 
from whence they came. The last Bishop 
of Alais before the French Revolution visit- 
ing a Rector once who was very rich and very 
avaricious, gave him some gentle admonitory 
hint of the character he had heard of him. 
-V ;. Monseigneiir" said the Man, U U 
faut garden une Poire pour la soifr " Vans 
avez bien rai-sonS replied the Bishop : i; pre- 
nez garde settlement quelle soit du ion Chre- 
tienr The first Lord Camelford, in one of 
whose letters this pun is preserved, thought 
it perfect. But to proceed with the no- 
menclature of Pears, there are the Su- 
preme, the Bag-pipe of Anjou, the Huff 
Cap, the Grey Good "Wife, the Goodman's 
Pear, the Queen's Pear, the Prince's Pear, 
the Mcirquis's Pear, the Dean's Pear, the 
Knave's Pear, the Pope's Pear, the Chaw 
Good, the Vicar, the Bishop's Thumb, the 
Lady's Lemon, the Lord Martin, the St. 
Austin, La Pastorelle and Monsieur John, 
the Great Onion, the Great Mouthwater, the 
King of Summer, the Angelic Pear, — and 
many others which I would rather eat than 
enumerate. At present the Louis Philippe 
holds pre-eminence. 

The Propria uuce Potatibus will be found 
not less rich, — though here we perceive a 
lower key of invention, as adapted to a lower 
rank of fruit, and affording a proof of 
Xature's Aristocracy :— here we have Red 
Champions, White Champions, Late Cham- 
pions and English Champions. Early Manlys. 
Rough Reds, Smooth Yellows. Silver Skins, 
I Pink Eyes, Golden Tags, Golden Gullens, 
Common Wise, Quaker Wise, Budworth's 
Dusters, Poor Man's Profit, Lady Queens, 
Drunken Landlords, Britons, Crones, Apples, 
Magpies, Lords, Invincibles, the Painted 
Lady and the Painted Lord, the Golden Dun, 
the Old Red Bough, and the Ox Xoble : 

Cum multis aliis qwz nunc perscribere langum est. 



350 



THE DOCTOR. 



For Roses, inethinks Venus, and the Fair 
Maid, and Flora, and Favourite, and Diana 
may well keep company with our old fa- 
vourite the Maiden Blush. There may be, 
too, though it were to be wished there were 
not, a Miss Bold, among these beautiful 
flowers. Nor would I object to Purple nor 
to Ruby, because they are significant, if no- 
thing more. But for Duchess, with double 
blush, methinks the characteristic and the 
name go ill together. The Great Mogul is 
as bad as the Vagrant ; the Parson worse 
than either ; and for Mount Etna and Mount 
Vesuvius, it excites an explosion of anger 
to hear of them. 

Among the trees in Barbadoes, we read of 
Anchovy the Apple, the Bread and Cheese, 
or Sucking Bottle, the Belly Ache, and the 
Fat Pork Tree! 

From the fields and gardens to the Dairy. 
In the Vaccine nomenclature we pass over 
the numerals and the letters of the Alphabet. 
Would you have more endearing appella- 
tions than Curly, Curl-pate, Pretty, Browny, 
Cot Lass, Lovely Lass, — (a name peradven- 
ture imposed by that person famous in the 
proverb, as the old Woman who kissed her 
Cow,) — more promising than Bee, Earnest, 
Early, Standfast, Fill-bouk, Fill-pan, — more 
romantic than Rose, Rosely, Rosebud, Rose- 
berry, Rosamond, Rosella, Rosalina, Furba, 
Firbrella, Firbrina, — more rural than Ru- 
rorea. 

Then for Bulls, — was there not the Bull 
Shakespeare, by Shakespeare off young Nell, 
who was sold in the year 1793 for <^400 ' 
with a condition that the seller should have 
the privilege every year of introducing two 
Cows to the said Shakespeare. And was 
there not the Bull Comet who was sold for 
1000 guineas. I say nothing of Alderman 
Bull, nor of John Bull, nor of the remark- 
able Irish Breed. 

For horses I content myself with remem- 
bering the never-to-be-forgotten Pot-o-o-o- 
o-o-o-o-os, sometimes written Pot8os. Whose 
was the proudest feeling of exultation, his 
who devised this numerico-literal piece of 
wit, — or that of Archimedes when he ex- 



claimed "E 



vprjKa 



? And while touching the 



Arithmographic mode of writing, let us not 
forget the Frenchman, who by the union of 
a pun and a hieroglyph described his Sove- 
reign's style thus — Louis with ten-oysters 
in a row after the name. 

As for the scientific names of Plants, — if 
Apollo had not lost all power he would have 
elongated the ears of Tournefort and Lin- 
nasus, and all their followers, as deservedly 
as he did those of Midas. 

Of the Knights or Horsemen, Greeks and 
Trojans, Rustics and Townsmen among — 
Butterflies, — and the Gods, Goddesses, 
Muses and Graces, Heroes, Worthies and 
Unworthies, who feed in their grub state 
upon lettuces and cabbages, sleep through 
their aurelian term of existence, and finally 
obtain a name in the naturalist's nomencla- 
ture, and perhaps a local habitation in his 
Cabinet with a pin through their bodies, I 
say nothing, farther than to state why one 
tribe of them is denominated Trojans. Be 
it known then in the words of a distinguished 
Entomologist, that " this tribe has been de- 
dicated by Entomologists to the memory of 
the more distinguished worthies of the 
Trojan race, and above others to preserve 
the memory of those heroes whose exploits 
in the defence of that rich and potent station 
of the ancient world, the town of Troy, have 
been commemorated in the Iliad by the im- 
mortal Homer." Lest Homer therefore and 
all the works derived from him should perish 
from remembrance the Entomologists have 
very considerately devised this means for 
preserving the memory of Hector. 

Hath not Daniel Girton, of the County of 
Bucks, in his Complete Pigeon-Fancier, 
wherein he points out to the Gentlemen of 
the Fancy, the foul marks and the real per- 
fections of every valuable species of Fancy 
Birds and Toys which in his time were bred 
in England, France and Holland ; — hath 
not Daniel Girton, I say, (tho' Boswell 
thought that a sentence so formed as to re- 
quire an I say to keep it together, resembled 
a pair of ill-mended breeches, and candidly 
acknowledged the resemblance in his own, 
— the sentence I mean, which he was then 
penning, not the breeches which he wore ;) 



THE DOCTOR. 



351 



— hath not Daniel Girton, I say, particu- 
larly enumerated in his Title-Page among 
the varieties of such Fancy Birds, Powters, 
Carriers, Horsemen, Dragoons, Croppers, 
Powting Horsemen, Uplopers, Fantails, 
Chinese Pigeons, Lace-Pigeons, Tumblers, 
Runts, Spots, Laughers, Trumpeters, Jaco- 
bines, Capuchines, Nuns, Shakers, Helmets, 
Ruffs, Finnikins, Turners, Barbs, Mahomets, 
Turbits, Owls, and Smiters, concluding the 
imperfect enumeration with an &c. 

The Foul Fiends also have odd names. 
Witness the list which John Gee collected 
after the veracious Romish Priests of his 
time : Lusty Dick, Killico, Hob, Corner- 
Cap, Puffe, Purre, Frateretto, Fliberdigibbet, 
Haberdicut, Cocabelto, Maho, (this Maho, 
who was a gentleman as Shakespeare * tells 
us, maintained his ground against a Priest 
for seven hours,) Kellicoeam, Wilkin, Smol- 
kin, Lusty Jolly Jenkin, (this must have 
been a Welsh Devil and of a noble race,) 
Porto Richo, (peradventure a Creole Devil,) 
Pudding of Thame — (fie on such pudding!) 

— Pour Dieu (Pour Diable !), Bonjour, 
Motubizanto, !N"ur, Bernon, Delicate. 

The familiar of that " damnable and 
malicious witch Elizabeth Southerns, alias 
Dimdikes, was called Tibb : she dwelt in 
the forest of Pendle, a vast place fit for her 
profession, and she was a general Agent for 
the Devil in all those parts." 

There was one Mr. Duke, a busy fanatic, 
in Devonshire in Charles II.'s days, whom 
old Sir Edward Seymour used to call Spirit 
Po, that said Po being' a petit diable, a small 
devil that was presto at every Conjuror's 
nod. He (the said Mr. Duke) " was a com- 
mon runner up and down on factious 
errands ; and there could not be a meeting 
in the country for business or mirth, but 
Spirit Po was there." 

Actasus Megalesius, Ormenus, Lycus, 
Nicon and Mimon are five of the Chief Tel- 
chinnes or Alastores, who take the waters of 
Styx in their hands and sprinkle them over 
the earth, thereby causing all kinds of dis- 
eases and calamities. 

* Lear, Act iii. sc. iv. 



It is known upon testimony which has 
received the sanction of the Holy Office, 
that Lucifer has three Lord Lieutenants, 
whose names are Aquias, Brum, and Acatu : 
whether the second assumed his name in 
prospective compliment to the Queen's At- 
torney-General, or whether the name itself 
has some appropriate and amiable significa- 
tion in the infernal tongue must be left to 
conjecture. These Lord Lieutenants were 
sent with a whole army of Devils to make 
war against a person of the feminine gender 
called in her own language Anna de San- 
tiago, but in the language of Hell, Catar- 
ruxa, which, according to the interpretation 
given by the Devils themselves, means the 
Strong Woman. The General was named 
Catacis, and the names of the subordinate 
Commanders have been faithfully recorded 
by a Franciscan Chronicler of unquestioned 
veracity, for the use of Exorcists, experience 
having shown that it is of signal use in their 
profession to know the names of the enemies 
with whom they are contending, the Devils 
perhaps having learned from the Lawyers, 
(who are able to teach the Devil,) to take 
advantage of a misnomer. This indeed is 
so probable that it cannot be superfluous to 
point out to Exorcists a received error, 
which must often have frustrated their 
laudable endeavours, if the same literal 
accuracy be required in their processes as 
in those of the Law. They no doubt have 
always addressed the Prince of the Devils 
by the name of Beelzebub, but his real 
name is Beelzebul ; and so St. Jerome found 
it in all his Manuscripts, but not under- 
standing what was then the common, and 
true reading, he altered Be e\&€oi\ into Bee\- 
%e£ov€, — by which he made the word sig- 
nificant to himself, but enabled Beelzebul 
to quash all actions of ejectment preferred 
against him in this false name. The value 
of this information will be appreciated in 
Roman Catholic Countries. Gentlemen of 
the long robe will think it beautiful ; and I 
have this additional motive for communi- 
cating it, to wit, that it may be a warning 
to all verbal Critics. I now return to my 
nomenclature. 



352 



THE DOCTOR. 



If a catalogue of plants or animals in a 
newly-discovered country be justly esteemed 
curious, how much more curious must a 
genuine muster-roll of Devils be esteemed, 
all being Devils of rank and consequence in 
the Satanic service. It is to Anna de San- 
tiago herself that we are originally beholden 
for it, when at her Confessor's desire, 

®iov; y ovoix,f,viv oLftouiras 

" The reader (as Fuller says) will not be 
offended with their hard names here follow- 
ing, seeing his eye may run them over in 
perusing them, though his tongue never 
touch them in pronouncing them." And 
when he thinks how many private and non- 
commissioned officers go to make up a legion, 
he may easily believe that Owen Glendower 
might have held Hotspur 

at least nine hours 

In reckoning up the several Devil's names 
That were his lackeys. — 

Barca, Maquias, Acatam, Ge, Arri, Maca- 
quias, Ju, Mocatam, Arra, Vi, Macutu, 
Laca, Machehe, Abriim, Maracatu, Maja- 
catam, Barra, Matu, the Great Dog, (this 
was a dumb devil), Arracatorra, Mayca, 
Oy, Aleu, Malacatan, Mantu, Arraba, Emay, 
Alacamita, Olu, Ayvatu, Arremabur, Ay- 
cotan, Lacahabarratu, Oguerracatam, Jama- 
catia, Mayacatu, Ayciay, Balla, Luachi, 
May ay, Buz ache, Berra, B err am, Malde- 
quita, Bemaqui, Moricastatu, Ahciaquias, 
Zamata, Bu, Zamcapatujas, Bellacatuaxia, 
Go, Bajaque, and Baa, — which seems but 
a sheepish name for a Devil. 

Can there be yet a roll of names more 
portentous in appearance, more formidable 
in sound, more dangerous in utterance ? 
Look, reader, at the ensuing array, and 
judge for thyself; look I say, and mentally 
peruse it, but attempt not to enunciate the 
words, lest thou shouldst loosen thy teeth 
or fracture them in the operation. 

AnghetedufF, otherwise AnghutudufFe, 
otherwise Ballyhaise, Kealdragh, Caveneboy, 
Aghugrenoase, otherwise Aghagremous, 
Killataven, Kilnaverley, Kelvoryvybegg, 
Tonnegh, Briehill, Drommody, Amragh- 



duffe, Drumhermshanbeeg, Dranhill, Cor- 
maghscargin, Corlybeeg,. Cornashogagh, 
Dromhome, Trimmigan, Knocklyeagh, Car- 
rigmore, Clemtegrit, LesdamenhufTe, Cor- 
reamyhy, Aghnielanagher, otherwise Agni- 
gamagh, Prittage, Aghaiasgim, Tobogamagh, 
Dromaragh, otherwise Dromavragh, Cnock- 
amyhee, Lesnagvan, Kellarne, Gargaran, 
Cormodyduffe, Curraghchinrin, Annageocry, 
Brocklagh, Aghmaihi, Drungvin, otherwise 
Dungen, Dungenbegg, Dungemore, Sheina, 
Dremcarplin, Shaghtany, Knocksegart, Keil- 
lagh, Tinlaghcoole, Tinlagheryagh, Lyssy- 
brogan, Lyssgallagh, Langarriah, Sheanmul- 
lagh, Celgvane, Drombomore, Lissgarre, 
Toncantany, Knockadawe, Dromboobegg, 
Drumpgampurne, Listiarta, Omrefada, Cor- 
ranyore, Corrotober, Clere, Biagbire, Lurg- 
riagh, Tartine, Drumburne, Aghanamaghan, 
Lusmakeragh, Nucaine, Cornamuck, Crosse, 
Coyleagh, Cnocknatratin, Toanmore, Ra- 
gasky, Longamonihity, Atteantity, Knock- 
fodda, Tonaghmore, Drumgrestin, Owley, 
Dronan, Vushinagh, Carricknascan, Lyssan- 
hany, otherwise Lysseyshanan, Knockaduyne, 
Dromkurin, Lissmakearke, Dromgowhan, 
Raghege, Dromacharand, Moneyneriogh, 
Drinsurly, Dromillan, Agunylyly, Gnock- 
antry, Ellyn, Keileranny, otherwise Kul- 
rany, Koraneagh, and Duigary. 

" Mercy on us,' 1 says the Reader, " what 
are these !" — Have patience, Reader, we have 
not done yet, there are still — Magheryhil- 
lagh, Drung, Clefern, Castleterra, Killana, 
Moybolgace, Kilfort, Templefort, Killagha- 
don, Laragh, Cloncaughy, Annaghgiliffe, 
Towninmore, Rathany, Drumgoone, Tyre- 
latrada, Lurganboy, Ballyclanphilip, Killin- 
kery, Ballintampel, Kilbride, Crosserlough, 
Drumlawnaught, Killanaburgh, Kilsher- 
dan, otherwise Killersherding, Dremakellen, 
Aughaurain, Drumgress and Shanaraghan. 
" For mercy's sake," exclaims the Reader, 
" enough — enough ! what are they ? " The 
latter, dear Reader, are all Poles and Ter- 
mons. And the whole of them were set up 
for sale by public cant in Dublin, pursuant 
to a Decree of his Majesty's High Court of 
Chancery in Ireland, dated the 18th of May, 
1816. 



THE DOCTOR. 



353 



CHAPTER CXL. 

HOW THERE AROSE A DISPUTE BETWEEN 
BARNABY AND NICHOLAS CONCERNING THE 
NAMING OF THIS COET, AND OF THE 
EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES THAT 
ENSUED. 

Quoiqu'il en soit, je ne tairai point cette histoire ; je 
Vabandonne a la credulite- ou a Vincrcdulitedes Lecteurs, 
Us prendront a cet egard quel parti il leur plaira. Je 
dirai settlement, s'ils ne la veulent pas croire, que je les 
defie de me prouver qu'elle soit absolument impossible ; 
its ne le prouver ont jamais. Gomgam. 

While the Doctor was deliberating by 
what significant name to call the foal of 
which he had in so surprising a manner 
found himself possessed, a warm dispute 
upon the same subject had arisen between 
Barnaby and Nicholas : for though a woman 
does not consider herself complimented when 
she is called a horse-godmother, each was 
ambitious of being horse-godfather on this 
occasion, and giving his own name to the 
colt, which had already become a pet with 
both. 

Upon discovering each other's wish they 
first quietly argued the point. Nicholas 
maintained that it was not possible any per- 
son, except his master, could have so good a 
right to name the colt as himself, who had 
actually been present when he was dropped. 
Barnaby admitted the force of the argument, 
but observed that there was a still stronger 
reason for naming him as he proposed, be- 
cause he had been foaled on the eleventh of 
June, which is St. Barnabas's day. 

" Nicholas," quoth his antagonist, " it ought 
to be, for I was there at the very nick of 
time." — " Barnaby," retorted the other, " it 
ought to be ; for in a barn it happened." 

" Old Nick was the father of him ! " said 
Nicholas. — " The more reason," replied Bar- 
naby, " for giving him a Saint's name." 

" He shall be nicked to suit his name," 
said Nicholas ; — " and that's a good rea- 
son ! " — " It's a wicked reason," cried Bar- 
naby, " he shall never be nicked. I love him 
as well as if he was a bairn of my own : and 
that's another reason why he should be called 



Barnaby. He shall be neither nicked nor 
Nicholased." 

Upon this Nicholas grew warm, and as- 
serted that his name was as good as the other's, 
and that he was ready to prove himself the 
better man. The other, who had been made 
angry at the thought of nicking his pet, was 
easily put upon his mettle, and they agreed to 
settle the dispute by the ultima ratio regum. 
But this appeal to the immortal Gods was 
not definitive, for John Atkinson the Miller's 
son came up and parted them ; and laughing 
at them for a couple of fools when he heard 
the cause of their quarrel, he proposed that 
they should determine it by running a race 
to the gate at the other end of the field. 

Having made them shake hands, and pro- 
mise to abide by the issue, he went before 
them to the goal, and got on the other side 
to give the signal and act as umpire. 

« One !— Two !— Three and away !"— They 
were off like race-horses. They jostled mid- 
way. It was neck and neck. And each 
laid his hand at the same moment on the 
gate. 

John Atkinson then bethought him that it 
would be a more sensible way of deciding the 
dispute, if they were to drink for it, and see 
who could swallow most ale at the Black 
Bull, where the current barrel was much to 
his taste. At the Black Bull, therefore, they 
met in the evening. John chalked pint for 
pint ; but for the sake of good fellowship 
he drank pint for pint also ; the Landlord 
(honest Matthew Sykes) entered into the 
spirit of- the contest, and when his wife 
refused to draw any more beer, went for 
it himself as long as he had a leg to stand 
on, or a hand to carry the jug, and longer 
than any one of the party could keep the 
score. 

The next day they agreed to settle it by 
a sober game at Beggar-my-Neighbour. It 
was a singular game. The cards were dealt 
with such equality that after the first round 
had shown the respective hands, the ablest 
calculator would have been doubtful on 
which side to have betted. Captures were 
made and re-made, — the game had all and 
more than all its usual ups and downs, and 



354 



THE DOCTOR. 



it ended in tyeing the two last cards. Never 
in any contest had Jupiter held the scales 
with a more even hand. 

" The Devil is in the business to be sure," 
said Nicholas, " let us toss up for it ! " — 
" Done," saidBarnaby ; and Nicholas placing 
a halfpenny on his thumb nail sent it whizz- 
ing into the air. 

" Tails ! " quoth Barnaby. — " 'Tis heads/' 
cried Nicholas, " hurrah ! " 

Barnaby stamped with his right foot for 
vexation — lifted his right arm to his head, 
drew in his breath with one of those sounds 
which grammarians would class among inter' 
jections, if they could express them by let- 
ters, and swore that if it had been an honest 
halfpenny, it would never have served him 
so ! He picked it up, — and it proved to be 
a Brummejam of the coarsest and clumsiest 
kind, with a head on each side. They now 
agreed that the Devil certainly must be in 
it, and determined to lay the whole case 
before the Doctor. 

The Doctor was delighted with their story, 
The circumstances which they related were 
curious enough to make the naming of this 
horse as remarkable as his birth. He was 
pleased also that his own difficulties and in- 
decision upon this important subject should 
thus as it were be removed by Fate or For- 
tune; and taking the first thought which 
now occurred, and rubbing his forehead as 
he was wont to do, when any happy concep- 
tion struck him, (Jupiter often did so when 
Minerva was in his brain), he said, "we must 
compromise the matter, and make a com- 
pound name in which both shall have an 
equal share. Nicholas Ottley, and Barnaby 
Sutton; N. O.— B. S.— Nobs shall be his 
name." 

Perhaps the Doctor remembered Smec- 
tymnuus at that time, and the notorious 
Cabal, and the fanciful etymology that be- 
cause news comes from all parts, and the 
letters N.E.W. S. stand for North, East, 
West, and South — the word was thence 
compounded. Perhaps, also, he called to 
mind that Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, the 
famous Maimonides, was called Rambam 
from the initials of his titles and his names ; 



and that the great Gustavus Adolphus when 
he travelled incognito assumed the name of 
M. Gars, being the four initials of his name 
and title. He certainly did not remember 
that in the Dialogue of Solomon and Satur- 
nus the name of Adam is said to have been 
in like manner derived from the four 
Angels Archox, Dux, Arocholem, and Min- 
symbrie. He did not remember this — be- 
cause he never knew it ; this very curious 
Anglo-Saxon poem existing hitherto only 
in manuscript, and no other portions or 
account of it having been printed than those 
brief ones for which we are indebted to 
Mr. Conybeare, a man upon whose like we 
of his generation shall not look again. 



CHAPTER CXLI. 

A SINGULAR ANECDOTE AND NOT MORE 
SAD THAN TRUE. 

Oh penny Pipers, and most painful penners 
Of bountiful new Ballads, what a subject, 
What a sweet subject for your silver sounds ! 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

The chance of the Birmingham halfpenny 
was a rare one. I will not so far wrong the 
gentle Reader as to suppose that he will 
doubt the accuracy of anything which is 
recorded in this true history ; and I seri- 
ously assure him that such a halfpenny I 
have myself seen in those days when the 
most barefaced counterfeits were in full 
circulation, — a halfpenny which had a head 
on either side, and consequently was like 
the fox in the fable, or a certain noble 
Marquis, and now more noble Duke when 
embassador at Petersburg, — not as being 
doublefaced, but as having lost its tail. 

A rare chance it was, and yet rarer ones 
have happened. — I remember one concern- 
ing a more serious appeal to fortune with 
the same instrument. An Organist not 
without some celebrity in his day, (Jeremiah 
Clark was his name,) being hopelessly in 
love with a very beautiful lady, far above 
his station in life, determined upon suicide, 
and walked into the fields to accomplish his 



THE DOCTOR. 



355 



purpose. Coming to a retired spot where 
there was a convenient pond, surrounded 
with equally convenient trees, he hesitated 
which to prefer, whether to choose a dry 
death, or a watery one ; — perhaps he had 
never heard of the old riddle concerning 
iElia Lgelia Crispis, which no (Edipus has 
yet solved. But that he might not continue 
like the Ass between two bundles of hay in 
the sophism, or Mahomet's coffin in the 
fable, he tossed a halfpenny in the air to 
decide whether he should hang or drown 
himself, — and the halfpenny stuck edgeways 
in the dirt. 

The most determined infidel would at 
such a moment have felt that this was more 
than accident. Clark, as may well be sup- 
posed, went home again ; but the salutary 
impression did not remain upon his poor 
disordered mind, and he shot himself soon 
afterwards. 



CHAPTER CXLIL 

A DEFECT IN HOYLE SUPPLIED. GOOD AD- 
VICE GIVEN, AND PLAIN TRUTH TOED. 
A TRIBUTE OF RESPECT TO THE MEMORY 
OF F. NEWBERY, THE CHILDREN'S BOOK- 
SELLER AND FRIEND. 

Neither is it a thing impossible or greatly hard, even 
by such kind of proofs so to manifest and clear that point, 
that no man living shall be able to deny it, without deny- 
ing some apparent principle such as all men acknowledge 
to be true. Hooker. 

There are many things in these kingdoms 
which are greatly under-valued : strong beer 
for example in the cider countries, and cider 
in the countries of good strong beer ; bottled 
twopenny in South Britain ; sprats and her- 
rings by the rich, — (it may be questioned 
whether his Majesty ever tasted them, 
though food for the immortal Gods,) — and 
fish of every kind by the labouring classes ; 
— some things because they are common, 
and others because they are not. 

But I cannot call to mind anything which 
is estimated so much below its deserts as the 
game of Beggar-my-Neighbour. It is ge- 
nerally thought fit only for the youngest 



children, or for the very lowest and most 
ignorant persons into whose hands a pack of 
cards can descend ; whereas there is no game 
whatever in which such perpetual oppor- 
tunities of calculation are afforded to the 
scientific gamester ; not indeed for playing 
his cards, but for betting upon them. Zerah 
Colburn, George Bidder and Professor Airy 
would find their faculties upon the stretch, 
were they to attempt to keep pace with its 
chances. 

It is, however, necessary that the Reader 
should not mistake the spurious for the 
genuine game, for there are various ways of 
playing it, and as in all cases only one which 
is the orthodox way. You take up trick by 
trick. The trump, as at other games, takes 
every other suit. If suit is not followed the 
leader wins the trick ; but if it is, the 
highest card is the winner. These rules 
being observed (I give them because they 
will not be found in Hoyle) the game is 
regular and affords combinations worthy to 
have exercised the power of that calculating 
machine of flesh and blood, called Jedediah 
Buxton. 

Try it, Reader, if you have the slightest 
propensity for gambling. — But first pledge 
your sacred word of honour to the person 
whose good opinion you are most desirous of 
retaining, that you will never at any game, 
nor in any adventure, risk a sum which 
would involve you in any serious difficulties, 
or occasion you any reasonable regret if it 
should be lost. Make that resolution, and 
keep it ; — and you and your family will 
have cause to bless the day in which you 
read the History of Dr. Dove. 

Observe, it is your word of honour that I 
have requested, and not your oath. Either 
with you might and ought to be equally 
binding, as in foro conscientice, so every- 
where else. But perhaps you are, or may 
hereafter be a Member of Parliament, (a 
propensity whether slight or not for gambling 
which has been presupposed, renders this 
the more likely ;) and since what is called 
the Catholic Relief Bill was passed, the 
obligation of an oath has been done away 
by the custom of Parliament, honourable 



356 



THE DOCTOR. 



Members being allowed to swear with what- 
ever degree of mental reservation they and 
their Father Confessors may find con- 
venient. 

A Frenchman some fifteen years ago pub- 
lished a Treatise upon the game of Thirty- 
One ; and which is not always done by 
Authors, in French or English, thought it 
necessary to make himself well acquainted 
with the subject upon which he was writing. 
In order, therefore, to ascertain the chances, 
he made one million five hundred and sixty 
thousand throws, which he computed as 
equivalent to four years' uninterrupted play. 
If this indefatigable Frenchman be living, I 
exhort him to study Beggar-my-Neighbour 
with equal diligence. 

There are some games which haVe sur- 
vived the Revolutions of Empires, like the 
Pyramids ; but there are more which have 
been as short-lived as modern Constitutions. 
There may be some old persons who still 
remember how Ombre was played, and 
Tontine and Lottery ; but is there any one 
who has ever heard of Quintill, Piquemdrill, 
Papillon, L'Ambigu, Ma Commere, La Ma- 
riee, La Mouche, Man d'Auvergne, L'Em- 
prunt, Le Poque, Romestecq, Sizette, 
Guinguette, Le Sixte, La Belle, Gillet, Cul 
Bas, Brusquembrille, the Game of Hoc, the 
Reverse, the Beast, the Cuckoo and the 
Comet ? — is there any one, I say, who has 
ever heard of these Games, unless he 
happens to know as I do, that rules for 
playing them were translated from the 
French of the Abbe Bellecour, and pub- 
lished for the benefit of the English people 
some seventy years ago by Mr. F. Newbery, 
a publisher never to be named without 
honour by those who have read in their 
childhood the delectable histories of Goody 
Two-Shoes, and Giles Gingerbread. 



CHAPTER CXLIII. 

A FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO DESCRIBE THE PHY- 
SICAL AND MORAL QUALITIES OF NOBS. 

Quant a moi,je desirerois fort scavoir bien dire, ou que 
feusse eu une bonne plume, et bien taillee a commande- 
ment, pour Vexalter et lower comme il le merite. Toutes- 
fois, telle quelle est,je m'en vais V employer au hazard. 

Brantome. 

Such, O Reader, were the circumstances con- 
cerning Nobs, before his birth, at his birth, 
and upon his naming. Strange indeed would 
it have been, if anything which regarded so 
admirable a horse had been after the manner 
of other horses. 

Fate never could a horse provide 
So fit for such a man to ride ; 
Nor find a man with strictest care 
So fit for such a horse to bear.* 

To describe him as he was would require 
all the knowledge, and all the eloquence of 
the immortal Taplin. Were I to attempt it 
in verse, with what peculiar propriety might 
I adopt the invocation of the Polish Poet. 

— Ducite Gratia. 

E valle Permessi vagantem 

Pegason ; alipedemque sacris 
Frenate sertis — Ut micat auribus! 
Vocemque longd vatis amabili 

Agnoscit hinnilu ! Ut Dearum 

Frenaferox, hilarique bullam 
Collo poposcit.^ — 

Might I not have applied the latter part 
of these verses as aptly, as they might truly 
have been applied to Nobs, when Barnaby 
was about to saddle him on a fine spring 
morning at the Doctor's bidding ? But what 
have I to do with the Graces, or the Muses 
and their winged steed ? My business is 
with plain truth and sober prose. 

— Io non so dov' io dcbba comminciare, 
Dal capo, da gli orecchi, o dalla coda. 
Egli e per tutto tanto singulare, 

Ch' io per me vo lodarlo, intero, intero ; 
Poi pigli ognun qual membro piu gli pare. % 

Stubbs would have found it difficult to 
paint him, Reginald Heber himself to de- 
scribe him as he was. I must begin by 
saying what he was not. 



Churchill. 



t Casimih. 



% Busini. 



THE DOCTOR. 



And grant me now, 
Good reader, thou ! 
Of terms to use 
Such choice to chuse, 
As may delight 
The country wight, 

And knowledge bring : 
For such do praise 
The country phrase, 
The country acts, 
The country facts, 
The country toys, 
Before the joys 

Of any thing* 

He was not jogged under the jaw, nor 
shoulder-splat, neck-cricked, pricked in the 
sole or loose in the hoof, horse-hipped, hide- 
bound, broken-winded, straight or heavy 
shouldered, lame in whirl- bone, run-away, 
res tiff, vicious, neck-reversed or cock-thrap- 
pled, ewe-necked or deer-necked, high on 
the leg, broken-knee'd, splent, oslett, false- 
quartered, ring-boned, sand-cracked, groggy, 
hollow-backed, bream-backed, long-backed 
or broken-backed, light-carcased, ragged 
hipped, droop-Dutchman' d, Dutch but- 
tock'd, hip shot-stifled, hough-boney or 
sickle-hammed. He had neither his head 
ill set on, nor dull and hanging ears, nor 
wolves' teeth, nor bladders in the mouth, nor 
gigs, nor capped-hocks, nor round legs, nor 
grease, nor the chine-gall, the navel-gall, the 
spur-gall, the light-gall, or the shackle-gall ; 
nor the worms, nor the scratches, nor the 
colt-evil, nor the pole-evil, nor the quitter 
bones, nor the curbs, nor the Anticore, nor 
the pompardy, nor the rotten-frush, nor the 
crown-scab, nor the cloyd, nor the web, 
nor the pin, nor the pearl, nor the howks, 
nor the haws, nor the vines, nor the paps, 
nor the pose : nor the bladders, nor the sur- 
bate, nor the bloody riffs, nor sinews down, 
nor mallenders, nor fallenders, nor sand 
cracks, nor hurts in the joints, nor toes 
turned out, nor toes turned in, nor soft feet, 
nor hard feet, nor thrushes, nor corns. Nor 
did he beat upon the hand, nor did he carry 
low, nor did he carry in the wind. Neither 
was he a crib-biter, nor a high-goer, nor a 
daisy cutter, nor a cut-behind, nor a hammer 
and pinchers, nor a wrong-end-first, nor a 



* TCSSER. 



short stepper, nor a roarer, nor an interferer. 
For although it hath been said that " a man 
cannot light of any horse young or old, but 
he is furnished with one, two, or more of 
these excellent gifts," Nobs had none of 
them : he was an immaculate horse ; — such 
as Adam's would have been, if Adam had 
kept what could not then have been called a 
saddle-horse, in Eden. 

He was not, like the horse upon which 
Petruchio came to his wedding, " possessed 
with the glanders and like to mose in the 
chine; troubled with the lampass, infected 
with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped 
with spavins, raied with the yellows, past 
cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the stag- 
gers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the 
back and shoulder-shotten." -j* But he was 
in every respect the reverse. 

A horse he was worthy to be praised like 
that of the Sieur Yuyart. 

Un courtaut brave, un courtaut glorieux, 
Qui ait en Voir ruadefurieuse, 
Glorieux trot, la bride glorieuse.t 

A horse who like that famous charger might 
have said in his Epitaph 

J'allay curieux 
En chocs furieux, 

Sans craindre estrapade ; 
Mai rabotez lieux 
Passez a cloz yeux, 

Sans f aire chopade. 
La visle virade, 
Pompante pennade, 

Le saut soubzlevant, 
La roide made, 
Prompte petarrade 

Je mis en avant. 
Escwneur bavant 
Au manger sgnvant, 

An penser fr&s-doux ; 
Releve devant, 
Jusqu'au bout servant 

J" ay esie sur tons. 

Like that Arabian which Almanzar sent to 
Antea's father, the Soldan, 

Egli area tutte lejattczze pronte 

Di buon cava I, come udirete appresso.§ 

Like those horses, described by Mr. Milman 
in his version of the episode of Nala from 
the Mahabharata, he was 



t Taming of the Shrew. 

§ Pl'LCI. 



j Clement Marot. 



358 



THE DOCTOR. 



fit and powerful for the road ; 

Blending mighty strength with fleetness, — high in cou- 
rage and in blood : 

Free from all the well-known vices, — broad of nostril, 
large of jaw, 

With the ten good marks distinguished,— born in Sindhu, 
fleet as wind. 

Like these horses he was, — except that 
he was born in Yorkshire ; — and being of 
Tartarian blood it may be that he was one 
of the same race with them. 

He was not like the horses of Achilles ; 

'E| oapQt'ruv ya.g atpBtroi ai$u:ib<rts 
Tev Tivikiog qigovtrt S-oCgiov yovov. 
AiSuift 8' ocvTob; n ■uXodtx.f&vvtrois u,v<x.% 
HyXu ILotnihoiv, us Xiyovtri, xovrus* 

Like them therefore Nobs could not be, be- 
cause he was a mortal horse ; and moreover 
because he was not amphibious, as they must 
have been. If there be any of their breed 
remaining, it must be the immortal River, 
or more properly Water-Horse of Loch 
Lochy, who has sometimes, say the High- 
landers, been seen feeding on the banks : 
sometimes entices mares from the pasture, 
sometimes overturns boats in his anger and 
agitates the whole lake with his motion. 

He was of a good tall stature ; his head 
lean and comely ; his forehead out-swelling ; 
his eyes clear, large, prominent and spark- 
ling, with no part of the white visible ; his 
ears short, small, thin, narrow and pricking ; 
his eye-lids thin ; his eye-pits well-filled ; 
his under-jaw thick but not fleshy; his nose 
arched ; his nostrils deep, open, and ex- 
tended ; his mouth well split and delicate ; 
his lips thin ; his neck deep, long, rising 
straight from the withers, then curving like 
a swan's ; his withers sharp and elevated ; 
his breast broad ; his ribs bending ; his chine 
broad and straight ; his flank short and full; 
his crupper round and plump ; his haunches 
muscular : his thighs large and swelling ; 
his hocks round before, tendonous behind, 
and broad on the sides, the shank thin be- 
fore, and on the sides broad ; his tendons 
strong, prominent, and well detached ; his 
pasterns short; his fetlocks well-tufted, 
the coronet somewhat raised; his hoofs 



black, solid, and shining ; his instep high, his 
quarters round ; the heel broad ; the frog 
thin and small ; the sole thin and concave. 

Here I have to remark that the tufted 
fetlocks Nobs derived from his dam Miss 
Jenny. They belong not to the thorough- 
bred race ; — witness the hunting song, 

Your high bred nags, 
Your hairy legs, 
We'll see which first come in, Sir. 

He had two properties of a man, to wit, a 
proud heart, and a hardy stomach. 

He had the three parts of a woman, the 
three parts of a lion, the three parts of a bul- 
lock, the three parts of a sheep, the three 
parts of a mule, the three parts of a deer, 
the three parts of a wolf, the three parts of 
a fox, the three parts of a serpent, and the 
three parts of a cat, which are required in a 
perfect horse. 

For colour he was neither black-bay, 
brown-bay, dapple-bay, black-grey, iron- 
grey, sad-grey, branded-grey, sandy-grey, 
dapple-grey, silver-grey, dun, mouse-dun, 
flea-backed, flea-bitten, rount, blossom, roan, 
pye-bald, rubican, sorrel, cow-coloured 
sorrel, bright sorrel, burnt sorrel, starling- 
colour, tyger-colour, wolf-colour, deer- 
colour, cream-colour, white, grey or black. 
Neither was he green, like the horse which 
the Emperor Severus took from the Par- 
tisans, and reserved for his share of the 
spoil, with a Unicorn's horn and a white 
Parrot ; et quit estima plus pour la rarete et 
couleur naive et belle que pour la valeur, 
comme certes il avoit raison : car, nul butin, 
tant precieux fut-il, ne Veust pu esgaler, ctsur 
toutce cheval, verd de nature. — Such a horse 
Rommel saw in the Duke of Parma's stables; 
because of its green colour it was called 
Speranza, and the Duke prized it above all 
his other horses for the extreme rarity of 
the colour, as being a jewel among horses, 
— yea a very emerald. 

Nor was he peach-coloured roan, like 
that horse which Maximilian cle Bethune, 
afterwards the famous Due de Sully, bought 
at a horse-market for forty crowns, and which 
was so poor a beast in appearance qtiil ne 
sembloit propre qaa porter la malle, and yet 



THE DOCTOR. 



359 



turned out to be so excellent a horse that 
Maximilian sold him to the Vidasme of Char- 
tres for six hundred crowns. Sully was an 
expert horse-dealer. He bought of Mon- 
sieur de la Roche- Guy on one of the finest 
Spanish horses that ever was seen, and gave 
six hundred crowns for him. Monsieur de 
Nemours not being able to pay the money, 
une tapisse?ne des forces de Hercvle was re- 
ceived either in pledge or payment, which 
tapestry adorned the great hall at Sully, 
when the veteran soldier and statesman had 
the satisfaction of listening to the Memoires 
de ce que Nous quatre, say the writers, qui 
avons este employex en diverses affaires de 
France sous Monseigneur le Due de Sully, 
avons peu sqavoir de sa vie, mceurs, diets, 
faicts, gestes et fortunes ; et de ce que luy- 
mesme nous pent avoir appris de ceux de nos- 
tre valeureux Alcide le Roy Henry le Grand, 
depuis le mois de May 1572 (qu'il fut mis a 
son service,) jusques au mois de May 1610, 
qu'il laissa la terre pour alter au Ciel. 

No ! his colour was chesnut ; and it is a 
saying founded on experience that a chesnut 
horse is always a good one, and will do more 
work than any horse of the same size of any 
other colour. The horse which Wellington 
rode at the Battle of Waterloo for fifteen 
hours without dismounting, was a small 
chesnut horse.* 

This was the " thorough-bred red chesnut 
charger" mentioned by Sir George Head, 
when he relates an anecdote of the Duke of 
Wellington and Sir Thomas Picton, who, 
contrary to the Duke's intentions, seemed at 
that moment likely to bring on an engage- 
ment, not long after the battle of Orthez. 
Having learned where Sir Thomas was, the 
Duke set spurs to his horse ; the horse " tossed 
up its head with a snort and impetuously 
sprang forward at full speed, and in a few 

* William Nicol, the printer of the original volumes, 
and the friend of Southey and Bedford, added this para- 
graph : — The following extract is from Gleig's Story of 
the Battle of Waterloo : " The gallant animal which had 
carried his master safely through the fatigues and dangers 
of the day, as if proud of the part which he had played in 
the great game, threw up his heels just as the Duke turned 
from him, and it was by a mere hair's breadth that the 
life was preserved which, in a battle of ten hours' dura- 
tion, had been left unscathed." c. xxxi. p. 254. 



minutes, ventre a terre, transported its gal- 
lant rider, his white cloak streaming in the 
breeze, to the identical copse distant about 
half a mile from whence the firing of the 
skirmishers proceeded. As horse and rider 
furiously careered towards the spot, I fan- 
cied," says Sir George, " I perceived by the 
motion of the animal's tail, a type, through 
the medium of the spur, of the quickened 
energies of the noble Commander, on the 
moment when for the first time he caught 
view of Picton." 

This famous horse, ncmed Copenhagen be- 
cause he was foaled about the time of the 
expedition against that City, died on the 12th 
of February, 1836, at Strathfieldsaye of old 
age ; there, where he had passed the last ten 
years of his life in perfect freedom, he was 
buried, and by the Duke's orders a salute 
was fired over his grave. The Duchess used 
to wear a bracelet made of his hair. Would 
that I had some of thine in a broche, O 
Nobs! 

Copenhagen has been wrongly described 
in a newspaper as slightly made. A jockey 
hearing this said of a horse would say, "ay 
a thready thing;' 1 '' but Copenhagen was a 
large horse in a small compass, as compact 
a thorough-bred horse as ever run a race, — 
which he had done before he was bought and 
sold to the Duke in Spain. "He was as 
sweet gentle a creature," says a right good 
old friend of mine, " as I ever patted, and 
he came of a gentle race, by the mother's 
side ; she was Meteora, daughter of Meteor, 
and the best trait in her master's character, 
Westminster's Marquis, was that his eyes 
dropped tears when they told him she had 
won a race, but being over weighted had 
been much flogged." 

He was worthy, like the horses of the 
Greek Patriarch Theophylact, to have been 
fed with pistachios, dates, dried grapes, and 
figs steeped in the finest wines, — that is to 
say, if he would have preferred this diet to 
good oats, clean hay, and sometimes, in case 
of extraordinary exertion, an allowance of 
bread soaked in ale. Wine the Doctor did 
not find it necessary to give him, even in his 
old aoe ; although he was aware of the 



360 



THE DOCTOR. 



benefit which the horse of Messire Philippe 
De Comines derived from it after the battle 
of Montl'hery : J'avoye, says that saga- 
cious soldier, un cheval extrememerd las et 
vieil ; 11 beut un seau plein de vin ; par au- 
cun cas daventure il y mit le museau ; Je le 
laissay achever ; Jamais ne Vavoye trouve si 
bon ne si frais. 

He was not such a horse as that famous 
one of Julius Caesar's, which had feet almost 
like human feet, the hoofs being cleft after 
the manner of toes. Leo X. had one which in 
like manner had what Sir Charles Bell calls 
digital extremities ; and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, 
he tells us, had seen one with three toes on 
the fore-foot and four on the hind-foot ; and 
such a horse was not long since exhibited in 
London and at Newmarket, — No ! Nobs 
was not such a horse as this ; — if he had 
been so mis-shapen he would have been a 
monster. The mare which the Tetrarch of 
Numidia sent to Grandgousier, and upon 
which Gargantua rode to Paris, had feet of 
this description; but that mare was la plus 
enorme et la plus grande que fut oncques 
veile, et la plus monstreuse. 

He was a perfect horse ; — worthy to be- 
long to the perfect doctor, — worthy of being 
immortalised in this perfect history. And 
it is not possible to praise him too much, 

— oiivtx' ufitrros 

not possible I repeat, porque, as D. Juan 
Perez de Montalvan says, parece que la Na- 
turaleza le avia hecho, no con la prisa que 
suele, sino con tanto espacio y perfeccion, que, 
como quando un pintor acaba con felicidad un 
lienzo, suele poner a su lado su nombre, assi 
pudo la Naturaleza escrivir el suyo, como por 
termino de su ciencia : which is, being trans- 
lated, " Nature seemed to have made him, 
not with her wonted haste, but with such 
deliberation and perfection, that as a painter 
when he finishes a picture successfully uses 
to mark it with his name, so might Nature 
upon this work have written hers, as being 
the utmost of her skill ! " As Shakespeare 
would have expressed it — 



Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world, this was a Horse. 

In the words of an old romance, to de- 
scribe him ainsi quit apartient seroit difficile 
jusques a V impossibility, beyond which no 
difficulty can go. 

He was as excellent a horse, the Doctor 
used to say, as that which was first chosen 
to be backed by Cain, and which the divine 
Du Bartas, as rendered by the not less divine 
Sylvester, thus describes, 

With round, high, hollow, smooth, brown, jetty hoof; 

"With pasterns short, upright, but yet in mean ; 

Dry sinewy shanks ; strong rleshless knees and lean ; 

With hart-like legs ; broad breast, and large behind, 

With body large, smooth flanks, and double chined ; 

A crested neck, bowed like a half bent bow, 

Whereon a long, thin, curled mane doth flow ; 

A firm full tail, touching the lowly ground, 

With dock between two fair fat buttocks drown'd ; 

A pricked ear, that rests as little space 

As his light foot ; a lean, bare, bony face, 

Thin joule, and head but of a middle size ; 

Full, lively-flaming, quickly-rolling eyes ; 

Great foaming mouth, hot fuming nostril wide ; 

Of chesnut hair, his forehead starrified ; 

Three milky feet, a feather in his breast, 

Whom seven-years- old at the next grass he guest. 

In many respects he was like that horse 
which the elder of the three Fraeassins won 
in battle in the Taprobanique Islands, in 
the wars between the two dreadful Giant 
Kings Gargamitre and Tartabas. Cefurieux 
destrier estoit dune taille fort belle, a jambe 
de cerf la poictrine ouverte, la croupe large, 
grand corps, jlancs unis, double eschine, le col 
voute comme un arc mi-tendu, sur lequel flot- 
toit un long poil crespu ; la queue longue, 
ferme et espesse ; Voreille poinctue et sans 
repos, aussi bien que lepied, dune come lissee, 
retirant sur le noir, haute, ronde, et creuse, le 
front sec, et itayant rien que Vos ; les yeux 
gros prompts et relevez ; la bouche grande, 
escumeuse ; le nareau ronflant et ouvert ; poil 
chastain, de Vage de sept ans. JBref qui eut 
voulu voir le modelle dun beau, bon et gene- 
reux cheval en estoit un. 

Like this he was, except that he was never 
Nobs furieux, being as gentle and as docile 
at seven years old, as at seventeen when it 
was my good fortune to know and my pri- 
vilege sometimes to ride him. 

He was not such a horse as that for which 
Muley, the General of the King of Fez, and 



THE DOCTOR. 



361 



the Principe Constante D. Fernando fought, 
when they found him without an owner upon 
a field covered with slain ; a horse 

tan monstruo, que siendo hijo 
del Viento, adopcion pretende 
del Fuego ; y entre los dos 
lo desdize y lo desmiente 
el color, pues siendo bianco 
dize el Agua, parto es este 
de mi esfera, sola yo 
pude quaxarle de nieve. 

Both leaped upon him at once, and fought 
upon his back, and Calderon's Don Fernando 
thus describes the battle, — 

En la silla y en las ancas 
puestos los dos juntamente, 
mares de sangre rompimos ; 
por cuyas ondas crueles 
este baxel animado, 
hecho proa de la f rente, 
rompiendo el globo de nacar. 
desde el codon al copete, 
parecio entre cspuma y sangre, 
ya que baxel quise hazerle, 
de quatro espuelas herido, 
que quatro vientos le mueven. 

He did not either in his marks or trap- 
pings resemble Rabicano, as Chiabrera 
describes him, when Rinaldo having lost 
Bayardo, won this famous horse from the 
Giant to whose keeping Galafron had com- 
mitted him after Argalia's death. 

Era si negro V animal guerriero, 
Qualpece d'Ida ; e solamente enfronte 
E sulla coda bianckeggiava il pelo, 
E del pie manco, e deretano Vunghia ; 
Ma confren d'oro, e con dorati arcioni. 
Sdegna tremando ogni reposo, e vibra 
Le tese orecchie, e per levarsi avvampa, 
E col f errata pit- non e mai stanco 
Battere il prato, e tutte I'aure sfida 
Al sonar de magnanimi nitriti. 

Galafron had employed 

Tutto I' Inferno afar veloce in corso 
Qua! negro corridor. 

Notwithstanding which Rabicano appears 
to have been a good horse, and to have had 
no vice in him ; and yet his equine virtues 
were not equal to those of Nobs, nor would 
he have suited the Doctor so well. 

Lastly, he was not such a Horse as that 
goodly one " of Cneiiis Seiiis which had all 
the perfections that could be named for 
stature, feature, colour, strength, limbs, 
comeliness, belonging to a horse ; but withal, 
this misery ever went along with him, that 
whosoever became owner of him was sure to 



die an unhappy death." Nor did the pos- 
session of that fatal horse draw on the de- 
struction of his owner alone, but the ruin 
of his whole family and fortune. So it 
proved in the case of his four successive 
Masters, Cneiiis Seiiis, Cornelius Dolabella, 
Caius Cassius, and Mark Antony, whom, if 
I were to call by his proper name Marcus 
Antonius, half my readers would not recog- 
nise. This horse was foaled in the territory 
of Argos *, and his pedigree was derived from 
the anthropophagous stud of the tyrant 
Diomedes. He was of surpassing size, hand 
credihili pulchritudine vigore et colore exu- 
bera?itissimo, — being purple with a tawney 
mane.. No ! Nobs was not such a horse as 
this. 

Though neither in colour nor in marks, 
yet in many other respects the description 
may be applied to him which Merlinus 
Cocaius has given in his first Macaronea of 
the horse on which Guido appeared at that 
tournament where he won the heart of the 
Princess Baldovina. 

Huic mantellus erat nigrior carbone galantus, 
Parvaque testa, breves agilesque movebat orecchias ; 
Frontis et in medio faciebat Stella decor em. 
Frena biassabat, naresque tenebat aperlas. 
Pectore mostazzo tangit, se reddit in unum 
(jroppettum, solusque viam galopando misurat, 
Goffiat, et curtos agitant sua colla capillos. 
Balzanus tribus est pedibus, cum pectore largo, 
Ac inter gambas tenet arcto corpore caudam ; 
Spaventat, volgitque oculos hinc inde fogatos j 
Semper el ad solam currit remanetque sbriaiam, 
Innaspatque pedes naso boffante priores. 

That he should have been a good horse is 
not surprising, seeing that though of foreign 
extraction on the one side, he was of Eng- 
lish birth, whereby, and by his dam, he par- 
took the character of English horses. Now 
as it has been discreetly said, " Our English 
horses have a mediocrity of all necessary 
good properties in them, as neither so slight 
as the Barbe ; nor so slovenly as the Flem- 
ish ; nor so fiery as the Hungarian ; nor so 
aery as the Spanish Gennets, (especially if, 
as reported, they be conceived of the wind ; ) 
nor so earthly as those in the Low Coun- 
tries, and generally all the German Horse. 

* Cf. Aul. Gcll. Noct. Att. lib. iii. c. ix., where the 
other proverb of Atirum Tolosanum, so often referred to 
in our old writers, is explained likewise. 



362 



THE DOCTOR. 



For stature and strength they are of a middle 
size, and are both seemly and serviceable in 
a good proportion. And whilst the seller 
praiseth them too much, the buyer too little, 
the indifferent stander-by will give them 
this due commendation." * 

A reasonably good horse therefore he 
might have been expected to prove as being 
English, and better than ordinary English 
horses as being Yorkshire. For saith the 
same judicious author, " Yorkshire doth 
breed the best race of English horses, whose 
keeping commonly in steep and stony ground 
bringeth them to firmness of footing and 
hardness of hoof; whereas a stud of horses 
bred in foggy, fenny ground, and soft, rotten 
morasses, — (delicacy marrs both man and 
beast,) — have often a fen in their feet, being 
soft, and soon subject to be foundered. Well, 
may Philip be so common a name amongst 
the gentry of this country, who are generally 
so delighted in horsemanship.'' 

Very good therefore there might have 
been fair ground for hoping that Nobs would 
prove; but that he should have proved so 
good, so absolutely perfect in his kind and 
for his uses, was beyond all hope — all ex- 
pectation. 

" I have done with this subject, the same 
author continues, when I have mentioned 
the monition of David, ' an Horse is but a 
vain thing to save a man,' though it is no 
vain thing to slay a man, by many casual- 
ties : such need we have, whether waking or 
sleeping, whether walking or riding, to put 
ourselves by prayer into Divine Protection." 

Such a reflection is in character with the 
benevolent and pious writer ; and conveys 
indeed a solemn truth which ought always to 
be borne in mind. Its force will not be 
weakened though I should remark that the 
hero of a horse which I have endeavoured 
to describe may in a certain sense be said to 
afford an exception to David's saying : for 
there were many cases in which, according 
to all appearance, the patient could not have 
been saved unless the Doctor had by means 
of his horse Nobs arrived in time. 

* FILLER. 



His moral qualities indeed were in as 
great perfection as his physical ones ; but — 
ilfautfaire desormais une fin au discours de 
ce grand clieval ; car, tant plus que f entrerois 
dans le labyrinthe de ses vertus, tant plus je 
m'y perdrois. With how much more, fitness 
may I say this of Nobs, than Brantome said 
it of Francis I. ! 

When in the fifteenth century the noble 
Valencian Knight, Mossen Manuel Diez ac- 
companied Alonso to the conquest of the 
kingdom of Naples, he there had occasion to 
remark of how great importance it was that 
the knights should be provided with good 
horses in time of war, that they might 
thereby be the better able to increase the 
honour and extend the dominions of their 
king ; and that in time of their old age and 
the season of repose they should have for 
their recreation good mules. He resolved 
therefore to compose a book upon the nature 
and qualities of these animals, and the way 
of breeding them, and preserving them 
sound, and in good condition and strong. 
And although he was well versed in these 
things himself, nevertheless he obtained the 
king's orders for calling together all the best 
Albeytares, that is to say in old speech, far- 
riers, horse-doctors, or horse-leeches, and in 
modern language Veterinary surgeons ; all 
which could assemble were convened, and 
after due consultation with them, he com- 
posed that Libre de Menescalid, the original 
of which in the Valencian dialect was among 
the MSS. that Pope Alexander VII. col- 
lected, and which began In nome sia de la 
Sancta Trinitat, que es Pare, e Fill, e Sant 
Spirit, tot hum Deu ; and which he as Ma- 
jordom of the molt alt e poderos Princep, e 
victorios Signior Don Alfonso, Re de Ragona, 
8fc. set forth to show to alsjovents Cavellers, 
gran part de la practica e de la conexenza del 
Cavalls, e de lurs malaties, e gran part de les 
cures di aquells. If Nobs had lived in those 
days, worthy would he have been to have 
been in all particulars described in that 
work, to have had an equestrian order insti- 
tuted in his honour, and have been made a 
Rico Cavallo, the first who obtained that 
rank. 



THE DOCTOR. 



3G3 



CHAPTER CXLIY. 

HISTORY AND ROMANCE RANSACKED FOR 
RESEMBLANCES AND NON-RESEMBLANCES 
TO THE HORSE OF DOCTOR DANIEL DOVE. 

Renowned beast ! (forgive poetic flight !) 
Not less than man, deserves poetic right. 

The Bruciad. 

When I read of heroic horses in heroic 
books, I cannot choose but remember Nobs, 
and compare him with them, not in parti- 
cular qualities, but in the sum total of their 
good points, each in his way. They may 
resemble each other as little as Rabelais 
and Rousseau, Shakespeare and Sir Isaac 
Xewton, Paganini and the Duke of Wel- 
lington, yet be alike in this, that each had 
no superior in his own line of excellence. 

Thus when I read of the courser which 
Prince Meridiano presented to Alphebus, 
the Knight of the Sun, after the Prince had 
been defeated by him in the presence of his 
Sister Lindabridis, I think of ISTobs, though 
Cornelin was marvellously unlike the Doc- 
tor's perfect roadster. For Cornelin was so 
named because he had a horn growing from 
the middle of his forehead ; and he had four 
joints at the lower part of his legs, which 
extraordinary formation, (I leave anatomists 
to explain how,) made him swifter than all 
other horses, insomuch that his speed was 
likened to the wind. It was thought that 
his Sire was an Unicorn, though his dam 
was certainly a mare : and there was this 
reason for supposing such to be the case, 
that Meridiano was son to the emperor of 
Great Tartary, in which country the hybrid 
race between Unicorn and Mare was not 
uncommon in those days. 

When the good Knight of the Sun en- 
gaged in single combat with the Giant 
Bradaman, this noble horse stood him in 
good stead : for Bradaman rode an elephant, 
and as they ran at each other, Cornelin 
thrust his natural spike into the elephant's 
poitrel, and killed him on the spot. 

Cornelin did special service on another 
occasion, when some Knights belonging to a 
Giant King of the Sards, who had established 



one of those atrocious customs which it was 
the duty of all Errant Knights to suppress, 
met with the Good Knight of the Sun ; and 
one of them said he would allow him to turn 
back and go away in peace, provided he 
gave him his arms and his horse, " if the 
horse be thine own," said he, " inasmuch as 
he liketh me hugely." The Good Knight 
made answer with a smile " my arms I shall 
not give, because I am not used to travel 
without them ; and as for my horse, none 
but myself can mount him." The discour- 
teous Knight made answer with an oath 
that he would see whether he could defend 
the horse ; and with that he attempted to 
seize the bridle. No sooner had he ap- 
proached within Cornelin's reach, than that 
noble steed opened his mouth, caught him 
by the shoulder, lifted him up, dropped him, 
and then trampled on him si rudement que 
son ame s'envola a celuy a qui elle estoit pour 
ses malefices. Upon this another of these 
insolent companions drew his sword, and 
was about to strike at Cornelin's legs, but 
Cornelin reared, and with both his fore-feet 
struck him on the helmet with such force, 
that no armourer could repair the outer 
head-piece, and no surgeon the inner one. 

It was once disputed in France whether 
a horse could properly be said to have a 
mouth ; a wager concerning it was laid, and 
referred to no less a person than a Judge, 
because, says a Frenchman, " our French 
Judges are held in such esteem that they 
are appealed to upon the most trifling occa- 
sions." The one party maintained quilfal- 
loit dire la gueule a toutes bestes, et qu'il n'y 
avoit que Vhomme qui eust bouche ; but the 
Judge decided, qiid cause de Vexccllence du 
cheval, il falloit dire la bouche. The Giant 
King's Knights must have been of the 
Judge's opinion when they saw Cornelin 
make but a mouthful of their companion. 

When our English Judges are holden in 
such esteem as to be referred to on such 
occasions, they do not always entertain the 
appeal. Mr. Brougham when at the Bar — 
that Mr. Brougham (if posterity inquires 
whom I mean) who was afterwards made 
Lord Chancellor and of whom Sir Edward 



364 



THE DOCTOR. 



Sugden justly observed, that if he had but 
a smattering of law he would know some- 
thing of everything — Mr. Brougham, I say, 
opened before Lord Chief Justice Tenterden 
an action for the amount of a wager laid 
upon the event of a dog-fight, which through 
some unwillingness of dogs or men had not 
been brought to an issue : " We, My Lord," 
said the advocate, "were minded that the 
dogs should fight" — " Then I," replied the 
Judge, " am minded to hear no more of it ; " 
and he called another cause. 

No wager would ever have been left un- 
decided through any unwillingness to fight 
on the part of Cornelin or of his Master the 
Knight of the Sun. 

When that good Knight of the Sun seek- 
ing death in his despair landed upon the 
Desolate Island, there to encounter a mon- 
ster called Faunus el Endemoniado, that is 
to say, the Bedevilled Faun, he resolved in 
recompense for all the service that Cornelin 
had done him to let him go free for life : so 
taking off his bridle and saddle and all his 
equipments, he took leave of him in these 
sorrowful words : — " O my good Horse, full 
grievously do I regret to leave thee ! Would 
it were but in a place where thou mightest 
be looked to and tended according to thy 
deserts ! For if Alexander of Macedon did 
such honour to his dead horse that he caused 
a sepulchre to be erected for him and a city 
to be called after his name, with much more 
reason might I show honour to thee while 
thou art living, who art so much better than 
he. Augustus had his dead horse buried 
that he might not be devoured by carrion 
birds. Didius Julianus consecrated a mar- 
ble statue of his in the Temple of Venus. 
Lucius Verus had the likeness of his while 
living cast in gold. But I who have 
done nothing for thee, though thou sur- 
passest them all in goodness, what can I do 
now but give thee liberty that thou mayest 
enjoy it like other creatures ? Go then, my 
good Horse, the last companion from whom 
I part in this world ! " Saying this, he 
made as if he would have struck him to 
send him off. But here was a great marvel 
in this good horse : for albeit he was now 



free and with nothing to encumber him, he 
not only would not go away, but instead 
thereof approached his master, his whole 
body trembling, and the more the Knight 
threatened the more he trembled and the 
nearer he drew. The Knight of the Sun 
knew not what he should do, for on the one 
hand he understood in what danger this 
good horse would be if he should be per- 
ceived by the Faun ; and on the other 
threaten him as he would he could not drive 
him away. At length he concluded to leave 
him at liberty, thinking that peradventure 
he would take flight as soon as he should see 
the Faun. He was not mistaken ; Cornelin 
would have stood by his Master in the dread- 
ful combat in which he was about to engage, 
and would peradventure have lost his life in 
endeavouring to aid him ; but the Bedevilled 
Faun had been so named because he had a 
hive of Devils in his inside ; fire came from 
his mouth and nostrils as he rushed against 
the Knight, and 3warms of armed Devils 
were breathed out with the flames ; no 
wonder therefore that even Cornelin took 
fright and galloped away. 

But when Alphebus had slain the Bede- 
villed Faun, and lived alone upon the 
Desolate Island, like a hermit, waiting and 
wishing for death, eating wild fruits and 
drinking of a spring which welled near some 
trees, under which he had made for himself 
a sort of bower, Cornelin used often to visit 
him in his solitude. It was some consolation 
to the unhappy Knight to see the good horse 
that he loved so well : but then again it 
redoubled his grief as he called to mind the 
exploits he had performed when mounted 
upon that famous courser. The displeasure 
of his beautiful and not less valiant than 
beautiful mistress the Princess Claridiana 
had caused his wretchedness, and driven him 
to this state of despair; and when Claridiana 
being not less wretched herself, came to the 
Desolate Island in quest of him, the first 
thing that she found was the huge and 
broken limb of a tree with which he had 
killed the Faun, and the next was Cornelin's 
saddle and bridle and trappings, which she 
knew by the gold and silk embroidery, 



/ 



TPIE DOCTOK. 



365 



tarnished as it was, and by the precious 
stones- Presently she saw the good horse 
Cornelin himself, who had now become well 
nigh wild, and came toward her bounding 
and neighing, and rejoicing at the sight of 
her horse, for it was long since he had seen a 
creature of his own kind. But he started 
off when she would have laid hold of him, 
for he could not brook that any but his own 
master should come near him now. Howbeit 
she followed his track, and was thus guided 
to the spot where her own good Knight was 
wasting his miserable life. 

Nobs was as precious a horse to the 
Doctor as Yegliantino was to Einaldo, — that 
noble courser whom the Harpies killed, and 
whom Einaldo, after killing the whole host 
of Harpies, buried sorowfully, kneeling 
down and kissing his grave. He intended 
to go in mourning and afoot for his sake all 
the rest of his life, and wrote for him this 
epitaph upon a stone, in harpy's blood and 
with the point of his sword. 

Qui giace Vegliantin, caval de Spagna, 
Orrido in guerra, e tutto grazie in pace ; 
Servi Rinaldo in Francia ed in Lamagna, 
Ed ebbe ingegno e spirto si vivace 
Che averebbe coipiefatto una ragna ; 
Accorto, destro, nobile ed audace, 
Mori qual forte, e can f route superba ; 
tu, che passi, gettagli un pb d'erba.* 

He was as sagacious a horse and as gentle as 
Frontalatte, who in the heroic age of horses 
was 

Sopra ogni altro caval savio ed umano.\ 

When the good Magician Atlante against 
v his will sent his pupil Euggiero forth, and 
provided him with arms and horse, he gave 
him this courser which Sacripante had lost, 
saying to him 

— certamente so che potrai dire 
Che 7 principe Rinaldo e 7 conte Orlando 
Non ha miglior caval. \ 
Aveyido altro signore, ebbe altro nome ; 

His new master called him Frontino 

H mondo non avea piit bel destriero, 

***** * 

Or sopra avendo il giovane Ruggiero, 
Fiu vaga cosa non si vide mai. 
Chi guardasse il cavallo e' I cavalicro 
Siarebbe a dar giudicio in dubbio assai, 
Sefusscr vivi, ofaiti col pennello, 
Tanto era F un e /' altro egregio e bello.f 



* RlCCIARDETTO. 



t Orlando Inamorato. 



Nobs was not like that horse now living 
at Brussels, who is fond of raw flesh, and 
getting one day out of his stable .found his 
way to a butcher's shop and devoured two 
breasts of mutton, mutton it seems being his 
favourite meat. If his pedigree could be 
traced we might expect to find that he was 
descended from the anthropophagous stud of 
that abominable Thracian King whom Her- 
cules so properly threw to his own horses 
for food. 

Nor was he like that other horse of the 
same execrable extraction, whom in an evil 
day Einaldo, having won him in battle, sent 
as a present by the damsel Hipalca to 
Euggiero, — that Clarion 

A quien el cielo con rigor maldixo, 
Y una beldad le did tan codiciada ; 

that fatal horse who, as soon as Euggiero 
mounted him, carried his heroic master into 
the ambush prepared for him, in which he 
was treacherously slain. The tragedy not 
ending there, for one of the traitors took 
this horse for his reward, and his proper 
reward he had with him. 

Pusole el traidor pernas, corrio elfuerte 
Desenfrenado potro hasta arrojallo, 
En medio de la plaza de Mar sella, 
A ojos de Bradamante, y su doncella. 
Alii en presencia suyo kecho pedazos 
Al Magances dexo el caballofiero : 
Viendole Hipalca muerto entre los brazos, 
Y no en su silla qual penso a Rugero, 
Notorios vio los cavilosos lazos 
Del fementido bando de Pontiero. 
Alterose la bella Bradamante 

Y el sobresalto le aborto un infante. 

Y al quinto dia con la nueva cierta 
De la muerte infeliz del paladino, 

La antes dudosa amante quedo muerta, 

Y cumplido el temor del adivino. 
Ypor lantas desgracias descubierta 

La traicion de Maganza, un rio sanguino 
Labrd Morgana, y de la genie impia 
Cienfalsos Condes degollo en un dia.t 

Eso quieren decir las desgracias del Caballo 
Clarion, says the author of this poem El 
Doctor Don Bernardo de Balbuena, in the 
allegory which he annexes to the Canto, que 
la fuerza de las estrellas predomina en los 
brutos, y en la parte sensiiiua, y no en el 
albedrio humano y voluntad racional. 

Neither did Nobs resemble in his taste 

X Balbllna. 



366 



THE DOCTOR. 



that remarkable horse which Dr. Tyson 
frequently saw in London at the beginning 
of the last century. This horse would eat 
oysters with great delight, scrunching them 
shells and all between his teeth. Accident 
developed in him this peculiar liking ; for 
being fastened one day at a tavern-door 
where there happened to be a tub standing 
with oysters in it, the water first attracted 
him, and then the fresh odour of fish induced 
him to try his teeth upon what promised to 
be more savoury than oats and not much 
harder than horse-beans. From that time 
he devoured them with evident satisfaction 
whenever they were offered him ; and he 
might have become as formidable a visitor 
to the oyster-shops, if oyster-shops there 
then had been, as the great and never-to-be- 
forgotten Dando himself. 

He was not like the Colt which Boyle 
describes, who had a double eye, that is to 
say two eyes in one socket, in the middle of 
his forehead, a Cyclops of a horse. 

Nor was he like the coal-black steed on 
which the Trappist rode, fighting against the 
Liberates as heartily as that good Christian 
the Bishop Don Hieronimo fought with the 
Cid Campeador against the Moors, elevating 
the Crucifix in one hand, and with his sword 
in the other smiting them for the love of 
Charity. That horse never needed food or 
sleep : he never stumbled at whatever speed 
his master found it needful to ride down the 
most precipitous descent ; his eyes emitted 
light to show the Trappist his way in the 
darkness ; the tramp of his hoofs was heard 
twenty miles around, and whatsoever man 
in the enemy's camp first heard the dreadful 
sound knew that his fate was fixed, and he 
must inevitably die in the ensuing fight. 
Nobs resembled this portentous horse as 
little as the Doctor resembled the terrible 
Trappist. Even the great black horse which 
used to carry old George, as William Dove 
called the St. George of Quakerdom, far 
exceeded him in speed. The Doctor was 
never seen upon his back in the course of 
the same hour at two places sixty miles 
apart from each other. There was nothing 
supernatural in Nobs. His hippogony, 



even if it had been as the Doctor was willing 
to have it supposed he thought probable, 
would upon his theory have been in the 
course of nature, though not in her usual 
course. 

Olaus Magnus assigns sundry reasons why 
the Scandinavian horses were hardier, and 
in higher esteem than those of any other 
part of the World. They would bear to be 
shod without kicking or restraint. They 
would never allow other horses to eat their 
provender. They saw their way better in 
the dark. They regarded neither frost nor 
snow. They aided the rider in battle both 
with teeth and hoofs. Either in ascending 
or descending steep and precipitous places 
they were sure-footed. At the end of a 
day's journey a roll in the sand or the snow 
took off' their fatigue and increased their 
appetite. They seldom ailed anything, and 
what ailments they had were easily cured. 
Moreover they were remarkable for one 
thing, 

Ch' a dire e brutto, ed a iacerlo & hello — * 

and which, instead of translating or quoting 

the Dane's Latin, I must intimate by 

saying that it was never necessary to whistle 
to them. 

Nobs had none of the qualities which cha- 
racterised the Scandinavian horses, and in 
which their excellencies consisted, as pe- 
culiarly fitting them for their own country. 
But he was equally endowed with all those 
which were required in his station. There 
was not a surer-footed beast in the West 
Riding ; and if he did not see his way in the 
dark by the light of his own eyes like the 
black horse of the Trappist, and that upon 
which the Old Woman of Berkeley rode 
double behind One more formidable than the 
Trappist himself, when she was taken out of 
her coffin of stone and carried bodily away, 
— he saw it as well as any mortal horse 
could see, and knew it as well as John 
Gough the blind botanist of Kendal, or John 
Metcalf the blind guide of Knaresborough. 

But of all his good qualities that for which 
the Doctor prized him most was the kind- 

* RUCELLAI. 



THE DOCTOR, 



367 



ness of his disposition, not meaning by those 
words what Gentlemen-feeders and pro- 
fessors of agriculture mean. " It is the 
Graziers own fault," says one of those 
professors, " if ever he attempts to fatten an 
unkind beast," — kindness of disposition in 
a beast importing in their language, that it 
fattens soon. What it meant in the Doc- 
tor's, the following authentic anecdote may 
show. 

The Doctor had left Nobs one day standing 
near the door of a farm-house with his bridle 
thrown over a gate-post ; one of the farmers 
children, a little boy just old enough to run 
into danger, amused himself by pulling the 
horse's tail with one hand and striking him 
with a little switch across the legs with the 
other. The mother caught sight of this and 
ran in alarm to snatch the urchin away ; but 
before she could do this, Nobs lifted up 
one foot, placed it against the boy's stomach, 
and gently pushed him down. The ground 
was wet, so that the mark of his hoof showed 
where he had placed it, and it was evident 
that what he had done was done carefully 
not to injure the child, for a blow upon that 
part must have been fatal. This was what 
the Doctor called kindness of disposition in 
a horse. Let others argue if they please 
que le cheval avoit quelque raison, et qiiil 
i^atiocinoit entire toates les autres bestes, a cause 
du temperament cle son cerveau * ,• here, as 
he justly said, was sufficient proof of con- 
sideration, and good nature. 

He was not like the heroic horse which 
Amadis won in the Isle Perilous, when in 
his old age he was driven thither by a tem- 
pest, though the adventure has been preter- 
mitted in his great history. After the death 
of that old, old, very old and most famous 
of all Knights, this horse was enchanted by 
the Magician Alchiso. Many generations 
passed away before he was overcome and dis- 
enchanted by Rinaldo ; and he then became 
so famous by his well-known name Bajardo, 
that for the sole purpose of winning this 
horse and the 'sword Durlindana, which was 
as famous among swords as Bajardo among 



BODCHET. 



horses, Gradasso came from India to invade 
France with an army of an hundred and 
fifty thousand knights. If Nobs had been 
like him, think what a confusion and con- 
sternation his appearance would have pro- 
duced at Doncaster races ! 

Ecco appare il cavallo, e i calci tira, 
Efa saltando ra del ben mille role j 
Delle narici ilfoco accolto spira, 
Muove V orecchie, e I' empie membra scuote ; 
A sassi, a sterpi, a piante ei non rimira, 
Mafracassatido il tutto, itrla e percote j 
Col nitrito i nemici afiera gucrra 
Sfida, e cb pie fa ritnbombar la tieri'a.j 

Among the Romans he might have been 
in danger of being selected for a victim to 
Mars, on the Ides of December. The Mas- 
sageta? would have sacrificed him to the 
Sun, to whom horses seem to have been 
offered wherever he was worshipped.} He 
might have escaped in those countries where 
white horses were preferred on such occa- 
sions : — a preference for which a commenta- 
tor upon Horace accounts by the unlucky 
conjecture that it was because they were 
swifter than any others. § 

No better horse was ever produced from 
that celebrated breed which Dionysius the 
Tyrant imported into Sicily from the Veneti. 
No better could have been found among 
all the progeny of the fifty thousand Mares 
belonging to the Great King, upon the Great 
Plain which the Greeks called Hippobotus 
because the Median herb which was the 
best pasture for horses abounded there. 
Whether the Nisa?an horses, which were 
used by kings, were brought from thence 
or from Armenia, ancient Authors have not 
determined. 

There was a tomb not far from the gates 
at Athens, ascending from the Pirams, on 
which a soldier was represented standing 
beside a Horse. All that was known of this 
monument in the age of Adrian was that it 



+ Tasso. 

X " Ne detur cclori victims tarda Deo." Ovid, Fast. 
Cf. 2 Kings, xxiii. 11. 

§ Is there any mistake here? The allusion is to Sat. 
vii. 8. " Equis prsecurreret albis?" Horace had in view- 
Iliad, x. 4HG. Virgil lias, with reference to Pilumnus' 
horses, i% Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras." 
Mn. xii. SI. 



368 



THE DOCTOR. 



was the work of Praxiteles ; the name of 
the person whose memory it was intended to 
preserve had perished. If Nobs and his 
Master had flourished at the same time with 
Praxiteles, that great sculptor would have 
thought himself worthily employed in pre- 
serving likenesses for posterity of the one 
and the other. He was worthy to have been 
modelled by Phidias or Lysippus. I will 
not wish that Chantrey had been what he 
now is, the greatest of living sculptors, four- 
score years ago : but I may wish that Nobs 
and the Doctor had lived at the time when 
Chantrey could have made a bust of the one 
and a model of the other, or an equestrian 
statue to the joint honour of both. 

Poppsea would have had such a horse shod 
with shoes of gold. Caligula would have 
made him Consul. William Rufus would 
have created him by a new and appropriate 
title Lord Horse of London "T own. 

When the French had a settlement in the 
Island of Madagascar, their Commander, 
who took the title of Viceroy, assembled a 
force of 3000 natives against one of the most 
powerful native Chiefs, and sent with them 
140 French under the Sieur de Chamargou. 
This officer had just then imported from 
India the first horse which had ever been 
seen in Madagascar, and though oxmanship 
was practised by this people, as by some of 
the tribes on the adjacent coast of Africa, 
those oxriders were astonished at the horse ; 
Us luy rendoiertt mime des respects si profonds, 
que tous ceux qui envoyoient quelque deputa- 
tion vers le General de cette armee, ne man- 
quoient point de /aire des presens et des 
complimens a Monsieur le Cheval, If Nobs 
had been that Horse, he would have deserved 
all the compliments that could have been 
paid him. 

He would have deserved too, as far as 
Horse could have deserved, the more extra- 
ordinary honours which fell to the lot of a 
coal-black steed, belonging to a kinsman of 
Cortes by name Palacios Rubios. In that 
expedition which Cortes made against his 
old friend and comrade Christoval de Olid, 
who in defiance of him had usurped 'a 
government for himself, the Spaniards, after 



suffering such privations and hardships of 
every kind as none but Spaniards could 
with the same patience have endured, came 
to some Indian settlements called the Mazo- 
tecas, being the name of a species of deer in 
the form of one of which the Demon whom 
the natives worshipped had once, they said, 
appeared to them, and enjoined them never 
to kill or molest in any way an animal of 
that kind. They had become so tame in 
consequence, that they manifested no fear at 
the appearance of the Spaniards, nor took 
flight till they were attacked. The day was 
exceedingly hot, and as the hungry hunters 
followed the chase with great ardour, 
Rubios's horse was overheated, and as the 
phrase was, melted his grease. Cortes there- 
fore charged the Indians of the Province of 
Itza to take care of him while he proceeded 
on his way to the Coast of Honduras, saying 
that as soon as he fell in with the Spaniards 
of whom he was in quest, he would send for 
him ; horses were of great value at that 
time, and this was a very good one. The 
Itzaex were equally in fear of Cortes and 
the Horse ; they did not indeed suppose 
horse and rider to be one animal, but they 
believed both to be reasonable creatures, 
and concluded that what was acceptable to 
the one would be so to the other. So they 
offered him fowls to eat, presented nosegays 
to him of their most beautiful and fragrant 
flowers, and treated him as they would have 
treated a sick Chief, till, to their utter dis- 
may, he was starved to death. What was 
to be done when Cortes should send for 
him ? The Cacique, with the advice of his 
principal men, gave orders that an Image of 
the Horse should be set up in the temple of 
his town, and that it should be worshipped 
there by the name of Tziminchac, as the 
God of Thunder and Lightning, which it 
seemed to them were used as weapons by the 
Spanish Horsemen. The honour thus paid 
to the Horse would they thought obtain 
credit for the account which they must give 
to the Spaniards, and prove that they had 
not wilfully caused his death. 

The Itzaex, however, heard nothing of the 
Spaniards, nor the Spaniards of Rubios's 



THE DOCTOR. 



369 



black horse, till nearly an hundred years 
afterwards two Franciscans of the province 
of Yucatan went as Missionaries among 
these Indians, being well versed in the Maya 
tongue, which is spoken in that country ; 
their names were Bartolome de Fuensalida 
and Juan de Orbita. The chief settlement 
was upon an Island in the Lake of Itza ; 
there they landed, not with the good will 
either of the Cacique or the people, and 
entering the place of worship, upon one of 
their great Cus or Pyramids they beheld the 
Horse-Idol, which was then more venerated 
than all the other Deities. Indignant at the 
sight, Father Orbita took a great stone and 
broke to pieces the clay statue, in defiance 
of the cries and threats with which he was 
assailed. "Kill him who has killed our God," 
they exclaimed ; " kill him ! kill him ! " The 
Spaniards say the serene triumph and the 
unwonted beauty which beamed in Orbita's 
countenance at that moment made it evident 
that he was acting under a divine impulse. 
His companion Fuensalida, acting in the 
same spirit, held up the Crucifix, and ad- 
dressed so passionate and powerful an appeal 
to the Itzaex in their own language upon 
the folly and wickedness of their Idolatry 
and the benefits of the Gospel which he 
preached, that they listened to him with 
astonishment, and admiration, and awe, and 
followed the Friars respectfully from the 
place of worship, and allowed them to depart 
in safety. 

These Franciscan Missionaries, zealous and 
intrepid as they were, did but half their 
work. Many years afterwards when D. 
Martin de Ursua defeated the Itzaex in an 
action on the Lake, and took the Peten or 
Great Island, he found, in what appears to 
have been the same Adoratory, a decayed 
shin bone, suspended from the roof by three 
strings of different coloured cotton, a little 
bag beneath containing smaller pieces of 
bone in the same state of decay ; under both 
there were three censers of the Indian 
fashion with storax and other perfumes 
burning, and a supply of storax near wrapt 
in dry leaves of maize, and over the larger 
bone an Indian coronet. These, he was told 



upon inquiry, were the bones of the Horse 
which the Great Captain had committed to 
the care of their Cacique long ago. 

If it had been the fate of Nobs thus to be 
idolified, and the Itzaex had been acquainted 
with his character, they would have com- 
pounded a name for him, not from Thunder 
and Lightning, but from all the good quali- 
ties which can exist in horse-nature, and for 
which words could be found in the Maya 
tongue. 



CHAPTER CXLY. 

WILLIAM OSMER. INNATE QUALITIES. MARCH 
OF ANIMAL INTELLECT. FARTHER REVEAL- 
MENT OE THE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

There is a word^and it is a great word in this Book *, 
lav to kvto, — In id ipsum, that is, to look to the thing 
itself, the very point, the principal matter of all ; to have 
our eye on that, and not off it, upon alia omnia, any thing 
but it — To go to the point, drive ah io that, as also to go 
to the matter real, without declining from it this way or 
that, to the right hand or to the left. Bp. Amdrewes. 

A certain William Osmer once wrote a 
dissertation upon the Horse, wherein he 
affirmeth, it is demonstrated by matters of 
fact, as well as from the principles of philo- 
sophy, that innate qualities do not exist, and 
that the excellence of this animal is alto- 
gether mechanical and not in the blood. 
In affirming this of the Horse, the said 
William Osmer hath gone far toward de- 
monstrating himself an Ass ; for he might 
as well have averred that the blood hath 
nothing to do with the qualities of a black 
pudding. When Hurdis said 

— Give me the steed 
Whose noble efforts bore the prize away, 
I care not for his grandsire or his dam, 

it was well said, but not wisely. 

The opinion, which is as old as anything 
known concerning this animal, that the good 
qualities of a horse are likely to bear some 
resemblance to those of its sire or dam, Mr. 
Osmer endeavoured to invalidate by arguing 



* The New Testament which the Preacher had before 
him.— R. S. 



370 



THE DOCTOR. 



that his strength and swiftness depend upon 
the exactness of his make, and that where 
this was defective, these qualities would be 
deficient also, — a foolish argument, for the 
proposition rests upon just the same ground 
as that against which he was reasoning. But 
what better reasoning could be looked for 
from a man who affirmed that if horses were 
not shod they might travel upon the turn- 
pike road without injury to their feet, be- 
cause, . in his own language, " when time 
was young, when the earth was in a state 
of nature, and turnpike roads as yet were 
not, the Divine Artist had taken care to 
give their feet such defence as it pleased 
him." 

If the Doctor had known that Nobs was 
of Tartarian extraction, this fact would suf- 
ficiently have accounted for the excellences 
of that incomparable roadster. He explained 
them quite as satisfactorily to himself by 
the fancy which he amused himself with 
supporting on this occasion, that this mar- 
vellous horse was a son of the Wind. And 
hence he inferred that ISTobs possessed the 
innate qualities of his kind in greater per- 
fection than any other horse, as approaching 
near to the original perfection in which the 
species was created. For although animals 
are each in then' kind less degenerate than 
man, whom so many circumstances have 
tended to injure in his physical nature, still, 
he argued, all which like the horse have been 
made subservient to the uses of man, were 
in some degree deteriorated by that sub- 
jection. Innate qualities, however, he ad- 
mitted were more apparent in the brute 
creation than in the human creature, be- 
cause even in those which suffer most by 
domestication, the course of nature is not 
so violently overruled. 

I except the Duck, he would say. That 
bird, which Nature hath made free of earth, 
air and water, loses by servitude the use of 
one element, the enjoyment of two, and the 
freedom of all three. 

Look at the Pig also, said the Doctor. 
In his wild state no animal is cleaner, hap- 
pier, or better able to make himself re- 
spected. Look at hiin when tamed, — I 



will not say in a brawn-case, for I am not 
speaking now of those cruelties which the 
Devil and Man between them have devised, 
■ — but look at him prowling at large about 
the purlieus of his sty. What a loathsome 
poor despised creature hath man made him ! 

Animal propter convivia natum.* 

Every cur thinks itself privileged to take 
him by the ear ; whereas if he were once 
more free in the woods, the stoutest mastiff 
or wolf-dog would not dare look him in the 
face. 

Yet he was fond of maintaining that the 
lower creation are capable of intellectual 
improvement. In Holland, indeed, he had 
seen the school for dogs, where poodles go 
through a regular Course of education, and 
where by this time perhaps the Lancasterian 
inventions have been introduced. But this 
was not what the Doctor contemplated. 
Making bears and elephants dance, teaching 
dogs to enact ballets, and horses to exhibit 
tricks at a fair, he considered as the freaks 
of man's capricious cruelty, and instances of 
that abuse of power which he so frequently 
exercises over his inferior creatures, and for 
which he must one day render an account, 
together with all those whose countenance 
of such spectacles affords the temptation to 
exhibit them.| 

In truth, the power which animals as well 
as men possess, of conforming themselves 
to new situations and forming new habits 
adapted to new circumstances, is proof of a 
capability of improvement. The wild dogs 
in the plains of La Plata burrow, because 
there is no security for them above ground 
against stronger beasts of prey. In the same 
country owls make their nests in the ground, 
because there are neither trees nor buildings 
to afford them concealment. A clergyman 
in Iceland by sowing angelica upon a Lake- 
island some miles from the sea, not only 
attracted gulls and wild ducks to breed 
there, but brought about an alliance between 
those birds, who are not upon neighbourly 



* Juvenal. 
t Cf. Jonah, iv. II.; Trov. xii. 10., with Ps. xxxvi. 6. 



THE DOCTOR. 



371 



terms elsewhere. Both perceived that the 
new plants afforded better shelter from wind \ 
and rain, than anything which they had seen 
before : there was room enough for both ; 
and the neighbourhood produced so much 
good will, that the gulLs protected the 
weaker birds not only against the ravens who 
are common enemies, but against another 
species of gull also which attacks the duck's 
nest. 

A change more remarkable than either of 
these is that which the common hearth- 
cricket has undergone in its very constitu- 
tion as well as in all its ways of life, since 
men built houses and inhabited cold cli- 
mates. 

The field-cricket in North America, which 
buries itself during the winter ten inches 
deep, and there lies torpid, began about an j 
hundred years ago to avail itself of the work i 
of man and take up its abode in the chiinnies. 
This insect even likes man for a bed-fellow, 
not with any such felonious intentions as 
are put in execution by smaller and viler 
vermin, but for the sake of warmth. The 
Swedish traveller, Kalm. says that when he 
and his companions were forced to sleep in 
uninhabited places, the crickets got into the 
folds of their garments, so that they were 
obliged to make some tarriance every morn- 
ing, and search carefully before they coidd 
get rid oi them. 

Two species of Swallows have domesti- 
cated themselves with man. We have only* 
that which builds under the eaves in Eng- 
land, but in North America they have both 
the house swallow and the chimney swallow ; 
the chiinnies not being made use of in sum- 
mer, they take possession, and keep it some- 
times in spite of the smoke, if the fire is not 
very great. Each feather in this bird's tail 
ends in a stiff point, like the end of an awl ; 
they apply the tail to the side of the wall, 
and it assists in keeping them up, while they 



* This looks like a mistake ; we have the chimney 
swallow also, the Hirundo rustica. It is the Martin, or 
the Hirundo urbica. that builds under the eaves. Besides 
these we have the Hirundo riparia, or Sand-Martin, and 
the Hirundo Apus. or Swift. I say it looks like a mistake, 
— but what follows makes it doubtful. 



hold on with their feet. " They make a 
great thundering noise all day long by flying 
up and down in the chimnies ; " now as the 
Indians had not so much as a hearth made 
of masonry, it is an obvious question, says 
Kalm, where did these swallows build before 
the Europeans came, and erected houses 
with chimnies ? Probably, it is supposed, 
in hollow trees, but certainly where they 
could ; and it is thus shown that they took 
the first opportunity of improving their own 
condition. 

But the Doctor dwelt with most pleasure 
on the intellectual capabilities of Dogs. 
There had been Dogs, he said, who, from the 
mere desire of following their master's ex- 
ample, had regularly frequented either the 
Church or the Meeting House ; others who 
attended the Host whenever they heard the 
bell which announced that it was carried 
abroad ; one who so modulated his voice as 
to accompany instrumental music through 
all the notes of a song ; and Leibnitz had 
actually succeeded in teaching one to speak. 
A dog may be made an epicure as well as 
his master. He acquires notions of rank 
and respectability ; understands that the 
aristocracy are his friends, regards the beg- 
gar as his rival for bones, and knows that 
whoever approaches in darkness is to be 
suspected for his intentions. A dog's phy- 
siognomical discernment never deceives him ; 
and this the Doctor was fond of observing, 
because wherever he was known the dogs 
came to return the greeting they expected. 
He has a sense of right and wrong as far as 
he has been taught ; a sense of honour and 
of duty, from which his master might some- 
times take a lesson ; and not unfrequently 
a depth and heroism of affection, which the 
Doctor verily believed would have its re- 
ward in a better world. John Wesley held 
the same opinion, which has been maintained 
also by his enemy, Augustus Topladv. and 
by his biographer, the laureated LL. D. or 
the El-el-deed Laureate. The Materialist, 
Dr. Dove would argue, must allow, upon 
his own principles, that a dog has as much 
soul as himself; and the Immaterial ist, if he 
would be consistent, must perceive that the 



372 



THE DOCTOK. 



life, and affections, and actions of an animal 
are as little to be explained as the mysteries 
of his own nature by mere materiality. The 
all- doubting, and therefore always half- 
believing Bayle has said that les actions des 
betes sont peut-etre un des plus profonds 
abimes sur quoi notre raison se puisse exercer. 

But here the Doctor acknowledged him- 
self to be in doubt. That another state of 
existence there must be for every creature 
wherein there is the breath of life he was 
verily persuaded.* To that conclusion the 
whole tenor of his philosophy led him, and 
what he entertained as a philosophical opin- 
ion, acquired from a religious feeling some- 
thing like the strength of faith. For if the 
whole of a brute animal's existence ended 
in this world, then it would follow that 
there are creatures born into it, for whom it 
had been better never to have been, than 
to endure the privations, pains, and wrongs 
and cruelties, inflicted upon them by human 
wickedness ; and he would not, could not, 
dared not believe that any, even the meanest 
of God's creatures, has been created to 
undergo more of evil than of good — (where 
no power of choice was given) — much less 
to suffer unmingled evil, during its allotted 
term of existence. Yet this must be, if 
there were no state for animals after death. 

A French speculator upon such things (I 
think it was P. Bougeant) felt this so strongly 
as to propose the strange hypothesis that 
fallen Angels underwent their punishment 
in the bodies of brutes, wherein they were 
incarnate and incarcerate as sentient, suffer- 
ing and conscious spirits. The Doctor's 
theory of progressive life was liable to no 
such objections. It reconciled all seeming 
evil in the lower creation to the great system 
of benevolence. But still there remained a 
difficulty. Men being what they are, there 
were cases in which it seemed that the ani- 
mal soul would be degraded instead of ad- 
vanced by entering into the human form. 
For example, the Doctor considered the 
beast to be very often a much worthier animal 
than the butcher ; the horse than the horse- 

* But see Eccles. c. iii. v. 21. 



jockey or the rider; the cock than the 
cock-fighter ; the young whale than the man 
who harpoons the reasonable and dutiful 
creature when it suffers itself to be struck 
rather than forsake its wounded mother. 

In all these cases indeed, a migration into 
some better variety of the civilised biped 
might be presumed, Archeus bringing good 
predispositions and an aptitude for improve- 
ment. But when he looked at a good dog — 
(in the best acceptation of the epithet), — 
a dog who has been humanised by human 
society, — who obeys and loves his master, 
pines during his illness, and dies upon his 
grave (the fact has frequently occurred), 
the Doctor declared his belief, and with a 
voice and look which told that he was speak- 
ing from his heart, that such a creature 
was ripe for a better world than this, and 
that in passing through the condition of 
humanity it might lose more than it could 
gain. 

The price of a dog might not, among the 
Jews, be brought into the House of the Lord, 
" for any vow," for it was an abomination to 
the Lord. This inhibition occurs in the 
same part of the Levitical law which enjoins 
the Israelites not to deliver up to his master 
the servant who had escaped from him : and 
it is in the spirit of that injunction, and 
of those other parts of the Law which are 
so beautifully and feelingly humane, that 
their very tenderness may be received in 
proof of their divine origin. It looks upon 
the dog as standing to his master in far other 
relation than his horse or his ox or his ass, — 
as a creature connected with him by the 
moral ties of companionship, and fidelity, and 
friendship. 



THE DOCTOR. 



373 



CHAPTER CXLVI. 

DANIEL DOVE VERSUS SENECA AND BEN 
JONSON. ORLANDO AND HIS HORSE AT 
RONCESVALLES. MR. BURCHELL. THE 

PRINCE OF ORANGE. THE LORD KEEPER 
GUILDFORD. REV. MR. HAWTATN. DR. 
THOMAS JACKSON. THE ELDER SCALIGER. 
EVELYN. AN ANONYMOUS AMERICAN. 

WALTER LANDOR, AND CAROLINE BOWLES. 

— Contented with an humble theme 
I pour my stream of panegyric down 
The vale of Nature, where it creeps and winds 
Among her lovely works with a secure 
And unambitious course, reflecting clear, 
If not the virtues, yet the worth of brutes. 

COWPER. 

The Doctor liked not Seneca when that 
philosopher deduced as a consequence from 
his definition of a benefit, that no gratitude 
can be due to beasts or senseless things : 
nam, qui beneficium mihi daturus est, he 
says, debet non tantum prodesse, sed velle. 
Ideo nee mutis animalibus quidqnam debetur ; 
et quam multos e periculo velocitas equi ra- 
puit! Nee arboribusj et quam multos a>stu 
laborantes ramorum opacitas texitl that is, — 
" for he who is about to render me a good 
service, not only ought to render it, but to 
intend it. Nothing, therefore, can be owed 
to dumb animals, and yet how many have 
the speed of a horse saved from danger ! 
Nor to trees, and yet how many when suffer- 
ing under the summer sun, have the thick 
boughs shaded ! " To the same tenor Ben 
Jonson speaks. "Nothing is a courtesy," 
he says, "unless it be meant us, and that 
friendly and lovingly. We owe no thanks 
to rivers that they carry our boats ; or winds 
that they be favouring, and fill our sails ; 
or meats that they be nourishing ; for these 
are what they are necessarily. Horses carry 
us, trees shade us, but they know it not." 

What ! our friend would say, do I owe 
thee nothing, Nobs, for the many times that 
thou hast carried me carefully and safely, 
through bad ways, in stormy weather, and 
in dark nights ? Do I owe thee nothing for 
thy painful services, thy unhesitating obe- 
dience, thy patient fidelity ? Do I owe thee | 



nothing for so often breaking thy rest, when 
thou couldest not know for what urgent 
cause mine had been broken, nor wherefore 
I was compelled by duty to put thee to thy 
speed ? Nobs, Nobs, if I did not acknowledge 
a debt of gratitude to thee, and discharge it 
as far as kind usage can tend to prolong 
thy days in comfort, I should deserve to be 
dropped as a colt in my next stage of ex- 
istence, to be broken in by a rough rider, 
and broken down at last by hard usage in a 
hackney coach. 

There is not a more touching passage in 
Italian poetry than that in which Pulci re- 
lates the death of Orlando's famous horse (his 
Nobs) in the fatal battle of Roncesvalles : 

Vegliantin come Orlando in terra scese, 

A pie del suo signor caduto e morto, 
E inginocchiossi e licenxia gli chiese, 

Quasi dicesse, io f ho condotto a porto. 
Orlando presto le braccia distese 

A V acqua, e cerca di dargli conforto, 
Ma poi eke pure il caval non si sente, 
Si condolea molto pietosamente. 

Vegliantin., tu m' hai servito tanto : 
Vegliantin, dov' e la tua prodezza ? 

Vegliantin, nessun si dia piu vanto ; 
Vegliantin, venuta e V ora sezza : 

Vegliantin, tu nC hai cresciuto il pianto ; 
Vegliantin, tu non vuoipiu cavexza : 

Vegliantin, s' io tifeci mai torto, 

Perdonami, tipriego, cosi morto. 

Dice Turpin, che mi par maraviglia, 
Che come Orlando perdonami disse, 

Quel caval parve ch' aprisse le ciglia, 
E col capo e co gesti acconsentisse.* 

A traveller in South Africa, Mr. Burchell, 
who was not less adventurous and perse- 
vering than considerate and benevolent, says 
that " nothing but the safety of the whole 
party, or the urgency of peculiar and in- 
evitable circumstances, could ever, during 
his whole journey, induce him to forget the 
consideration due to his cattle, always re- 
garded as faithful friends whose assistance 
was indispensable. There may be in the 
world," he says, " men who possess a nature 
so hard, as to think these sentiments mis- 
applied ; but I leave them to find, if they 
can, in the coldness of their own hearts, a 
satisfaction equal to that which I have en- 
joyed in paying a grateful attention to 



MORGANTE MAGGIORE. 



374 



THE DOCTOR. 



animals by whose services I have been so 
much benefited." 

The Prince of Orange would once have 
been surprised and taken in his tent by the 
Spaniards if his dog had not been more 
vigilant than his guards. Julian Romero 
planned and led this night attack upon the 
Prince's camp ; the camisado was given so 
suddenly, as well as with such resolution, 
" that the place of arms took no alarm, until 
their fellows," says Sir Roger Williams, 
" were running in with the enemy in their 
tail ; whereupon this dog, hearing a great 
noise, fell to scratching and crying, and 
withal leaped on the Prince's face, awaking 
him, being asleep, before any of his men." 
Two of his secretaries were killed hard by 
the tent, and " albeit the Prince lay in his 
arms, with a lacquey always holding one of 
his horses ready bridled, yet at the going 
out of his tent, with much ado he recovered 
his horse before the enemy arrived. One 
of his squires was slain taking horse pre- 
sently after him, and divers of his servants 
which could not recover theirs, were forced 
to escape amongst the guards of foot. Ever 
after until the Prince's dying day, he kept 
one of that dog's race, — so did many of his 
friends and followers. The most or all of 
these dogs were white little hounds, with 
crooked noses, called camuses." 

The Lord Keeper Guildford " bred all 
his horses, which came to the husbandry first 
colts, and from thence, as they were fit, were 
taken into his equipage ; and as by age or 
accident they grew unfit for that service, 
they were returned to the place from whence 
they came, and there expired." This is one 
of the best traits which Roger North has re- 
lated of his brother. 

" A person," says Mr. Hawtayn, who was 
a good kind-hearted clergyman of the 
Church of England, " that can be insensible 
to the fidelity and love which dumb animals 
often express, must be lower in nature than 
they." 

Grata e Natura in noi ; fin dalla cuna 
Gralitudine & impressa in uman core ; 
Ma d'un inslinto tal queslo i lo stile, 
Che lo seconda pill, chi e piu gentile.* 



Cahlo M\uia Maggi. 



The gentlest natures indeed are the best, 
and the best will be at the same time the 
most grateful and the most tender. " Even 
to behold a flourishing tree, first bereft of 
bark," says Dr. Jackson, " then of all the 
naked branches, yet standing, lastly the green 
trunk cut down and cast full of sap into the 
fire, would be an unpleasant spectacle to 
such as delighted in setting, pruning, or 
nourishing plants." 

The elder Scaliger, as Evelyn tells us, 
never could convince Erasmus but that trees 
feel the first stroke of the axe ; and Evelyn 
himself seems to have thought there was 
more probability in that opinion than he 
liked to allow. " The fall of a very aged oak," 
he says, " giving a crack like thunder, has 
been often heard at many miles' distance ; 
nor do I at any time hear the groans with- 
out some emotion and pity, constrained, as I 
too often am, to fell them with much reluc- 
tancy." Mr. Downes, in his Letters from the 
Continent, says, "There is at this time a 
forest near Bolsena so highly venerated for 
its antiquity, that none of the trees are ever 
cut."f 

One who, we are told, has since been 
honourably distinguished for metaphysical 
speculation, says, in a juvenile letter to the 
late American Bishop Hobart, " I sometimes 
converse a considerable time with a tree 
that in my infancy invited me to play under 
its cool and refreshing shade ; and the old 
dwelling in which I have spent the greater 
part of my life, though at present unoccupied 
and falling into ruin, raises within me such 
a musing train of ideas, that I know not 
whether it be pleasing or painful. Now 
whether it arise from an intimate association 
of ideas, or from some qualities in the in- 
sensible objects themselves to create an 
affection, I shall not pretend to determine ; 
but certain it is that the love we bear for 
objects incapable of making a return, seems 
always more disinterested, and frequently 
affords us more lasting happiness than even 
that which we feel toward rational crea- 
tures." 



t " Stat vetus, et multos inccedua silva per annos," 
&c. Ovid. 



THE DOCTOR. 



37; 



But never by any author, ancient or 
modern, in verse or prose, has the feeling 
which ascribes sentience as well as life to 
the vegetable world, been more deliciously 
described than by Walter Landor, when, 
speaking of sweet scents, he says, 

They bring me tales of youth, and tones of love ; 
And 'tis and ever was my wish and way 
To let all flowers live freely and all die, 
Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart, 
Among their kindred in their native place. 
I never pluck the rose ; the violet's head 
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank 
And not reproach'd me ; the ever sacred cup 
Of the pure lily hath between my hands 
Felt safe, unsoil'd, nor lost one grain of gold. 

These verses are indeed worthy of their 
author, when he is most worthy of himself. 
And yet Caroline Bowles's sweet lines will 
lose nothing by being read after them. 

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. 

How happily, how happily the flowers die away ! 
Oh ! could we but return to earth as easily as they ; 
Just live a life of sunshine, of innocence and bloom, 
Then drop without decrepitude or pain into the tomb. 

The gay and glorious creatures ! " they neither toil nor 

spin," 
Yet lo ! what goodly raiment they're all apparelled in ; 
No tears are on their beauty, but dewy gems more bright 
Than ever brow of Eastern Queen endiademed with light. 

The young rejoicing creatures ! their pleasures never pall, 
Nor lose in sweet contentment, because so free to all ; 
The dew, the shower, the sunshine ; the balmy blessed 

air, 
Spend nothing of their freshness, though all may freely 

share. 

The happy careless creatures ! of time they take no heed ; 
Nor weary of his creeping, nor tremble at his speed ; 
Nor sigh with sick impatience, and wish the light away; 
Nor when 'tis gone, cry dolefully, " Would God that it 
were day." 

And when their lives are over, they drop away to rest, 
Unconscious of the penal doom, on holy Nature's breast ; 
No pain have they in dying, no shrinking from decay. 
Oh ! could we but return to earth as easily as they ! 



CHAPTER CXLVII. 

OLD TREES. SHIPS. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. 
LIFE AND PASSIONS ASCRIBED TO INANI- 
MATE OBJECTS. FETISH WORSHIP. A LORD 
CHANCELLOR AND HIS GOOSE. 

Ce que fen ay escrit, c' 'est pour une curiosite, qui flair a 
possible d aucuns : et non possible aux autres. 

Brantome. 

" Consider," says Plutarch, in that precious 
volume of Philemon Holland's translating, 



which was one of the elder Daniel's trea- 
sures, and which the Doctor valued accord- 
ingly as a relic, " consider whether our 
forefathers have not permitted excessive 
ceremonies and observations in these cases, 
even for an exercise and studious medita- 
tion of thankfulness ; as namely, when they 
reverenced so highly the Oaks bearing acorns 
as they did. Certes the Athenians had one 
Fig-tree which they honoured by the name 
of the holy and sacred Fig-Tree ; and they 
expressly forbade to cut down the Mulberry- 
tree. For these ceremonies, I assure you, 
do not make men inclined to superstition as 
some think, but frame and train us to grati- 
tude and sociable humanity one toward 
another, when as we are thus reverently 
affected to such things as these that have no 
soul nor sense." But Plutarch knew that 
there were certain Trees to which something 
more than sense or soul was attributed by 
his countrymen. 

There was a tradition at Corinth which 
gave a different account of the death of Pen- 
theus from that in the Metamorphoses, 
where it is said that he was beholding the 
rites of the Bacchanals, from an open emi- 
nence surrounded by the woods, when his 
mother espied him, and in her madness led 
on the frantic women by whom he was torn 
to pieces. But the tradition at Corinth was 
that he climbed a tree for the purpose of 
seeing their mysteries, and was discovered 
amid its branches ; and that the Pythian 
Oracle afterwards enjoined the Corinthians 
to find out this Tree, and pay divine honours 
to it, as to a God. The special motive here 
was to impress the people with an awful re- 
spect for the Mysteries, none being felt for 
any part of the popular religion. 

Old Trees, without the aid of an Oracle to 
consecrate them, seem to have been some of 
the most natural objects of that contempla- 
tive and melancholy regard which easily 
passes into superstitious veneration. No 
longer ago than during the peace of Amiens 
a Frenchman * describing the woods on the 
banks of the Senegal, says, On eprouve 



376 



THE DOCTOR. 



un doux ravissement en contemplant ces nobles 
productions dune nature tranquille, libre el 
presque vierge ; car Id elle est encore re- 
spectee, et la vieillesse des beaux arbres y est 
pour ainsi dire Vobjel dun culte. Mon ame 
reconnoissante des emotions quelle ressentait, 
remerciait le Createur a" avoir fait naitre ces 
magnifiques vegetables sur un sol ou elles 
avaient pu croitre independantes et paisibles, 
et conserver ces formes originales et na'ives 
que Tart sait alterer, mais qu'il ne saura ja- 
mais imiter. — 

Quelques-uns des sites qiion rencontre eta- 
lent les attraits et les graces dune nature vir- 
ginale ; dans dautres, on admire ce que Fdge, 
de sa plus grande force, peut avoir de plus 
imposant et de plus auguste ; et a" antiques 
forets, dont les arbres ont une grosseur et une 
elevation qui attestent leur grand age, excitent 
une admiration melee de respect ; et ces prodi- 
gieux vegetaux encore verts, encore beaux, 
apres une vie de tant de siecles, semblent vou- 
loir nous apprendre, que dans ces contrees 
solitaires et fertiles, la nature vit toujours, et 
ne vieillit jamais. 

There are Tribes among the various races 
in the Philippines who are persuaded that the 
souls of their ancestors use old trees as their 
habitations, and therefore it is deemed a sa- 
crilege to cut one down. The Lezgis used 
to erect pillars under the boughs of decayed 
Oaks to support them as long as possible ; 
Murlooz is the name which they give to such 
spurs, or stay-pillars. 

The Rector of Manafon, Mr. Walter 
Davies, in his View of the Agriculture and 
Domestic Economy of North Wales, says, 
" Strangers have oftentimes listened with 
attention to Gentlemen of the County of 
Montgomery inquiring anxiously into the 
conduct and fate of the Windsor Castle, the 
Impregnable, the Brunswick, and other men 
of war, in some particular naval engage- 
ments ; and were led to imagine that they 
had some near and dear relations holding 
important commissions on board ; but upon 
further inquiry, found the ground of this 
curiosity to be no other than that such ships 
had been partly built of timber that had 
grown upon their estates ; as if the inani- 



mate material contained some magic virtue." 
The good Rector might have perceived in 
what Tie censures one indication of that at- 
tachment to our native soil, on which much 
of the security of states depends, much of the 
happiness of individuals, and not a little of 
their moral and intellectual character. 

But indeed the same cause which renders 
personification a common figure not only 
with poets and orators, but in all empas- 
sioned and even in ordinary speech, leads 
men frequently both to speak and act as if 
they ascribed life and consciousness to inani- 
mate things. 

When the Cid Campeador recovered from 
the Infantes of Carrion his two swords 
Colada and Tizona, " his whole frame," says 
the Chronicler, " rejoiced, and he smiled 
from his heart. And he laid them upon his 
lap and said, " Ah my swords, Colada and 
Tizona, truly may I say of you that you are 
the best swords in Spain ; and I won you, 
for I did not get you either by buying or by 
barter. I gave ye in keeping to the Infantes 
of Carrion that they might do honour to my 
daughters with ye. But ye were not for 
them ! They kept ye hungry, and did not 
feed ye with flesh as ye were wont to be fed. 
Well is it for you that ye have escaped 
that thraldom and are come again to my 
hands." 

The same strong figure occurs in the Ma- 
caronea, 

Gaude, Baldus ait, mi brande ! cibaberis j ecce 
Carnis et sanguis tibi prcesententur abunde. 

The Greek Captain who purchases a vessel 
which he is to command himself takes pos- 
session of it by a ceremony which is called 
espousing the ship ; on this occasion he sus- 
pends in it a laurel crown as a symbol of the 
marriage, and a bag of garlic as a preserva- 
tive against tempests. — In the year 1793, 
the ship Darius belonging to a Hindoo, or 
more probably, as may be inferred from the 
name, a Parsee owner, was run ashore off Ma- 
lacca by its Commander Captain Laughton, 
to save it from falling into the hands of a 
French Privateer. The Captain and his 
Officers, when they had thus disappointed 



THE DOCTOR. 



377 



the enemy, succeeded afterwards, by great 
exertion and great skill, in getting the vessel 
off, and brought it safely home to Bombay ; 
where the grateful owner, thinking the Ship 
itself was entitled to some signal mark of 
acknowledgment, treated it with a complete 
ablution, which was performed not with 
water, but with sugar and milk. — 

Our own sailors sometimes ascribe con- 
sciousness and sympathy to their ship. It 
is a common expression with them that 
"she behaves well;" and they persuade 
themselves that an English Man of War, by 
reason of its own good will, sails faster in 
pursuit of a Frenchman than at any other 
time. Poor old Captain Atkins was firmly 
possessed with this belief. On such occasions 
he would talk to his ship, as an Arabian to 
his horse, urge and intreat her to exert 
herself and put forth all her speed, and 
promise to reward her with a new coat of 
paint as soon as they should get into harbour. 

— "Who," says Fuller, "can without pity 
or pleasure behold that trusty vessel which 
carried Sir Francis Drake about the World ? " 

— So naturally are men led to impute 
something like vitality to so great a work of 
human formation, that persons connected 
with the shipping trade talk of the average 
life of a ship, which in the present state of 
our naval affairs is stated to be twenty-two 
years. — 

At one of the Philosophers' Yearly- 
Meetings it was said that every Engine-man 
had more or less pride in his engine, just as 
a sailor had in his ship. We heard then of 
the duty of an engine, and of how much 
virtue resides in a given quantity of coals. 
This is the language of the Mines, so easily 
does a figurative expression pass into common 
speech. The duty of an engine has been 
taken at raising 50 millions of cubic-feet of 
water one foot in an hour; some say 100 
millions, some 120; but the highest duty 
which the reporter had ascertained was 
90 millions, the lowest 70. And the virtue 
in a bushel of coals is sufficient to raise 125 
millions of cubic-feet of water one foot, 
being from 800 to 1070 at the cost of one 
farthing. No one will think this hard duty 



for the Engine, but all must allow it to be 
cheap virtue in the coals. 

This, however, is merely an example of the 
change which words undergo in the currency 
of speech as their original stamp is gradually 
effaced : what was metaphorical becomes 
trivial ; and this is one of the causes by 
which our language has been corrupted, 
more perhaps than any other, recourse being 
had both in prose and verse to forced and 
fantastic expressions as substitutes for the 
freshness and strength that have been lost. 
Strong feelings and strong fancy are liable 
to a more serious perversion. 

M. de Custine, writing from Mont Anvert, 
in the rhapsodical part of his travels, ex- 
claims, Qu'on ne me parle plus de nature 
morte ; on sent ici que la Divinite est partout, 
et que les pierres sont penetrees comme nous- 
memes dune puissance creatrice ! Quand on 
me dit que les rochers sont insensibles, je crois 
entendre un enfant soutenir que V aiguille dune 
montre ne marche pas, parce quil ne la voit 
pas se mouvoir. 

It is easy to perceive that feelings of this 
kind may imperceptibly have led to the 
worship of any remarkable natural objects, 
such as Trees, Forests, Mountains, Springs, 
and Rivers, as kindred feelings have led to 
the adoration of Images and of Relics. 
Court de Gebelin has even endeavoured to 
show that Fetish worship was not without 
some reasonable cause in its origin. The 
author of a treatise JDu Culte des Dieux 
Fetiches, ou Parallele de Vancienne Religion 
de VEgypte avec la Religion actuelle de la 
Nigritie, had asserted that this absurd super- 
stition originated in fear. But Court de 
Gebelin asks, " why not from gratitude and 
admiration as well ? Are not these passions 
as capable of making Gods as Fear ? Is not 
experience itself in accord with us here ? 
Do not all savage nations admit of Two 
Principles, the one Good, who ought not to 
be feared, the other Evil, to whom sacrifices 
must be offered in order to avert tlur mis- 
chief in which he delights ? If fear makes 
them address their homage to the one, it hhs 
no part in the feeling which produces it 
toward the other. Which then of these 



378 



THE DOCTOR. 



sentiments has led to Fetish worship ? Not 
fear, considered as the sentiment which 
moves us to do nothing that might displease 
a Being whom we regard as our superior, 
and as the source of our happiness ; for 
Fetishes cannot be regarded in this light. 
Will it then be fear considered as the 
sentiment of our own weakness, filling us 
with terror, and forcing us to seek the pro- 
tection of a Being more powerful than our- 
selves and capable of protecting us ? But 
how could any such fear have led to the 
worship of Fetishes ? How could a Savage, 
seized with terror, ever have believed that 
an onion, a stone, a flower, water, a tree, a 
mouse, a cat, &c. could be his protector and 
secure him against all that he apprehended ? 
I know that fear does not reason, but it is 
not to be understood in this sense ; we fre- 
quently fear something without knowing 
why ; but when we address ourselves to a 
Protector we always know why ; it is in the 
persuasion that he can defend us, a per- 
suasion which has always a foundation, — a 
basis. But in Fetish worship where is the 
motive ? What is there to afford confidence 
against alarm ? Who has said that the 
Fetish is superior to man ? — It is impossible 
to conceive any one so blockish, so stupid, 
so terrified as to imagine that inanimate 
things like these are infinitely above him, 
much more powerful than himself, in a state 
to understand his wants, his evils, his fears, 
his sufferings, and to deliver him from all in 
acknowledgment of the offering which he 
makes to them. 

" Moreover, the Fetish is not used till it 
has been consecrated by the Priest : this 
proves an opinion in the savage, that the 
Fetish of itself cannot protect him ; but that 
he may be made by other influence to do so, 
and that influence is exercised by the Priest 
in the act of consecration." Court de Ge- 
belin argues therefore that this superstition 
arose from the primary belief in a Supreme 
Being on whom we are altogether dependent, 
who was to be honoured by certain cere- 
monies directed by the Priest, and who was 
to be propitiated by revering these things 
whereby it had pleased him to benefit man- 



kind ; and by consecrating some of them as 
pledges of future benefits to be received 
from him, and of his presence among his 
Creatures who serve him and implore his 
protection. But in process of time it was 
forgotten that this was only a symbolic 
allegory of the Divine Presence, and igno- 
rant nations who could no longer give a 
reason for their belief, continued the prac- 
tice from imitation and habit. 

This is ascribing too much to system, too 
little to superstition and priestcraft. The 
name Fetish, though used by the Negroes 
themselves, is known to be a corrupt appli- 
cation of the Portuguese word for Witch- 
craft, feitiqo ; the vernacular name is Bossum 
or Bossifoe. . Upon the Gold Coast every 
nation has its own, every village, every 
family, and every individual. A great hill, 
a rock any way remarkable for its size or 
shape, or a large Tree, is generally the 
national Fetish. The king's is usually the 
largest tree in his country. They who 
choose or change one take the first thing 
they happen to see, however worthless. A 
stick, a stone, the bone of a beast, bird or 
fish, unless the worshipper takes a fancy for 
something of better appearance, and chooses 
a horn or the tooth of some large animal. 
The ceremony of consecration he performs 
himself, assembling his family, washing the 
new object of his devotion, and sprinkling 
them with the water. He has thus a house- 
hold or personal God in which he has as 
much faith as the Papist in his relics, and 
with as much reason. Barbot says that 
some of the Europeans on that coast not 
only encouraged their slaves in this super- 
stition, but believed in it, and practised it 
themselves. 

Thus low has man sunk in his fall. The 
debasement began with the worship of the 
Heavenly Bodies. When he had once de- 
parted from that of his Creator, his religious 
instinct became more and more corrupted, 
till at length no object was too vile for his 
adoration ; as in a certain state of disease 
the appetite turns from wholesome food, 
and longs for what would at other times be 
loathsome. 



THE DOCTOR. 



379 



The Negro Fetishes are just such objects 
as, according to the French Jesuits, the 
Devil used to present to the Canadian In- 
dians, to bring them good luck in fishing, 
hunting, gaming, and such traffic as they 
carried on. This may probably mean that 
they dreamt of such things ; for in dreams 
many superstitions have originated, and 
great use has been made of them in Priest- 
craft. 

The same kind of superstition has ap- 
peared in different ages and in different 
parts of the World, among the most civi- 
lised nations and the rudest savages *, and 
among the educated as well as the ignorant. 
The belief in Omens prevails among us still, 
and will long continue to prevail, notwith- 
standing national schools, cheap literature 
and Societies for promoting knowledge. 

A late Lord Chancellor used to travel 
with a Goose in his carriage, and consult it 
on all occasions ; whether according to the 
rules of Roman augury I know not, nor 
whether he decided causes by it ; but the 
causes might have been as well decided 
if he did. The Goose was his Fetish. It 
was not Lord Brougham, — Lord Brougham 
was his own Goose while he held the Seals ; 
but it was the only Lord Chancellor in our 
times who resembled him in extraordinary 
genius, and as extraordinary an unfitness for 
his office. One of the most distinguished 
men of the age, who has left a reputation 
which will be as lasting as it is great, was, 
when a boy, in constant fear of a very able 
but unmerciful schoolmaster ; and in the 
state of mind which that constant fear pro- 
duced he fixed upon a great Spider for his 
Fetish, and used every day to pray to it that 
he might not be flogged. 



* Omens from birds are taken in the island of Borneo 
with as much faith as they were amongst the Greeks 
or Romans. The Rajah Brooke says, " the Singe Dyacks, 
like the others, attend to the warning of birds of various 
sorts, some birds being in more repute than others," 
&c. &c. — The Expedition to Borneo of H. M. S. Dido, 
vol. i. p. 232. 



CHAPTER EXTRAORDINARY. 

PROCEEDINGS AT A BOOK CLUB. THE AU- 
THOR ACCUSED OF " LESE DELICATESSE," 
OR WHAT IS CALLED AT COURT " TUM-TI- 
TEE." HE UTTERS A MYSTERIOUS EX- 
CLAMATION, AND INDIGNANTLY VINDI- 
CATES HIMSELF. 

Rem profecto mirabilem, longeque stupendam, rebusque 
veris veriorem describo. Hieronymus Radiolensis. 

A circumstance has come to my knowledge 
so remarkable in itself and affecting me so 
deeply, that on both accounts I feel it neces- 
sary to publish a Chapter Extraordinary on 
the occasion. 

There is a certain Book- Club, or Society, 
(no matter where) in which the Volumes of 
this Opus have been regularly ordered as 
they appeared, and regularly perused, to the 
edification of many Readers, the admiration 
of more, and- the amusement of all. But I 
am credibly informed that an alarm was 
excited in that select literary Circle by a 
Chapter in the fourth volume f , and that the 
said volume was not allowed to circulate by 
the Managing Directors or Committee, of 
the said Book Club, till the said Chapter 
had been exscinded, that is to say, cut out. 
Aballiboozo ! 

When a poor wretch fell into the hands 
of that hellish Tribunal which called itself 
the Holy Office, the Inquisitors always 
began by requiring him to tell them what 
he was accused of; and they persisted in 
this course of examination time after time, 
till by promises and threats, long suspense, 
and solitary confinement, with the occasional 
aid of the rack, they had extorted from him 
matter of accusation against himself and as 
many of his friends, relations and acquaint- 
ances, as they could induce, or compel, or en- 
trap him to name. Even under such a judicial 
process I should never have been able to dis- 
cover what Chapter in this Opus could have 
been thought to require an operation, which, 
having the fear of the expurgatorial scissars 
before my eyes, I must not venture to men- 

t See suprii, p. 339., of this edition. 



380 



THE DOCTOE. 



tion here, by its appropriate name, though 
it is a Dictionary word, and the use of it is 
in this sense strictly technical. My ignor- 
ance, however, has been enlightened, and I 
have been made acquainted with what in 
the simplicity of my heart I never could 
have surmised. 

The Chapter condemned to that operation, 
the chapter which has been not bisked, but 
semiramised, is the Hundred and thirty-sixth 
Chapter, concerning the Pedigree and Birth 
of Nobs ; but whether the passage which 
called forth this severe sentence from the 
Censors were that in which Moses and Miss 
Jenny, the Sire and Dam of Nobs, are 
described as meeting in a field near Knaves- 
mire Heath, like Dido dux et Trojanus ; or 
whether it were the part where the con- 
sequences of that meeting are related as 
coming unexpectedly to light, in a barn be- 
tween Doncaster and Adwick-in-the- Street, 
my informant was not certain. 

From another quarter I have been assured, 
that the main count in the indictment was 
upon the story of Le Cheval de Pierre, et 
les Officiers Municipaux. This I am told 
it was which alarmed the Literary Sen- 
sitives. The sound of the footsteps of the 
Marble Statue in Don Juan upon the boards 
of the stage never produced a more awful 
sense of astonishment in that part of the 
audience who were fixed all eyes and ears 
upon its entrance, than this Cheval de Pierre 
produced among the Board of Expurgators. 
After this I ought not to be surprised if the 
Publishers were to be served with a notice 
that the Lord Mayors of London and York, 
and the simple Mayors of every corporate 
town in England, reformed or unreformed, 
having a Magistrate so called, whether gentle 
or simple, had instituted proceedings against 
them for Scandalum Magnatum. This, how- 
ever, I have the satisfaction of knowing, 
that Miss Graveairs smiled in good humour 
when she heard the Chapter read ; the only 
serious look put on was at the quotation 
from Pindar, as if suspecting there might 
be something in the Greek which was not 
perfectly consistent with English notions of 
propriety 



innocent than that Greek. And, even after 
what has passed, she would agree with me 
that this Chapter, which made the Elders 
blush, is one which Susanna would have read 
as innocently as it was written. 

Nevertheless I say, O tempora ! O mores ! 
uttering the words exultantly, not in expro- 
bration. I congratulate the age and the 
British Public. I congratulate my Country- 
men, my Country-women, and my Country- 
children. I congratulate Young England 
upon the March of Modesty ! How delight- 
ful that it should thus keep pace with the 
March of Intellect ! Redeunt Saturnia regno.. 
In these days Liberality and Morality ap- 
pear hand -in-hand upon the stage like the 
Two Kings of Brentford ; and Piety and 
Profit have kissed each other at religious 
Meetings. 

We have already a Family Shakespeare ; 
and it cannot be supposed that the hint will 
always be disregarded which Mr. Matthew 
Gregory Lewis introduced so properly some 
forty years ago into his then celebrated 
novel called the Monk, for a Family Bible, 
upon the new plan of removing all passages 
that could be thought objectionable on the 
score of indelicacy. We may look to see 
Mr. Thomas Moore's Poems adapted to the 
use of Families ; and Mr. Murray cannot 
do less than provide the Public with a Family 
Byron. 

It may, therefore, be matter of grave con- 
sideration for me whether, under all circum- 
stances, it would not be highly expedient to 
prepare a semiramised edition of this Opus, 
under the Title of the Family Doctor. It 
may be matter for consultation with my 
Publishers, to whose opinion, as founded 
on experience and a knowledge of the public 
taste, an author will generally find it pru- 
dent to defer. Neither by them or me 
would it be regarded as an objection that ' 
the title might mislead many persons, who, 
supposing that the " Family Doctor" and the 
" Family Physician " meant the same kind 
of Book, would order the Opus, under a 
mistaken notion that it was a new and con- 
sequently improved work, similar to Dr. 
Buchan's, formerly well known as a stock- 



THE DOCTOR. 



381 



book. This would be no objection I say, 
but, on the contrary, an advantage to all 
parties. For a book which directs people 
how to physic themselves ought to be en- 
titled Every Man his own Poisoner, because 
it cannot possibly teach them how to dis- 
criminate between the resemblant symptoms 
of different diseases. Twice fortunate, there- 
fore, would that person have reason to think 
him or herself, who, under such a misappre- 
hension of its title, should purchase the 
Family Doctor ! 

Ludicrous mistakes of this kind have some- 
times happened. Mr. Haslewood's elaborate 
and expensive edition of the Mirror for 
Magistrates was ordered by a gentleman in 
the Commission of the Peace, not a hundred 
miles from the Metropolis ; he paid for it 
the full price, and his unfortunate Worship 
was fain to take what little he could get for 
it from his Bookseller under such circum- 
stances, rather than endure the mortification 
of seeing it in his book-case.* A lady who 
had a true taste as well as a great liking for 
poetry, ordered an Essay on Burns for the 
Beading Society of which she was a mem- 
ber. She opened the book expecting to 
derive much pleasure from a critical disquisi- 
tion on the genius of one of her favourite 
Poets ; and behold it proved to be an Essay 
on Burns and Scalds by a Surgeon ! 

But in this case it would prove an Agree- 
able Surprise instead of a disappointment; 
and if the intention had been to mislead, 
and thereby entrap the purchaser, the end 
might be pleaded, according to the con- 
venient morality of the age, as justifying 
the means. Lucky indeed were the patient 
who sending for Morison's Pills should be 
supplied with Tom D'Urfey's in their stead ; 
happy man would be his dole who when he 
had made up his mind in dismal resolution 
to a dreadful course of drastics, should find 
that gelastics had been substituted, not of 
the Sardonian kind, but composed of the 
most innocent and salutiferous ingredients, 



* Whoever purchased Southey's copy will find this 
anecdote in his own handwriting, on the fly leaf. I tran- 
scribed it from thence into my own copy many years ago. 



gently and genially alterative, mild in their 
operation, and safe and sure in their effects. 
On that score, therefore, there could be no 
objection to the publication of a Family 
Doctor. But believing as I believe, or 
rather, knowing as I know, that the Book 
is free from any such offence, 

— mal cupiera alii 
tal aspid en tales flores j t 

maintaining that it is in this point imma- 
culate, which I will maintain as confidently 
because as justly, and as publicly were it 
needful, (only that my bever must be closed) 
as Mr. Dymock at the approaching Corona- 
tion will maintain Queen Victoria's right to 
the Crown of these Kingdoms (God save the 
Queen !), — it is impossible that I should 
consent to a measure which must seem like 
acknowledging the justice of a charge at 
once ridiculous and wrongful. 

— I must not disesteem 
My rightful cause for being accused, nor must 
Forsake myself, tho I were left of all. 
Fear cannot make my innocence unjust 
Unto itself, to give my Truth the fall.J 

The most axiomatic of English Poets has 
said 

Do not forsake yourself; for they that do, 
Offend and teach the world to leave them too. 

Of the Book itself, — (the Opus) — I can 
say truly, as South said of the Sermon which 
he preached in 1662 before the Lord Mayor 
and Aldermen of the city of London, " the 
subject is inoffensive, harmless, and innocent 
as the state of innocence itself;" and of the 
particular chapter, that it is " suitable to the 
immediate design, and to the genius of the 
book." And in saying this I call to mind 
the words of Nicolas Perez, el Setabiense; 
— el amor propio es nuestro enemigo mas 
perjudicial; es dijicil acahar con el, por lo 
mismo un sabio le compara a la camisa, que 
es el ultimo de los vestidos que nos quitamos. 

Bear witness incorrupta Fides, nudaque 
Veritas! that I seek not to cover myself 
with what the Spaniard calls Self-Love's 
last Shirt ; for I am no more guilty of Lese 
Modestie than of Lese Majeste. If there were 
a Court of Delicacy as there has been a 



t Lope de Vega. 



X Daniel. 



382 



THE DOCTOR. 



Court of Honour, a Court Modest as there 
is a Court Martial, I would demand a trial, 
and in my turn arraign my arraigners, 

Torque en este limpio trigo 
Siembren xixana y estrago.* 

It is said in the very interesting and 
affecting Memoir of Mr. Smedley's Life that 
he had projected with Mr. Murray " a cas- 
tigated edition of the Faery Queen." He was 
surprised, says the biographer, " to find how 
many passages there were in this the most 
favourite poem of his youth, which a father's 
acuter vision and more sensitive delicacy 
discovered to be unfit for the eyes of his 
daughters." It appears, too, that he had 
actually performed the task ; but that " Mr. 
Murray altered his opinion as to the ex- 
pediency of the publication, and he found to 
his annoyance that his time had been em- 
ployed to no purpose." 

Poor Smedley speaks thus of the project 
in one of his letters. " I am making the 
Faery Queen a poem which may be admitted 
into family reading, by certain omissions, by 
modernising the spelling and by appending, 
where necessary, brief glossarial foot-notes. 
I read Spenser so very early and made him 
so much a part of the furniture of my mind, 
that until I had my attention drawn to him 
afresh I had utterly forgotten how much he 
required the pruning-knife, how utterly 
impossible it is that he should be read aloud : 
and I cannot but think that when fitted for 
general perusal, he will become more at- 
tractive by a new coat and waistcoat. If 
we were to print Shakespeare, and Beaumont 
and Fletcher, or even Milton, literatim from 
the first editions, the spelling would deter 
many readers. Strange to say, when Southey 
was asked some time ago whether he would 
undertake the task, he said, 'No, I shall print 
every word of him ! ' And he has done so in 
a single volume. Can he have daughters ? 
Or any who, like my Mary, delight in such 
portions as they are permitted to open ? " 

Did Southey say so ? — Why then, well 
said Southey! And it is very like him; for 
he is not given to speak, as his friends the 



* Lope de Vega. 



Portuguese say, enfarinhadamente — which 
is, being interpreted, mealy-mouthedly. In- 
deed his moral and intellectual constitution 
must be much feebler than I suppose it to 
be, if his daughters are not "permitted to 
open" any book in his library. He must 
have been as much astonished to hear that 
the Faery Queen was unfit for their perusal 
as he could have been when he saw it 
gravely asserted by an American Professor, 
Critic and Doctor of Divinity, that his Life 
of Wesley was composed in imitation of the 
Iliad ! 

Scott felt like Southey upon this subject, 
and declared that he would never deal with 
Dryden as Saturn dealt with his father 
Uranus. Upon such publications as the 
Family Shakespeare he says, — "I do not 
say but that it may be very proper to select 
correct passages for the use of Boarding- 
Schools and Colleges, being sensible no 
improper ideas can be suggested in these 
seminaries unless they are introduced or 
smuggled under the beards and ruffs of our 
old dramatists. But in making an edition 
of a Man of Genius's Works for libraries and 
collections, (and such I conceive a complete 
edition of Dryden to be), I must give my 
author as I find him, and will not tear out 
the page even to get rid of the blot, little as 
I like it. Are not the pages of Swift, and 
even of Pope, larded with indecency and 
often of the most disgusting kind, and do 
we not see them upon all shelves, and 
dressing-tables and in all boudoirs ? Is not 
Prior the most indecent of tale-tellers, not 
even excepting La Fontaine ? and how often 
do we see his works in female hands. In 
fact, it is not passages of ludicrous indelicacy 
that corrupt the manners of a people ; it is 
the sonnets which a prurient genius like 
Master Little sings virginibus puerisque, — 
it is the sentimental slang, half lewd, half 
methodistic, that debauches the understand- 
ing, inflames the sleeping passions, and pre- 
pares the reader to give way as soon as a 
tempter appears." 

How could Mr. Smedley have allowed 
himself to be persuaded that a poem like the 
Faery Queen which he had made from early 



THE DOCTOR. 



383 



youth " a part of the furniture of his own 
mind," should be more injurious to others 
than it had proved to himself? It is one of 
the books which Wesley in the plan which 
he drew up for those young Methodists who 
designed to go through a course of acade- 
mical learning, recommended to students of 
the second year. Mr. Todd has noticed this 
in support of his own just estimate of this 
admirable poet. " If," says he, " our con- 
ceptions of Spenser's mind may be taken 
from his poetry, I shall not hesitate to pro- 
nounce him entitled to our warmest appro- 
bation and regard for his gentle disposition, 
for his friendly and grateful conduct, for 
his humility, for his exquisite tenderness, 
and above all for his piety and morality. 
To these amiable points a fastidious reader 
may perhaps object some petty inadver- 
tencies ; yet can he never be so ungrateful 
as to deny the efficacy which Spenser's 
general character gives to his writings, — as 
to deny that Truth and Virtue are graceful 
and attractive, when the road to them is 
pointed out by such a guide. Let it always 
be remembered that this excellent Poet in- 
culcates those impressive lessons, by attend- 
ing to which the gay and the thoughtless 
may be timely induced to treat with scorn 
and indignation the allurements of intem- 
perance and illicit pleasure." 

When Izaak Walton published " Thealma 
and Clearchus," a pastoral history written 
long since in smooth and easy verse by John 
Chalkhill, Esq., he described him in the Title 
page as "An Acquaintant and Friend of 
Edmund Spenser." He says of him " that 
he was in his time a man generally known 
and as well beloved, for he was humble and 
obliging in his behaviour, a gentleman, a 
scholar, very innocent and prudent, and in- 
deed his whole life was useful, quiet, and 
virtuous." Yet to have been the friend of 
Edmund Spenser was considered by the 
biographer of Hooker and Donne and Bishop 
Sanderson and George Herbert, as an 
honourable designation for this good man, a 
testimonial of his worth to posterity, long 
after both Chalkhill and Spenser had been 
called to their reward. 



It was well that Mr. Murray gave up the 
project of a Family Faery Queen. Mr. 
Smedley when employed upon such a task 
ought to have felt that he was drawing upon 
himself something like Ham's malediction. 

With regard to another part of these pro- 
jected emendations there is a fatal objection. 
There is no good reason why the capri- 
cious spelling of the early editions should 
be scrupulously and pedantically observed in 
Shakespeare, Milton, or any author of their 
respective times; — no reason why words 
which retain the same acceptation, and are 
still pronounced in the same manner, should 
not now be spelt according to the received 
orthography. Spenser is the only author 
for whom an exception must be made from 
this obvious rule. Malone was wrong when 
he asserted that the language of the Faery 
Queen was that of the age in which Spenser 
lived ; and Ben Jonson was not right when, 
saying that Spenser writ no language, he 
assigned as the cause for this, his " affecting 
the Ancients." The diction, or rather dialect, 
which Spenser constructed, was neither like 
that of his predecessors, nor of his contem- 
poraries. Camoens also wrote a language of 
his own, and thereby did for the Portuguese 
tongue the same service which was rendered 
to ours by the translators of the Bible. But 
the Portuguese Poet, who more than any 
other of his countrymen refined a language 
which was then in the process of refining, 
attempted to introduce nothing but what 
entirely accorded with its character, and 
with the spirit of that improvement which 
was gradually taking place : whereas both the 
innovations and renovations which Spenser 
introduced were against the grain. Yet 
such is the magic of his verse, that the Faery 
Queen if modernised, even though the struc- 
ture of its stanza — (the best which has ever 
been constructed) — were preserved, would 
lose as much as Homer loses in the best 
translation. 

Mr. Wordsworth has modernised one of 
Chaucer's Poems with " no farther deviation 
from the original than was necessary for the 
fluent reading and instant understanding of 
the author, supplying the place of whatever 



384 



THE DOCTOR. 



he removed as obsolete with as little incon- 
gruity as possible." This he has done very 
skilfully. But the same skill could not be 
exercised upon the Faery Queen with the 
same success. The peculiarities of language 
there are systematic ; to modernise the spell- 
ing, as Mr. Smedley proposed, would in very 
many cases interfere with the rhyme, and 
thus dislocate the stanza. The task, there- 
fore, would have been extremely difficult ; it 
would have been useless, because no one 
who is capable of enjoying that delightful 
Poem ever found any difficulty in under- 
standing its dialect, and it would have been 
mischievous, because it would have destroyed 
the character of the Poem. And this in the 
expectation of rendering Spenser more 
attractive by a new coat and waistcoat ! 
Spenser of whom it has been truly said that 
more poets have sprung from him than from 
all other English writers ; Spenser by whom 
Cowley tells us he was made a Poet; of 
whom Milton acknowledged to Dryden that 
he was his original ; and in whom Pope says 
" there is something that pleases one as 
strongly in one's old age as it did in one's 
youth. I read the Faery Queen," he pro- 
ceeds, "when I was about twelve, with a 
vast deal of delight, and I think it gave 
me as much when I read it over about a 
year oa two ago." 

No, a new suit of clothes would not render 
Spenser more attractive, not even if to a coat 
and waistcoat of Stultz's fabric, white satin 
pantaloons were added, such as the hand- 
somest and best dressed of modern patriots, 
novelists and poets was known by on the 
public walk of a fashionable watering-place. 

Save us from the Ultradelicates and the 
Extrasuperfines ! for if these are to prevail — 

What can it avail 

To drive forth a snail 

Or to make a sail 

Of a herring's tail ? 

To rhyme or to rail, 

To write or to indite 

Either for delight 

Or else for despite ? 

Or books to compile 

Of divers manner of style, 

Vice to revile, 

And sin to exile, 

To teach or to preach 

As reason will reach ? 



So said Skelton three centuries ago, and 
for myself I say once more what Skelton 
would have been well pleased to have heard 
said by any one. 

Aballiboozo ! 

Dear Author, says one of those Readers 
who deserve to be pleased, and whom, there- 
fore, there is a pleasure in pleasing, dear 
Author ! may I not ask wherefore you have 
twice in this Chapter Extraordinary given 
us part of your long mysterious word, and 
only part, instead of setting it before us at 
full length ? 

Dear Reader ! you may ; and you may 
also ask unblamed whether a part of the 
word is not as good, that is to say, as sig- 
nificant, as the whole ? You shall have a 
full and satisfactory answer in the next 
Chapter. 



CHAPTER CXLVIII. 

WHEREIN A SUBSTITUTE FOB OATHS, AND 
OTHER PASSIONATE INTERJECTIONS IS EX- 
EMPLIFIED. 

What have we to do with the times ? We cannot cure 

'em : 
Let them go on : when they are swoln with surfeits 
They'll burst and stink : Then all the world shall smell 

'em. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Once more, Reader, I commence with 

Aballiboozobanganorribo ; 
Do not suppose that I am about to let thee 
into the mysteries of that great decasyllabon ! 
Questo e bene uno de'piuprofondi segreti cK 
abbia tutto il mondo, e quasi nessuno il sa ; e 
sia certo che ad altri not direi giammai.* No, 
Reader! not if I were before the High 
Court of Parliament, and the House of 
Commons should exert all its inquisitorial 
and tyrannical powers to extort it from 
me, would I let the secret pass that epicog 
oSovtojv within which my little trowel of 
speech has learned not to be an unruly mem- 
ber. I would behave as magnanimously as 
Sir Abraham Bradley King did upon a not- 



* BlBBIENA. 



THE DOCTOR. 



385 



altogether dissimilar occasion. Sir Abraham 
might have said of his secret as Henry 
More says of the Epicurean Philosophy, 
" Truly it is a very venerable secret ; and 
not to be uttered or communicated but by 
some old Silenus lying in his obscure grot 
or cave ; nor that neither but upon due cir- 
cumstances, and in a right humour, when 
one may find him with his veins swelled out 
wirh wine, and his garland fallen off from 
his head through his heedless drowsiness. 
Then if some young Chromis and Mnasylus, 
especially assisted by a fail' and forward 
iEgle, that by way of a love-frolic will leave 
the tracts of their fingers in the blood of 
mulberries on the temples and forehead of 
this aged Satyr, while he sleeps dog-sleep, 
and will not seem to see for fear he forfeit 
the pleasure of his feeling, — then I say, if 
these young lads importune him enough, — 
he will utter it in a higher strain than ever." 

But by no such means can the knowledge 
of my profounder mystery be attained. I 
will tell thee, however, good Reader, that the 
word itself, apart from all considerations of 
its mystical meaning, serves me for the same 
purpose to which the old tune of Lillibur- 
lero was applied by our dear Uncle Toby, — 
our dear Uncle I say, for is he not your 
Uncle Toby, gentle Reader ? yours as well 
as mine, if you are worthy to hold him in 
such relationship ; and so by that relation- 
ship, you and I are Cousins. 

The Doctor had learned something from 
his Uncle William, which he used to the 
same effect, though not in the same way. 
William Dove in that capacious memory of 
his, into which everything that he heard was 
stored, and out of which nothing was lost, 
had among the fragments of old songs and 
ballads which he had picked up, sundry 
burdens or choruses, as unmeaning as those 
which O'Keefe used to introduce in some of 
the songs of his farces, always with good 
farcical effect. Uncle Toby's favourite was 
one of them ; 

Lilli burlero bullen a-la ; 
Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la ; 
Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la. 

Without knowing that it was designed as 



an insult to the French, he used to say and 
sing in corrupted form, 

Suum, mun, hey no nonny, 
Dolphin, my boy, my boy, 
Sessa, let him trot by. 

Another was that from the ballad in honour 
of the Earl of Essex, called Queen Eliza- 
beth's Champion, which Johnson quoted in 
the Isle of Sky ; and Johnson is not the only 
omnivorous reader in whose memory it has 
stuck ; 

Raderer too, tandaro tee 
Radarer, tandorer, tan do ree. 

And he had treasured up the elder frag- 
ment, 

Martin Swart and his men. 

Sodledum, sodledum, 
Martin Swart and his men, 

Sodledum bell, 
With hey tioly loly lo, whip here Jack, 
Alumbeck, sodledum, syllerum ben, 
Martin Sw r art and his merry men. 

He had also this relic of the same age, relat- 
ing as it seems to some now forgotten hero 

of the strolling minstrels, 

Rory-bull Joyse, 
Rumble down, tumble down, hey, go now now. 

Here is another, for he uttered these things 
" as he had eaten ballads." 

A story strange I will you tell, 

But not so strange as true, 
Of a woman that danced upon the rope, 
And so did her husband too : 
With a dildo, dildo, dildo, 
With a dildo, dildo, dee. 

And he had one of Irish growth, which he 



to this last for the 



sometimes tacked on 
rhyme's sake 

Callino, callino, 
Callino. castore me, 

Era ee, Era ee 
Loo loo, loo loo lee. 

All these were favourites with little Daniel; 
and so especially for his name's sake, was 

My juggy, my puggy, my honey, my coney, 
My deary, my love, my dove. 

There was another with wdiich and the 
Dovean use thereof, it is proper that the 
reader should now be made acquainted, for 
it would otherwise require explanation, 
when he meets with it hereafter. This was 
the one which, when William Dove trotted 
little Daniel upon his knee, he used to sine 



386 



THE DOCTOR. 



more frequently than any other, because the 
child, then in the most winning stage of 
childhood, liked it best of all, and it went to 
the tune of " God save great George our 
King," as happily as if that noble tune had 
been composed for it. The words were, 

Fa la la lerridan, 
Dan dan dan derridan, 
Dan dan dan derridan, 
Derridan dee. 

To what old ditty they formed the burden I 
know not, nor whether it may be (as I sus- 
pect) a different reading of " Down, down, 
down derry down," which the most learned 
of living Welshmen supposes to be a Druidi- 
cal fragment : but the frequent repetition of 
his own abbreviated name seldom failed to 
excite in the child one of those hearty and 
happy laughs which are never enjoyed after 
, that blessed age has past. Most of us have 
frequently laughed till our sides ached, and 
many not unfrequently it may be feared 
laugh till their hearts ache. But the pure, 
fresh, unalloyed innocent laughter of chil- 
dren, in those moods when they 

— seem like birds, created to be glad,* — 

that laughter belongs to them and to them 
only. We see it and understand it in them; 
but nothing can excite more than a faint re- 
semblance of it in ourselves. 

The Doctor made use of this burden when 
anything was told him which excited his 
wonder, or his incredulity ; and the degree 
in which either was called forth might be 
accurately determined by his manner of 
using it. He expressed mirthful surprise, 
or contemptuous disbelief by the first line, 
and the tune proceeded in proportion as the 
surprise was greater, or the matter of more 
moment. But when anything greatly asto- 
nished him, he went through the whole, and 
gave it in a base voice when his meaning was 
to be most emphatic. 

In imitation, no doubt, of my venerable 
friend in this his practice, though perhaps at 
first half unconscious of the imitation, I have 
been accustomed to use the great decasylla- 
bon, with which this present Chapter com- 



GONDIBERT. 



mences, and with which it is to end. In my 
use of it, however, I observe this caution, — 
that I do not suffer myself to be carried away 
by an undue partiality, so as to employ it in 
disregard of ejaculatory propriety or to the 
exclusion of exclamations which the occasion 
may render more fitting. Thus if I were to 
meet with Hercules, Mehercule would doubt- 
less be the interjection which I should pre- 
fer ; and when I saw the Siamese Twins, I 
could not but exclaim, O Gemini!^ 

Further, good Reader, if thou wouldest 
profit by these benevolent disclosures of 
Danielism and Dovery, take notice I say, 
and not only take notice, but take good 
notice, — N.B. — there was this difference 
between the Doctors use of his burden, and 
mine of the decasyllabon, that the one was 
sung, and the other said, and that they are 
not " appointed to be said or sung," but that 
the one being designed for singing must be 
sung, and the other not having been adapted 
to music must be said. And if any great 
Composer should attempt to set the Deca- 
syllabon, let him bear in mind that it should 
be set in the hypodorian key, the proslam- 
banomenos of which mode is, in the judge- 
ment of the Antients, the most grave sound 
that the human voice can utter, and that the 
hearing can distinctly form a judgement of. 

Some such device may be recommended 
to those who have contracted the evil habit 
of using oaths as interjectional safety-valves 
or convenient expletives of speech. The 
manner may be exemplified in reference to 
certain recent events of public notoriety. 

We see which way the stream of time doth run, 
And are enforced from our most quiet sphere 
By the rough torrent of occasion. J 

Upon hearing one morning that in the 
Debate of the preceding night Mr. Brougham 
had said no change of administration could 
possibly affect him, I only exclaimed A ! A 
short-hand writer would have mistaken it for 
the common interjection, and have written 
it accordingly Ah ! But it was the first 
syllable of my inscrutable word, and signified 
mere notation without wonder or belief. 



t This last paragraph was inserted by Mr. H. Tayler. 
% Shakespeare. 



THE DOCTOE. 



387 



When in the course of the same day- 
there came authentic intelligence that Mr. 
Brougham was to be the Lord Chancellor of 
the New Administration, so little surprise 
was excited by the news, that I only added 
another syllable and exclaimed Abed! 

Reading in the morning papers that Sir 
James Graham was to be first Lord of the 
Admiralty, and Lord Althorp to lead the 
House of Commons, the exclamation pro- 
ceeded one step farther, and became Aballi ! 

This was uttered in a tone that implied 
disbelief ; for verily I gave Cabinet Makers 
credit for a grain of sense more than they 
possessed, (a grain mark you, because they 
had nothing to do with scruples ,•) I sup- 
posed there was a mistake as to the persons, 
— that Sir James Graham, whose chief 
knowledge was supposed to lie in finance, 
and his best qualification in his tongue, was 
to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that 
Lord Althorp, who had no other claim to 
consideration whatever than as being Earl 
Spencer's eldest son, (except that as Hodge 
said of Diccon the Bedlam, he is " even as 
good a fellow as ever kissed a cow,") was in- 
tended for the Admiralty, where Spencer is 
a popular name. But when it proved that 
there was no mistake in the Newspapers, 
and that each of these ministers had been 
deliberately appointed to the office for which 
the other was fit, then I said Aballiboo I 

The accession of Mr. Charles Grant and 
his brother to such an Administration 
brought me to Aballiboozo! with a shake of 
the head and in a mournful tone ; for I 
could not but think how such a falling off 
would astonish the Soul of Canning, if in the 
intermediate state there be any knowledge 
of the events which are passing on earth. 

When the Ministry blundered into their 
Budget, I exclaimed Aballiboozobang ! with 
a strong emphasis upon the final syllable, and 
when they backed out of it, I came to Aballi- 
boozobanga I 

The Reform Bill upon a first glance at its 
contents called forth Aballiboo zobanganor — 
I would have hurried on two steps farther, 
to the end of the decasyllabon, if I had not 
prudently checked myself and stopped there, 



— foreseeing that new cause for astonish- 
ment must now arise daily. 

When Sir Robert Peel did not upon the 
first reading kick out this mass of crudities, 
and throw out the Cabinet after it, neck and 
shoulders, hip and thigh, I said in bitterness 
Aballiboozobanganorri I 

And when that Cabinet waxing insolent 
because they had raised the mob to back 
them, declared that they would have the 
Bill, the whole Bill, and. nothing but the 
Bill, then I expressed my contempt, amaze- 
ment, and indignation, by uttering in its 
omnisignificant totality the great word 

Aballiboozobanganorribo. 



CHAPTER CXLIX. 

A PARLOUS QUESTION ARISING OUT OF THE 
FOREGOING CHAPTER. MR. IRVING AXD 
THE UNKNOWN TONGUES. TAYLOR THE 
WATER POET. POSSIBLE SCHEME OF IN- 
TERPRETATION PROPOSED. OPINIONS CON- 
CERNING THE GIFT OF TONGUES AS EXHI- 
BITED IN MADMEN. 

Speak what terrible language you will, though you 
understand it not yourselves, no matter! Chough's lan- 
guage, gabble enough and good enough. 

Shakespeare. 

But here, gentle reader, occurs what Bishop 
Latimer would call a parlous question, if he 
had lived in these portentous times. There 
is no apparent meaning in Lilli burlero 
bullen a-la, nor in Raderer too, tandaro tee, 
nor in Dan dan dan derridan, any more than 
there is in Farra diddle dyno, — Hay ley 
gayly gamborayly, higgledy piggledy, gallop- 
ing draggle-tail dreary dun, and other 
burthens of a similar kind, which are to be 
found in the dramas of poor old blind 
O'Keeffe, and in Tom D'Urfey's songs. 
There is I say no apparent meaning in them ; 
but we must not too confidently apply the 
legal maxim in this case, and conclude that 
de non apparente et non existente eadeni est 
ratio; for although these choruses are not 
in any known tongue, they may by possibi- 
lity be in an unknown one : and if Mr. Irving 



388 



THE DOCTOR. 



has not a cast in his intellect as well as in 
his eye, there is a mystery in an unknown 
tongue ; and they who speak it, and conse- 
quently they who write it, may be inspired 
for the nonce — though they may be as little 
conscious of their inspiration as they are of 
their meaning. There may be an unknown 
inspiration as well as an unknown tongue. 
If so what mighty revelations may lie un- 
revealed in the gibberish of Taylor the 
Water Poet ! Now if Mr. Irving would but 
read one of the wine-drinking Water Poet's 
eifusions of this kind, in his chapel, on a day 
appointed for that purpose, some of his in- 
spired speakers male or female might per- 
adventure be moved to expound it in their 
kindred language ; and as two negatives 
make an affirmative, it might be found that 
two unintelligiblcs make a meaning, and the 
whole affair would thus become intelligible 
to every one. 

Two specimens therefore of the Taylorian 
tongues I shall here set before the public, in 
the hope that this important experiment 
may be tried with them. They were both 
intended as epitaphs for Thomas Coriat the 
famous Odcombian traveller ; the first was 
supposed by the inspired Water Poet to be 
in the Bermuda tongue. 

Hough gruntough wough Thomough Coriatough, Ad- 

cougli robunquogh 
Warawogh bogh Comitogh sogh wogh termonatogrogh, 
Callimogh gogh whobogh Ragamogh demagorgogh pale- 

mogb, 
Lomerogh nogh Tottertogh illemortogb eagh Allaquem- 

qucgh 
Toracominogh- Jagogh Jamerogh mogh Carnogh pelep- 

sogli, 
Animogh trogh deradrogh maramogh hogh Flondrogh 

calepsogh. 

This, Taylor says, must be pronounced 
with the accent of the grunting of a hog. 
He gives no directions for pronouncing the 
second specimen, which is in the Utopian 
tongue. 

Nortumblum callimumquash omystoliton quash teburashte 
Scribuke woshtay solusbay perambulatushte ; 
Grekay sous Turkay Paphay zums Jerusalushte. 
Neptus esht Ealors Interrimoy diz dolorushte, 
Confabuloy Odcumbay Prozeugmolliton tynaorumynoy, 
Omulus oratushte paralescus tolliton umbroy. 

The Water Poet gave notice as Professor 
of these tommes that he was willing; to in- 



struct any gentlemen or others who might be 
desirous of learning them. 

But with regard to a gift of tongues, either 
known or unknown, there are more things 
than are dreamed of in the Irvingite philoso- 
phy or in the Lerry-cum-twang school. It 
was a received opinion in the seventeenth 
century that maniacs, and other persons 
afflicted with morbid melancholy, spoke in 
strange languages, and foretold things that 
were to come, by virtue, — that is to say, — 
in consequence of their mental malady. But 
some philosophers who in the march of in- 
tellect were in advance of their age, denied 
the fact, and accounted for the persuasion by 
supposing that such patients, when in a state 
of great agitation, uttered unmeaning words 
or sounds which ignorant people took to be 
Greek, Latin or Hebrew, merely because 
they could not understand them. Two ques- 
tions therefore arose ; whether the received 
opinion were true ? and if it were true, how 
was the fact to be accounted for ? 

The first of these questions was easily dis- 
posed of by Sennertus, one of the most 
eminent Professors and practitioners of the 
medical science in that age. Facts he said, 
which were attested by trustworthy authors, 
were not to be disputed. Many were the 
impudent falsehoods which this great, and in 
other respects wise man, received implicitly 
as facts conformably to the maxim which he 
thus laid down ; and many were the perilous 
consequences which he deduced in good 
faith, and on fail' reasoning from such pre- 
mises. Upon this occasion he instanced the 
case of a countryman, who at certain periods 
of the moon used to compose Latin verses, 
though he knew not a word of Latin at any 
other time. And of a man who spoke lan- 
guages which he had never learned, and be- 
came unable to speak any one of them as 
soon as he was restored to health by the 
effect of some powerful worm-medicines. 
And of a sailor's son, who being wounded in 
the head and becoming delirious in conse- 
quence, made perfect syllogisms in German, 
but as soon as his wound was healed, lost 
all the logic which had been beaten into his 
head in so extraordinary a way. 



THE DOCTOR. 



389 



Antonius Gualnerius, who vouched for one 
of these cases as having witnessed the fact 
and all its circumstances, accounted for it by 
a brave hypothesis. The soul, he said, be- 
fore its infusion into the body, possesses a 
knowledge of all things, and that knowledge 
is, in a certain manner, obliterated, or offus- 
cated by its union with the body ; but it is 
restored either by the ordinary means of in- 
struction or by the influence of the star 
which presided at the time of its union. The 
body and the bodily senses resist this in- 
fluence, but when these are as it were bound, 
or suspended, quod fiat in melancholia, the 
stars can then impart their influences to the 
soul without obstruction, and the soul may 
thus be endowed with the power of effecting 
what the stars themselves effect, and thus 
an illiterate person may become learned, 
and may also predict events that are to come. 
Sennertus is far from assenting to this theory. 
He says, Magna petita sunt qu<s prasup- 
ponit et sibi concedi postulat Guainerius. 

A theory quite as extraordinary was ad- 
vanced by Juan Huarte in his Examen de 
Ingenios, a book which obtained at one time 
far more reputation than it deserved. Take 
the passage, curious Reader, from the Eng- 
lish version, entitled, " The Examination of 
Men's Wits," in which by discovering the 
variety of natures is shewed for what pro- 
fession each one is apt, and how far he shall 
profit therein. Translated out of the Spanish 
tongue by M. Camillo Camilli. Englished 
out of his Italian by R. C.*, Esquire, 1594. 
" The frantic person's speaking of Latin, 
without that he ever learned the same in his 
health-time, shews the consonance which the 
Latin tongue holds with the reasonable soul; 
and (as we will prove hereafter) there is to 
be found a particular wit applicable to the 
invention of languages, and Latin words ; 
and the phrases of speech in that tongue are 
so fitting with the ear, that the reasonable 
soul, possessing the necessary temperature 
for the invention of some delicate language, 
suddenly encounters with this. And that 



* i. e. Richard Carew. See Life of Camden prefixed 
to the Britannia, note p. xv. 



two devisers of languages may shape the like 
words, (having the like wit and liability) it 
is very manifest ; pre-supposing, that when 
God created Adam, and set all things before 
him, to the end he might bestow on each its 
several name whereby it should be called, 
he had likewise at that instant molded an- 
other man with the same perfection and 
supernatural grace ; now I demand if God 
had placed the same things before this other 
man, that he might also set them names 
whereby they should be called, of what 
manner those names should have been ? For 
mine own part I make no doubt but he 
would have given these things those very 
names which Adam did : and the reason is 
very apparent, for both carried one self- 
same eye to the nature of each thing, which 
of itself was no more but one. After tliir 
manner might the frantic person light upon 
the Latin tongue ; and speak the same with- 
out ever having learned it in his health ; for 
the natural temperature of his brain con- 
ceiving alteration through the infirmity, it 
might for a space become like his who first 
invented the Latin tongue, and feign the 
like words, but yet not with that concert 
and continued fineness, for this would give 
token that the Devil moved that tongue, as 
the Church teacheth her Exorcists." 

This theory found as little favour with 
Sennertus as that of Guainerius, because he 
says, Huarte assumes more than can be 
granted ; and moreover because he supposes 
that the Lai in language has a peculiar con- 
sonance with the rational soul, and that 
there are certain natures which are pe- 
culiarly constituted for inventing languages. 
And therefore if by disease that tempera- 
ment be excited in the brain which is neces- 
sary for the invention of any most elegant 
language the patient would fall into the 
Latin tongue; and Latin words would occur 
to him, without any deliberation, or act of 
will on his part. This opinion Sennertus 
argued cannot be maintained as probable, 
being indeed disproved by the very eases 
upon which the question had been raised, for 
Greek and Hebrew had been spoken by some 
of the patients, as well as Latin. The facts 



390 



THE DOCTOR. 



he admits as not to be doubted, because they 
are related by veracious authors; and his 
way of accounting for them is by the agency 
of evil spirits, who take advantage of bodily 
diseases and act upon them, especially such 
as arise from melancholy ; for that humour 
or passion has such attractions for evil spirits 
that it has been called Balneum Diaboli, the 
Devil's Bath. When therefore a patient 
speaks in tongues which he has never learned, 
eo ipso Damon se manifeste prodit. 

This opinion, than which one of greater 
weight could not have been produced in the 
seventeenth century, is recommended to the 
serious consideration of the Irvingites 

The Doctor would have sung Fa-la-la- 
lerridan to all this reasoning, and I say 
Aballiboo ! 



CHAPTER CL. 

THE WEDDING PEAL AT ST, GEORGE^, AND 
THE BRIDE'S APPEARANCE AT CHURCH. 

See how I have strayed ! and you'lLnot wonder when you 
reflect on the whence and the whither. 

Alexander Knox. 

Well dear Reader, I have answered your 
question concerning the great Decasyllabon. 
I have answered it fairly and 
explicitly, not like those Je- ^ ■> tf 



parenthesis in the most important part of the 
Doctor's life, tell thee that the Interim is 
past, that in the month of April, 1761, he 
brought home his bride, and the bells of St. 
George rang that peal, — that memorable 
peal which was anticipatively mentioned in 
the 32d chapter. Many such peals have they 
rung since on similar occasions, but they have 
rung their last from St. George's Tower, for 
in 1836 it was thought necessary to remove 
them, lest they should bring that fine old 
fabric down. 

Webster libelled the most exhilarating and 
the most affecting of all measured sounds 
when he said, 

— those flattering bells have all 
One sound at weddings and at funerals. 

Es cierta experiencia que la musica crece la 
pdna donde la halla, y acrecieuta el plazer en 
el corazon contento ; this is more true of bell 
ringing than of any other music ; but so far 
are church bells from having one sound on 
all occasions, that they carry a different im- 
port on the same to different ears and diffe- 
rent minds. The bells of St. George's told 
a different tale to Daniel Dove, and to 
Deborah, on their wedding day. To her, 
they said, as in articulate words, varying, but 
melancholy alike in import as in cadence, 



suitical casuists 

That palter with us in a double sense, 
That keep the word of promise to our ear 
And break it to our hope. 

You have received an answer as full and 
satisfactory as you could expect or desire, 
and yet the more than cabalistic mysteries 
of the word are still concealed with Eleu- 
sinian secresy. Enough of this. For the 
present also we will drop the subject which 
was broken off by the extraordinary circum- 
stances that called forth our Chapter Ex- 
traordinary, 

— to di xui TiTiXitr/Aivov i<rrmi' * 

for awhile, however, it will be convenient to 
leave it unfinished, and putting an end to the 

* Homer. 



-A#* 0^ 



tr 



Deborah Bacon hath changed her name ; 
Deborah Bacon hath left her home ; 
Deborah Bacon is now no more. 

Yet she had made what in every one's 
opinion was considered a good match, and 
indeed was far better than what is commonly 
called good ; it promised in all human likeli- 
hood to be a happy one, and such it proved. 
In the beautiful words of Mrs. Hutchinson, 
neither she nor her husband, " ever had 
occasion to number their marriage among 
their infelicities." 

Many eyes were turned on the Doctor's 
bride, when she made her appearance at St. 



THE DOCTOR. 



391 



George's Church. The novelty of the place 
made her less regardful of this than she 
might otherwise have been. Hollis Pigot, 
who held the vicarage of Doncaster thirty- 
years, and was then in the last year of his 
incumbency and his life, performed the ser- 
vice that day. I know not among what 
description of preachers he was to be classed ; 
whether with those who obtain attention, 
and command respect, and win confidence, 
and strengthen belief, and inspire hope, or 
with the far more numerous race of Spin- 
texts and of Martexts. But if he had 
preached that morning with the tongue of an 
angel, the bride would have had no ears for 
him. Her thoughts were neither upon those 
who on their way from church would talk 
over her instead of the sermon, nor of the 
service, nor of her husband, nor of herself in 
her new character, but of her father, — and 
with a feeling which might almost be called 
funereal, that she had passed from under his 
pastoral as well as his paternal care. 



CHAPTER CLI. 

SOMETHING SEKIOUS. 

If thou hast read all this Book, and art never the better, 
yet catch this flower before thou go out of the garden, 
and peradventure the scent thereof will bring thee back 
to smell the rest. Henuy Smith. 

Deborah found no one in Doncaster to sup- 
ply the place of Betty Allison in the daily 
intercourse of familiar and perfect friend- 
ship. That indeed was impossible ; no after- 
math has the fragrance and the sweetness 
of the first crop. But why do I call her 
Deborah ? She had never been known by 
that name to her new neighbours ; and to 
her very Father she was now spoken of as 
Mrs. Dove. Even the Allisons called her so 
in courteous and customary usage, but not 
without a melancholy reflection that when 
Deborah Bacon became Mrs. Dove, she was 
in a great measure lost to them. 

— Friendship, although it cease not 
In marriage, is yet at less command 
Than when a single freedom can dispose it.* 



* Foud. 



Doncaster has less of the Bus in Urbe 
now than it had in those days, and than Bath 
had when those words were placed over the 
door of a Lodging House, on the North 
Parade. And the house to which the Doctor 
brought home his bride had less of it than 
when Peter Hopkins set up the gilt pestle 
and mortar there as the cognizance of his 
vocation. It had no longer that air of quiet 
respectability which belongs to such a dwell- 
ing in the best street of a small country 
town. The Mansion House by which it was 
dwarfed and inconvenienced in many ways 
occasioned a stir and bustle about it, unlike 
the cheerful business of a market day. The 
back windows, however, still looked to the 
fields, and there was still a garden. But 
neither fields nor garden could prevail over 
the odour of the shop, in which, like 

Hot, cold, moist and dry, four champions fierce, 

in Milton's Chaos, rhubarb and peppermint, 
and valerian, and assafetida, " strove for 
mastery," and to battle brought their atoms. 
Happy was the day when peppermint pre- 
dominated ; though it always reminded Mrs. 
Dove of Thaxted Grange, and the delight 
with which she used to assist Miss Allison in 
her distillations. There is an Arabian proverb 
which says, " The remembrance of youth is a 
sigh." Southey has taken it for the text of 
one of those juvenile poems in which he 
dwells with thoughtful forefeeling upon the 
condition of declining life. 

Miss Allison had been to her, not indeed 
as a mother, but as what a step-mother is, 
who is led by natural benevolence and a re- 
ligious sense of duty, to perforin as far as 
possible a mother's part to her husband's 
children. There are more such step-mothers 
than the world is willing to believe, and they 
have their reward here as well as hereafter. 
It was impossible that any new friend could 
fill up her place in Mrs. Dove's affections, — 
impossible that she could ever feel for an- 
other woman the respect, and reverence, and 
gratitude, which blended with her love for 
this excellent person. Though she was born 
within four miles of Doncaster, and had lived 
till her marriage in the humble vicarage in 



392 



THE DOCTOB. 



which she was born, she had never passed 
| four-and-twenty hours in that town before 
she went to reside there ; nor had she the 
slightest acquaintance with any of its inha- 
bitants, except the few shopkeepers with 
whom her little dealings had lain, and the 
occasional visitants whom she had met at the 
Grange. 

An Irish officer in the army, happening to 
be passenger in an armed vessel during the 
last war, used frequently to wish that they 
might fall in with an enemy's ship, because 
he said, he had been in many land battles, 
and there was nothing in the world which he 
desired more than to see what sort of a thing 
a sea fight was. He had his wish, and when 
after a smart action, in which he bore his 
part bravely, an enemy of superior force had 
been beaten off, he declared with the custo- 
mary emphasis of an Hibernian adjuration, 
that a sea-fight was a mighty sairious sort of 
thing. 

The Doctor and Deborah, as soon as they 
were betrothed, had come 10 just the same 
conclusion upon a very different subject. 
Till the day of their engagement, nay till the 
hour of proposal on his part, and the very 
instant of acceptance on hers, each had looked 
upon marriage, when the thought of it oc- 
curred, as a distant possibility, more or less 
desirable, according to the circumstances 
which introduced the thought, and the mood 
in which it was entertained. And when it 
was spoken of sportively, as might happen, 
in relation to either the one or the other, it 
was lightly treated as a subject in which they 
had no concern. But from the time of their 
engagement, it seemed to both the most 
serious event of their lives. 

In the Dutch village of Broek, concerning 
which, singular as the habits of the inhabi- 
tants are, travellers have related more pecu- 
liarities than ever prevailed there, one 
remarkable custom shows with how serious a 
mind some of the Hollanders regard mar- 
riage. The great house door is never opened 
but when the Master of the House brings 
home his Bride from the altar, and when 
Husband and Wife are borne out to the 
grave. Dr. Dove had seen that village of 



great Baby-houses, but though much at- 
tached to Holland, and to the Dutch as a 
people, and disposed to think that we might 
learn many useful lessons from our prudent 
and thrifty neighbours, he thought this to be 
as preposterous, if not as shocking a custom. 
as it would be to have the bell toll at a mar- 
riage, and to wear a winding sheet for a 
wedding garment. 

We look with wonder at the transforma- 
tions that take place in insects, and yet their 
physical metamorphoses are not greater than 
the changes which we ourselves undergo 
morally and intellectually, both in our rela- 
tions to others and in our individual nature. 
Chaque individu, considere separement. dif- 
fere encore de lui meme par Teffet du terns; 
il dement un autre, en quelque maniere, aux 
diverses epoques de sa vie, L enfant, Thorn/me 
fait, le vieillard. goni eomrne aidant d 'etr -angers 
unis dans une settle personne par le lienmyste- 
rieux do. souvenir.* Of all changes in life, 
marriage is certainly the greatest, and though 
less change in every respect can very rarely 
be produced by it in any persons than in 
the Doctor and his wife, it was very great to 
both. On his part it was altogether an in- 
crease of happiness ; or rather from having 
been contented in his station he became 
happy in it, so happy as to be experimentally 
convinced that there can be no "single 
blessedness " for man. There were some 
drawbacks on her part, — in the removal 
from a quiet vicarage to a busy street ; in 
the obstacle which four miles opposed to that 
daily and intimate intercourse with her 
friends at the Grange which had been the 
chief delight of her ms ; and above 

all in the separation from her father, for even 
at a distance which may appear so incon- 
siderable, such it was : but there was the 
consolatory reflection that those dear friends 
and that dear father concurred in approving 
her marriage, and in rejoicing in it for her 
sake ; and the experience of every day and 
every year made her more and more thank- 
ful for her lot. In the full liturgic sense of 
the word, he w. her, that is, he 

* Nbcub. 



THE DOCTOR. 



393 



loved, and cherished, and respected, and 
honoured her ; and she would have obeyed 
him cheerfully as well as dutifully, if obe- 
dience could have been shown where there 
was eTer but one will. 



CHAPTER CLH. 

ODD OPINIONS CONCERNING BIOGRAPHY AND 
EDUCATION. THE AUTHOR MAKES A SECOND 
HIATUS AS UNWILLINGLY AS HE MADE THE 
FIRST, AND TOR THE SAME COGENT REASON. 



Ya sabes—pero csforzoso 
liepclirlo, auuque lo sepas. 



Calderon. 



Unwillingly, as the Reader may re- 
member, though he cannot possibly know 
with how much unwillingness, I passed over 
fourteen years of Daniel Dove's youth, 
being the whole term of his adolescence, and 
a fifth part of that appointed sum, beyond 
which the prolongation of human life is but 
labour and sorrow. Mr. Coleridge has said 
that "the history of a man for the nine 
months preceding his birth would probably 
be far more interesting, and contain events 
of greater moment than all the threescore 
and ten years that follow it." * Mr. Coleridge 
was a philosopher, in many points, of the 
first order, and it has been truly said by one 
of the ancients that there is nothing so 
absurd but that some philosopher has ad- 
vanced it. Mr. Coleridge, however, was not 
always in earnest when he said startling 
things; and they who suppose that 'the 
opinions of such a man are to be collected 
from what he says playfully in the freedom 
of social intercourse to amuse himself, and 
perhaps to astonish others, may as well 
expect to hold an eel by the tail. 

There were certain French legislators in 
the days of Liberty and Equality, who held 
that education ought to begin before birth, 
and therefore they proposed to enact laws 
for the benefit of the homunculus during 

* Most probably Mr. Coleridge said this with reference 
to Sir Thomas Browne, who maintained that every man, 
at his birth, was nine months old. 



that portion of its existence to which Mr. 
Coleridge is said to have attached such 
metaphysical, or, in his own language, such 
psychological importance. But even these 
Ultra-philosophers would not have main- 
tained that a biographer ought to begin 
before the birth of his subject. All an- 
tecedent matter belongs to genealogical 
writers ; astrologers themselves are content 
to commence their calculations from the 
hour and minute of the nativity. The 
fourteen years over which I formerly passed 
for the reasons stated in the 25th Chapter of 
this Opus, would have supplied more ma- 
terials than any equal portion of his life, if 
the Doctor had been his own historian ; for 
in those years his removal from home took 
place, his establishment at Doncaster, and 
his course of studies at Ley den, the most 
momentous events in his uneventful history, 
except the great one of marriage, — which 
either makes or mars the happiness of both 
parties. 

From the time of that " crowning event" 
I must pass over another but longer interval, 
and represent the Doctor in his married 
state, such as he was when it was my fortune 
in early life to be blessed with his paternal 
friendship, for such it might be called. Age 
like his, and Youth might well live together, 
for there was no crabbedness in his age. 
Youth, therefore, was made the better and 
the happier by such society. It was full of 
pleasure instead of care ; not like winter, 
but like a fine summer evening, or a mild 
autumn, or like the light of a harvest 
moon, 

Which sheds o'er all the sleeping scene 
A soft nocturnal day.t 



t James Montgomery. 



394 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CLIII. 

MATRIMONY AND RAZORS. LIGHT SAYINGS 
LEADING TO GRAVE THOUGHTS. USES OF 
SHAVING. 

I wonder whence that tear came, when I smiled 
In the production on't ! Sorrow's a thief 
That can, when joy looks on, steal forth a grief. 

Massinger. 

Oh pitiable condition of human kind ! One 
colour is born to slavery abroad, and one 
sex to shavery at home! — A woman, to 
secure her comfort and well-being in this 
country, stands in need of one thing only, 
which is a good husband; but a man hath to 
provide himself with two things, a good wife, 
and a good razor, and it is more difficult to 
find the latter than the former. The Doctor 
made these remarks one day, when his chin 
was smarting after an uncomfortable opera- 
tion ; and Mrs. Dove retorted by saying that 
women had still the less favourable lot, for 
scarce as good razors might be, good hus- 
bands were still scarcer. 

" Ay," said the Doctor, " Deborah is right, 
and it is even so ; for the goodness of wife, 
husband, and razor depends upon their 
temper, and, taking in all circumstances and 
causes natural and adventitious, we might 
reasonably conclude that steel would more 
often be tempered precisely to the just 
degree, than that the elements of which 
humanity is composed should be all nicely 
proportioned and amalgamated happily. 
Rarely indeed could Nature stand up, and 
pointing out a sample of its workmanship in 
this line say to all the world this is a Man ! 
meaning thereby what man, rational, civi- 
lised, well educated, redeemed, immortal 
man, may and ought to be. Where this 
could be said in one instance, in a thousand 
or ten thousand others she might say this is 
what Man has by his own devices made 
himself, a sinful and miserable creature, 
weak or wicked, selfish, sensual, earthly- 
minded, busy in producing temporal evil for 
others, — and everlasting evil for himself!" 

But as it was his delight to find good, or 
to look for it, in everything, and especially 
when he could discover the good which may 



be educed from evil, he used to say that 
more good than evil resulted from shaving, 
preposterous as he knew the practice to be, 
irrational as he admitted it was, and trouble- 
some as to his cost he felt it. The incon- 
venience and the discomfort of the operation 
no doubt were great, — very great, espe- 
cially in frosty weather, and during March 
winds, and when the beard is a strong beard. 
He did not extenuate the greatness of this 
evil, which was moreover of daily recurrence. 
Nay, he said, it was so great, that had it 
been necessary for physical reasons, that is 
to say, were it a law of nature, instead of a 
practice enjoined by the custom of the 
country, it would undoubtedly have been 
mentioned in the third chapter of the book 
of Genesis, as the peculiar penalty inflicted 
upon the sons of Adam, because of his 
separate share in the primal offence. The 
daughters of Eve, as is well known, suffer 
expressly for their mother's sin ; and the 
final though not apparent cause why the 
practice of shaving, which is apparently so 
contrary to reason, should universally pre- 
vail in all civilised christian countries, the 
Doctor surmised might be, that by this 
means the sexes were placed in this respect 
upon an equality, each having its own 
penalty to bear, and those penalties being — 
perhaps — on the whole equal ; or if man 
had the heavier for his portion, it was no 
more than he deserved, for having yielded 
to the weaker vessel. These indeed are 
things which can neither be weighed nor 
measured ; but it must be considered that 
shaving comes every day to all men of what 
may be called the clean classes, and to the 
poorest labourer or handicraft once a week ; 
and that if the daily shavings of one year, 
or eve 1 the weekly ones, could be put into 
one shave, the operation would be fatal, — 
it would be more than flesh and blood could 
bear. 

In the case of man this penalty brought 
with it no after compensation, and here the 
female had the advantage. Some good 
nevertheless resulted from it, both to the 
community and to the individual shaver, 
unless he missed it by his own fault. 



THE DOCTOR. 



?/.)■ 



To the community because it gives em- 
ployment to Barbers, a lively and loqua- 
cious race, who are everywhere the great 
receivers and distributors of all news, private 
or public in their neighbourhood. 

To the individual, whether he were, like 
the Doctor himself, and as Zebedee is fami- 
liarly said to have been, an autokureus, 
which is being interpreted a self-shaver, or 
shaver of himself ; or merely a shavee, as the 
labouring classes almost always are, the 
operation in either case brings the patient 
into a frame of mind favourable to his moral 
improvement. He must be quiet and com- 
posed when under the operator's hands, and 
not less so if under his own. In whatever 
temper or state of feeling he may take his 
seat in the barber's chair, or his stand at the 
looking-glass, he must at once become calm. 
There must be no haste, no impatience, no 
irritability ; so surely as he gives way to 
either, he will smart for it. And however 
prone to wander his thoughts may be, at 
other and perhaps more serious times, he 
must be as attentive to what he is about in 
the act of shaving, as if he were working a 
problem in mathematics. 

As a lion's heart and a lady's hand are 
among the requisites for a surgeon, so are 
they for the Zebedeean shaver. He must 
have a steady hand, and a mind steadied for 
the occasion ; a hand confident in its skill, 
and a mind assured that the hand is compe- 
tent to the service upon which it is ordered. 
Fear brings with it its immediate punish- 
ment as surely as in a field of battle ; if he 
but think of cutting himself, cut himself he 
will. 

I hope I shall not do so to-morrow ; but 
if what I have just written should come into 
my mind, and doubt come over me in con- 
sequence, too surely then I shall ! Let me 
forget myself, therefore, as quickly as I can, 
and fall again into the train of the Doctor's 
thoughts. 

Did not the Due de Brissac perform the 
operation himself for a moral and dignified 
sentiment, instead of letting himself be 
shaved by his valet-de-chambre ? Often was 
he heard to say unto himself in grave soli- 



loquy, while holding the razor open, and 
adjusting the blade to the proper angle, in 
readiness for the first stroke, " Timoleon de 
Cosse, God hath made thee a Gentleman, 
and the King hath made thee a Duke. It 
is nevertheless right and fit that thou 
shouldst have something to do ; therefore 
thou shalt shave thyself!" — In this spirit 
of humility did that great Peer " mundify 
his muzzel." 

De sgavoir les raisons pourquoy son pere 
luy donna ce nom de Timoleon, encore que ce 
ne fut nom Chretien, mais payen, il ne se 
peut dire ; toutesfois, a V imitation des Italiens 
et des Grecs, qui ont emprunte la plus part des 
noms pay ens, et n'en sont corrigez pour cela, et 
rienfontaucun scruple, — il avoitcette opinion, 
que son pere luy avoit donne ce nom par 
humeur, et venant a lire la vie de Timoleon 
elle luy pleut, et pour ce en imposa le nom a 
sonjils, presageant qiiun jour il luy seroit 
semblaUe. Et certes pour si peu quHl a vesqu, 
il luy a ressernble quelque peu ; mais, s'il eust 
vesqu il ne Veust ressernble quelque peu en sa 
retraite si longue, et en son temporisement si 
tardif qu'il fit, et si longue abstinence de 
guerre ; ainsi que luy-mesme le disoit souvent, 
quHl ne demeureroit pour tous les biens du 
monde retire si longuement que fit ce Timo- 
leon* This is a parenthesis : I return to 
our philosopher's discourse. 

And what lectures, I have heard the 
Doctor say, does the looking-glass, at such 
times, read to those men who look in it at 
such times only ! The glass is no flatterer, 
the person in no disposition to flatter him- 
self, the plight in which he presents himself 
assuredly no flattering one. It would be 
superfluous to have TvwBi YtavTbv inscribed 
upon the frame of the mirror; he cannot 
fail to know himself, who contemplates his 
own face there, long and steadily, every day. 
Nor can he as he waxes old need a death's 
head for a memento in his closet or his 
chamber ; for day by day he traces the de- 
features which the hand of Time is making, 
— that hand which never suspends its work. 

Thus his good melancholy oft organ 
On the catastrophe and heel of pastime.f 



Buantome. 



t Shakespeare. 



396 



THE DOCTOR. 



" When I was a round-faced, red-faced, 
smooth-faced boy," said he to me one day, 
following the vein upon which he had thus 
fallen, " I used to smile if people said they 
thought me like my father, or my mother, 
or my uncle. I now discern the resemblance 
to each and all of them myself, as age brings 
out the primary and natural character of the 
countenance, and wears away all that acci- 
dental circumstances had superinduced upon 
it. The recognitions, — the glimpses which 
at such times I get of the departed, carry 
my thoughts into the past ; — and bitter, — 
bitter indeed would those thoughts be, if my 
anticipations — (wishes I might almost call 
them, were it lawful as wishes to indulge in 
them) — did not also lead me into the future, 
when I shall be gathered to my fathers in 
spirit, though these mortal exuvice should not 
be laid to moulder with them under the 
same turf." * 

There were very few to whom he talked 
thus. If he had not entirely loved me, he 
would never have spoken to me in this strain. 



CHAPTER CLIV. 

a poet's calculation concerning the 
time employed in shaving, and the 
use that mtght be made of it. the 
lake poets lake shavers also. a pro- 
test against lake shaving. 

Intellect and industry are never incompatible. There 
is more wisdom, and will be more benefit, in combining 
them than scholars like to believe, or than the common 
v/orld imagine. Life has time enough for both, and its 
happiness will be increased by the union. 

Sharon Turner. 

The poet Campbell is said to have calculated 
that a man who shaves himself every day, 



* The passage following is from a letter of Southey's, 
published by Sir Egerton Brydges in his Autobiography: 
" Did you ever remark how remarkably old age brings 
out family likenesses, — which, having been kept, as it were, 
in abeyance while the passions and the business of the 
world engrossed the parties, come forth again in age (as 
in infancy), the features settling into their primary cha- 
racters — before dissolution ? 1 have seen some affecting 
instances of this, — a brother and sister, than whom no 
two persons in middle life could have been more unlike 
in countenance or in character, becoming like as twins at 
last. I now see my father's lineaments in the looking- 
glass, where they never used to appear." — Vol. ii. p. 270. 



and lives to the age of threescore and ten, 
expends during his life as much time in the 
act of shaving, as would have sufficed for 
learning seven languages. 

The poet Southey is said to carry shaving 
to its n'e plus ultra of independency, for he 
shaves sans looking-glass, sans shaving- 
brush, sans soap, or substitute for soap, sa)is 
hot-water, sans cold-water, sans everything 
except a razor. And yet among all the 
characters which he bears in the world, no 
one has ever given him credit for being a 
cunning shaver ! 

(Be it here observed in a parenthesis that 
I suppose the word shaver in this so common 
expression to have been corrupted from 
shaveling ; the old contemptuous word for 
a Priest.) 

But upon reflection, I am not certain 
whether it is of the poet Southey that this is 
said, or of the poet Wordsworth. I may 
easily have confounded one with the other 
in my recollections, just as what was said of 
Romulus might had been repeated of Remus 
while they were both living and flourishing 
together ; or as a mistake in memory might 
have been made between the two Kings of 
Brentford when they both quitted the stage, 
each smelling to his nosegay, which it was 
who made his exit P. S. and which O. P. 

Indeed we should never repeat what is 
said of public characters (a denomination 
under which all are to be included who 
figure in public life, from the high, mighty 
and most illustrious Duke of Wellington at 
this time, down to little Waddington) with- 
out qualifying it as common report, or as 
newspaper, or magazine authority. It is 
very possible that the Lake poets may, both 
of them, shave after the manner of other 
men. The most attached friends of Mr. 
Rogers can hardly believe that he has ac- 
tually said all the good things which are 
ascribed to him in a certain weekly journal ; 
and Mr. Campbell may not have made the 
remark which I have repeated, concerning 
the time employed in mowing the chin, and 
the use to which the minutes that are so 
spent might be applied. Indeed so far am I 
from wishing to impute to this gentleman 



THE DOCTOR. 



397 



upon common report, anything which might 
not be to his credit, or which he might not 
like to have the credit of, that it is with the 
greatest difficulty I can persuade myself to 
believe in the authenticity of his letter to 
Mr. Moore upon the subject of Lord and 
Lady Byron, though he has published it 
himself, and in his own name. 

Some one else may have made the calcu- 
lation concerning sharing and languages, 
some other poet, or proser, or one who never 
attempted either prose or rhyme. "Was he 
not the first person who proposed the estab- 
lishment of the London University, and if 
this calculation were his, is it possible that 
he should not have proposed a plan for it 
founded thereon, which might have entitled 
the new institution to assume the title of 
the Polyglot College ? 

Be this as it may, I will not try the sans- j 

every-thing way of shaving, let who will j 

have invented it : never will I trv it, unless i 

7 I 

thereto by dire necessity enforced S I will 
neither shave dry, nor be dry-shaved, while 
any of those things are to be obtained which 
either mitigate or abbreviate the operation. 
I will have a brush, I will have Xaples soap, 
or some substitute for it, which may enable 
me always to keep a dry and clean apparatus. 
I will have hot-water for the sake of the 
razor, and I will have a looking-glass for the 
sake of my chin and my upper lip. No, 
never will I try Lake shaving, unless thereto 
by dire necessity enforced. 

Xor would I be enforced to it by any 
necessity less dire than that with which 
King Arthur was threatened by a messager 
from Kynge Ryona of Xorth-walys : and 
Kynge he was of all Ireland and of many 
lies. And this was his message, gretynge 
wel Kynge Arthur in tliis manere wyse. 
sayenge, "that Kyng? Ryons had discomfyte 
and overcome eleaven Kynges. and everyche 
of hem did hym homage, and that was this : 
they <^af hym their beardys clene flayne off. 
as moche as ther was : wherfor the messager 
came for King Arthurs beard. For King 
Ryons had purfyled * a mantel with Kynges 

* I. e. Ornamented. See Halliwell's Dictionary of Ar- \ 
chaic and Provincial Words, y. Pcpfle. 



berdes, and there lacked one place of the 
mantel, wherfor he sent for his berd, or els 
he wold entre in to his landes, and brenne 
and slee, and never leve tyl he have thi hede 
and thi herd." If the King of the Lakes 
should require me to do him homage by 
shaving without soap, I should answer with 
as much spirit as was shown in the answer 
which King Arthur returned to the Mes- 
senger from King Ryons. t; TVel, sayd 
Arthur, thow hast said thy message, the 
whiche is the most vylanous and lewdest 
message that ever man herd sente unto a 
Kynge. Also thow mayst see, my berd is 
ful yong yet to make a purfyl of hit. But 
telle thow thy Kynge this : I owe hym none 
homage, ne none of mine elders ; but or it 
be longe to, he shall do me homage on bothe 
his kneys, or els he shall lese his hede by the 
feithe of my body, for this is the most 
shamefuliest message that ever I herd 
speke of. I have aspyed. thy King met 
never yet with worshipful man; but telle 
hym. I wyll have his hede without he doo 
me homage : Then the messager departed." 



CHAPTER CLV. 
ihb poet's calcdiateoh tested a>~d 

PROVED. 

Tiddle-faddle. don't tell of this and that, ar.d every thing 
in the world, but give me mathematical demonstration. 

Congreve. 

Bit I wfll ferf (as an American would say. 
— though let it be observed in passing that 
I do not advocate the use of Americanisms.) 
— I will test Mr. Campbell's assertion. And 
as the Lord President of the Xew Monthly 
Magazine has not favoured the world with 
the calculations upon which his assertion, if 
his it be. is founded. I will investigate it, 
step by step, with which intent I have this 
morning, Saturday, May the fifteenth, 1SS0, 
minuted mvself during the act of shaving. 

The time employed was. within a second 
or two more or less, nine mini;: 

I neither hurried the operation, nor 
lingered about it. Everything was done in 



I 398 



THE DOCTOR. 



my ordinary orderly way, steadily, and 
without waste of time. 

Now as to my beard, it is not such a beard 
as that of Domenico d'Ancona, which was 
delle ba?-be la corona, that is to say the crown 
of beards, or rather, in English idiom, the 
king. 

Una barba la pih singulare 
Che mai fosse discritta in verso o'n prosa, 
A beard the most unpar'allell'd 
That ever was ) r et described in prose or rhyme, 

and of which Berni says that the Barber 
ought to have felt less reluctance in cutting 
the said Domenico's throat, than in cutting 
off so incomparable a beard. Neither do I 
think that mine ever by possibility could vie 
with that of Futteh Ali Shah, King of 
Persia at this day : nay, I doubt whether 
Macassar Oil, Bear's grease, Elephant's 
marrow, or the approved recipe of sour 
milk with which the Persians cultivate their 
beards, could ever bring mine to the far 
inferior growth of his son's, Prince Abbas 
Mirza. Indeed no Mussulmen would ever 
look upon it, as they did upon Mungo 
Park's, with envious eyes, and think that it 
was too good a beard for a Christian. But 
for a Christian, and moreover an English- 
man, it is a sufficient beard ; and for the 
individual a desirable one : nihil me pamitet 
hujus barbm; desirable I say, inasmuch as it 
is in thickness and rate of growth rather 
below the average standard of beards. Nine 
minutes, therefore, will be about the average 
time required for shaving, by a Zebedeean, 
— one who shaves himself. A professional 
operator makes quicker work ; but he cannot 
be always exactly to the time, and at the 
year's end as much may have been lost in 
waiting for the barber, as is gained by his 
celerity of hand. 

Assuming, then, the moderate average of 
nine mimites, nine minutes per day amount 
to an hour and three minutes per week ; an 
hour and three minutes per week are fifty- 
four hours thirty-six minutes per year. We 
will suppose that our shaver begins to 
operate every day when he has completed 
his twentieth year ; many, if not most men, 
begin earlier ; they will do so if they are 
ambitious of obtaining whiskers ; they must 



do so if their beards are black, or carroty, 
or of strong growth. There are, then, fifty 
years of daily shaving to be computed ; and 
in that time he will have consumed two 
thousand, seven hundred and thirty hours in 
the act of shaving himself. I have stated 
the numbers throughout in words, to guard 
against the mistakes which always creep into 
the after editions of any book, when figures 
are introduced. 

Now let us see whether a man could in 
that time acquire a competent knowledge of 
seven languages. 

I do not, of course, mean such a knowledge 
as Professor Porson and Dr. Elmsley had 
attained of Greek, or as is possessed by 
Bishop Blomfield and Bishop Monk, — but a 
passable knowledge of living languages, such 
as would enable a man to read them with 
facility and pleasure, if not critically, and to 
travel without needing either an interpreter 
— or the use of French in the countries 
where they are spoken. 

Dividing, therefore, two thousand seven 
hundred and thirty, being the number of 
hours which might be appropriated to learn- 
ing languages, — by seven, — the number of 
languages to be learnt, we have three hun- 
dred and ninety hours for each language ; 
three hundred and ninety lessons of an hour 
long, — wherein it is evident that any per- 
son of common capacity might with common 
diligence learn to read, speak, and write — 
sufficiently well for all ordinary purposes, 
any European language. The assertion, there- 
fore, though it might seem extravagant at 
first, is true as far as it goes, and is only 
inaccurate because it is far short of the truth. 

For take notice that I did not strop the 
razor this morning, but only passed it, after 
the operation, ten or twelve times over the 
palm of the hand, according to my every-day 
practice- One minute more at least would 
have been required for stropping. There are 
many men whose beards render it necessary 
for them to apply to the strop every day, 
and for a longer time, — and who are obliged 
to try first one razor and then another. But 
let us allow only a minute for this — one 
minute a day amounts to six hours five 



THE DOCTOR. 



399 



minutes in the year; and in fifty years to 
three hundred and four hours ten minutes, 
— time enough for an eighth language. 

Observe, also, that some languages are so 
easy, and others so nearly related to each 
other, that very much less than half the 
number of hours allowed in this computation 
would suffice for learning them. It is strictly 
true that in the time specified a man of good 
capacity might add seven more languages to 
the seven for which that computation was 
formed ; and that a person who has any re- 
markable aptitude for such studies might in 
that time acquire every language in which 
there are books to be procured. 

He bien, me suis-je enfin rendu croyable f Est-on con- 
tent?* 

See, Reader, what the value of time is, 
when put out at simple interest. But there 
is no simple interest in knowledge. What- 
ever funds you have in that Bank go on in- 
creasing by interest upon interest, — till the 
Bank fails. 



CHAPTER CLYI. 

AN ANECDOTE OF WESLEY, AND AN ARGU- 
MENT ARISING OUT OF IT, TO SHOW THAT 
THE TIME EMPLOYED IN SHAVING IS NOT 
SO MUCH LOST TIME ; AND YET THAT THE 
POET'S CALCULATION REMAINS OF PRAC- 
TICAL USE. 

Qiirsto medesimo anchor a con una altra gagliardissima 
ragione vi confermo. Lodovico Dominichi. 

There was a poor fellow among John 
Wesley's followers, who suffered no razor to 
approach his chin, and thought it impossible 
that any one could be saved who did : shav- 
ing was in his opinion a sin for which there 
could be no redemption. If it had been 
convenient for their interests to put him out 
of the way, his next of kin would have had 
no difficulty in obtaining a lettre cle cachet 
against him from a mad-doctor, and he might 
have been imprisoned for life, for this harm- 
less madness. This person came one day to 



Mr. Wesley, after sermon, and said to him 
in a manner which manifested great concern, 
" Sir, you can have no place in Heaven with- 
out a beard ! therefore, I entreat you, let 
your's grow immediately ! " 

Had he put the matter to "Wesley as a 
case of conscience, and asked that great 
economist of time how he could allow him- 
self every day of his life to bestow nine 
precious minutes upon a needless operation, 
the Patriarch of the Methodists might have 
been struck by the appeal, but he would soon 
have perceived that it could not be supported 
by any just reasoning. 

For in the first place, in a life of such in- 
cessant activity as his, the time which Wesley 
employed in shaving himself, was so much 
time for reflection. However busy he might 
be, as he always was, — however hurried he 
might be on that particular day, here was a 
portion of time, small indeed, but still a dis- 
tinct and apprehensible portion, in which he 
could call his thoughts to council. Like our 
excellent friend, he was a person who knew 
this, and he profited by it, as well knowing 
what such minutes of reflection are worth. 
For although thought cometh, like the wind, 
when it listeth, yet it listeth to come at re- 
gular appointed times, when the mind is in a 
state of preparation for it, and the mind will 
be brought into that state, unconsciously, 
by habit. We may be as ready for medita- 
tion at a certain hour, as we are for dinner, 
or for sleep ; and there will be just as little 
need for an effort of volition on our part. 

Secondly, Mr. Wesley would have con- 
sidered that if beards were to be worn, some 
care and consequently some time must be 
bestowed upon them. The beard must be 
trimmed occasionally, if you would not have 
it as ragged as an old Jew Clothes-man's : it 
must also be kept clean, if you would not 
have it inhabited like the Emperor Julian's ; 
and if you desired to have it like Aaron's 
you would oil it. Therefore it is probable 
that a Zebedeean, who is cleanly in his habits 
would not save any time by letting his beard 
grow. 

But it is certain that the practice of shav- 
ing must save time for fashionable men, 



400 



THE DOCTOR. 



though it must be admitted that these are 
persons whose time is not worth saving, who 
are not likely to make any better use of it, 
and who are always glad when any plea can 
be invented for throwing away a portion of 
what hangs so heavily upon their hands. 

Alas, Sir, what is a Gentleman's time ! 

there are some brains 

Can never lose their time, whate'er they do.* 

For in former times as much pains were be- 
stowed on dressing the beard, as in latter 
ones upon dressing the hair. Sometimes it 
was braided with threads of gold. It was 
dyed to all colours, according to the mode, 
and cut to all shapes, as you may here learn 
from John Taylor's SuperbicB Flagellum. 

Now a few lines to paper I will put, 

Of men's beards strange and variable cut : 

In which there's some do take as vain a pride, 

As almost in all other things beside. 

Some are reap'd most substantial like a brush, 

Which make a natural wit known by the bush : 

(And in my time of some men I have heard, 

Whose wisdom hath been only wealth and beard,) 

Many of these the proverb well doth fit, 

Which says Bush natural, more hair than wit. 

Some seem as they were starched stiff and fine, 

Like to the bristles of some angry swine : 

And some (to set their Love's desire on edge) 

Are cut and pruned like to a quickset hedge. 

Some like a spade, some like a fork, some square, 

Some round, some mowed like stubble, some stark bare, 

Some sharp stiletto fashion, dagger like, 

That may with whispering a man's eyes out pike : 

Some with the hammer cut or Roman T, 

Their beards extravagant reformed must be, 

Some with the quadrate, some triangle fashion, 

Some circular, some oval in translation, 

Some perpendicular in longitude, 

Some like a thicket for their crassitude, 

That heights, depths, breadths, triform, square, oval, 

round, 
And rules geometrical in beards are found ; 
Beside the upper lips strange variation, 
Corrected from mutation to mutation ; 
As't were from tithing unto tithing sent, 
Pride gives to Pride continual punishment. 
Some {spite their teelh) like thatched eaves downward 

grows, 
And some grow upwards in despite their nose. 
Some their mustachios of such length do keep, 
That very well they may a manger sweep ? 
Which in Beer, Ale. or Wine, they drinking plunge, 
And suck the liquor up as't were a sponge ; 
But 'tis a Sloven's beastly Pride I think 
To wash his beard where other men must drink. 
And some (because they will not rob the cup) 
Their upper chaps like pot hooks are turned up, 
The Barbers thus (like Tailors) still must be, 
Acquainted with each cut's variety. t 



t Taylor the Water Poet. 



In comparison with such fashions, clean 
shaving is clear gain of time. And to what 
follies and what extravagances would the 
whiskerandoed macaronies of Bond Street 
and St. James's proceed, if the beard once 
more were, instead of the neckcloth, to 
" make the man ! " — They who have put on 
the whole armour of Dandeyism, having 
their loins girt with — stays, and having put 
on the breast-plate of — buckram, and having 
their feet shod — by Hoby ! 

I myself, if I wore a beard, should cherish 
it, as the Cid Campeador did his, for my 
pleasure. I should regale it on a summer's 
day with rose water; and, without making it 
an Idol, I should sometimes offer incense to 
it, with a pastille, or with lavender and sugar. 
My children when they were young enough 
for such blandishments would have delighted 
to stroke, and comb, and curl it, and my 
grand-children in their turn would have 
succeeded to the same course of mutual en- 
dearment. 

Methinks then I have shown that although 
the Campbellian, or Pseudo-Campbellian 
assertion concerning the languages which 
might be acquired in the same length of 
time that is consumed in shaving, is no other- 
wise incorrect than as being short of the 
truth, it is not a legitimate consequence from 
that proposition that the time employed in 
shaving is lost time, because the care and 
culture of a beard would in all cases require 
as much, and in many would exact much 
more. But the practical utility of the pro- 
position, and of the demonstration with 
which it has here been accompanied, is not 
a whit diminished by this admission. For, 
what man is there, who, let his business, 
private or public, be as much as it will, 
cannot appropriate nine minutes a-day to 
any object that he likes ? 



THE DOCTOK. 



401 



CHAPTER CLVII. 

WHICH THE READER WILL FIND LIKE A 
ROASTED MAGGOT, SHORT AND SWEET. 

Malum quod minimum est, id minimum est malum. 

Plautus. 

But here one of those persons who acting 
upon the proverbial precept which bids us 
look before we leap, look so long that they 
never leap at all, offers a demurrer. 

It may be perfectly true, he observes, that 
a language may be learned in three hundred 
and ninety lessons of an hour each. But in 
your proposition the hour is broken into 
several small parts ; we will throw in an 
additional minute, and say six such portions. 
What I pray you can a lesson of ten minutes 
be worth ? 

To this I reply that short lessons are best, 
and are specifically enjoined in the new 
System of Education. Dr. Bell says in his 
Manual of Instructions for conducting 
Schools, " in the beginning never prescribe 
a lesson or task, which the Scholar can 
require more than ten minutes, or a quarter 
of an hour, to learn." 

On this authority, and on the authority of 
experience also, I recommend short lessons. 
For the same reasons, or for reasons nearly 
or remotely related to them, I like short 
stages, short accounts, short speeches, and 
short sermons ; I do not like short measure 
or short commons ; and, like Mr. Shandy, I 
dislike short noses. I know nothing about 
the relative merit of short-horned cattle. I 
doubt concerning the propriety of short 
meals. I disapprove of short parliaments 
and short petticoats ; I prefer puffpaste to 
short pie-crust ; and I cut this chapter short 
for the sake of those readers who may like 
short chapters. 



CHAPTER CLVIH. 

DR. DOVE'S PRECEPTORIAL PRESCRIPTION 
TO BE TAKEN BY THOSE WHO NEED IT. 

Some strange devise, I know, each youthful wight 

Would here expect, or lofty brave assay : 

But I'll the simple truth in simple wise convey. 

Henry More. 

Now comes the question of a youth after my 
own heart, so quick in his conclusions that 
his leap seems rather to keep pace with his 
look than to follow it. He will begin to- 
morrow, and only asks my advice upon the 
method of proceeding. 

Take the Grammar of any modern lan- 
guage, and read the dialogues in it, till you 
are acquainted with the common connecting 
words, and know the principal parts of 
speech by sight. Then look at the de- 
clensions and the verbs — you will already 
have learned something of their inflections, 
and may now commit them to memory, or 
write them down. Read those lessons, which 
you ought to read daily — in a bible of this 
language, having the English bible open 
beside it. Your daily task will soon be 
either to learn the vocabulary, or to write 
exercises, or simply to read, according to 
the use which you mean to make of your 
new acquirement. You must learn me- 
moriter, and exercise yourself in writing if 
you wish to educate your ear and your 
tongue for foreign service ; but all that is 
necessary for your own instruction and 
delight at home may be acquired by the eye 
alone. 

Qui mihi Discipulus es — a/pis atque doceri, 

try this method for ten minutes a- day, per- 
severingly, and you will soon be surprised at 
your own progress. 

Quod tibi deest, d te ipso mutuare, — 

it is Cato's advice. 

Ten minutes you can bestow upon a 
modern language, however closely you may 
be engaged in pursuits of immediate ne- 
cessity ; even tho' you should be in a public 
office from which Joseph Hume, or some of 
Lis worthy compeers, has moved for volu- 



►402 



THE DOCTOR. 



urinous returns. (Never work at extra 
hours upon such returns, unless extra pay is 
allowed for the additional labour and con- 
finement to the desk, as in justice it ought 
to be. But if you are required to do so by 
the superiors, who ought to protect you from 
such injustice, send petition after petition to 
Parliament, praying that when the abolition 
or mitigation of slavery shall be taken into 
consideration, your case may be considered 
also.) 

Any man who will, may command ten 
minutes. Exercet philosophia regnum suum, 
says Seneca ; dot tempus, non accipit. Non 
est res subcisiva, ordinaria est, domina est; 
adest, et jubet. Ten minutes the Under 
Graduate who reads this may bestow upon 
German, even though he should be in train- 
ing for the University races. Ten minutes 
he can bestow upon German, which I re- 
commend because it is a master-key for 
many doors both of language and of know- 
ledge . His mind will be refreshed even by 
this brief change of scene and atmosphere. 
In a few weeks (I repeat) he will wonder at 
his own progress : and in a few years, if he 
is good for anything — if the seed has not 
been sown upon a stony place, nor among 
thorns, — ■ he will bless me his unknown be- 
nefactor, for showing him by what small 
savings of time a man may become rich in 
mind. " And so I end my counsel, beseech- 
ing thee to begin to follow it." * 

But not unto me be the praise ! 
Doctor, O my guide, philosopher and 
friend ! 

Like to the bee thou everywhere didst roam 

Spending thy spirits in laborious care, 
And nightly brought'st thy gathered honey home, 

As a true workman in so great affair ; 
First of thine own deserving take the fame, 

Next of thy friend's ; his due he gives to thee, 
That love of learning may renown thy name, 

And leave it richly to posterity.! 

I have but given freely what freely I have 
received. This knowledge I owe, — and what 
indeed is there in my intellectual progress 
which I do not owe to my ever-beloved 
friend and teacher, my moral physician ? 



Eupjiues, A. M. 



t Restituta. 



— his plausive words 
He scattered not in ears, but grafted them 
To grow there and to bear.f 

To his alteratives and tonics I am chiefly 
(under Providence) indebted for that sanity 
of mind which I enjoy, and that strength, — 
whatever may be its measure, — which I 
possess. It was his method, — his way, he 
called it ; in these days when we dignify 
everything, it might be called the Dovean 
system or the Columbian, which he would 
have preferred. 



CHAPTER CLIX. 

THE AUTHOR COMPARES HIMSELF AND THE 
DOCTOR TO CARDINAL WOLSET AND KING 
HENRY VIII., AND SUGGESTS SUNDRY 
SIMILES FOR THE STYLE OF HIS BOOK. 

I doubt not but some will liken me to the Lover in a 
modern Comedy, who was combing his peruke and setting 
his cravat before his mistress ; and being asked by her 
when he intended to begin his court ? replied, he had 
been doing it all this while. Dryden. 

It cannot be necessary for me to remind the 
benevolent reader, that at those times when 
a half or a quarter-witted critic might cen- 
sure me for proceeding egotistically, I am 
nevertheless carrying on the primary inten- 
tion with which this work was undertaken, 
as directly as if the Doctor were the imme- 
diate and sole theme of every chapter ; — 

Non enim excursus hie — sed opus ipsum est.§ 

For whatever does not absolutely relate to 
him is derived directly or indirectly from 
him ; it is directly derivative when I am 
treating upon subjects which it has been my 
good fortune to hear him discuss ; and in- 
directly when I am led to consider the topics 
that incidentally arise, according to the way 
of thinking in which he trained me to go. 

As Wolsey inscribed upon one of his mag- 
nificent buildings the words Ego et Rex 
Meus, so might I place upon the portal of 
this Edifice Ego et Doctor Meus, for I am as 
much his creature as Wolsey was the crea- 
ture of bluff King Harry, — as confessedly 



% SHAKESrEARE. 



§ Puny. 



THE DOCTOR. 



403 



so, and as gratefully. Without the King's 
favour Wolsey could not have founded 
Christ Church ; without the Doctors friend- 
ship I could not have edified this monument 
to his memory. Without the King's favour 
Wolsey would never have obtained the Car- 
dinal's hat; and had it not been for the 
favour, and friendship, and example of the 
Doctor, never should I have been entitled to 
wear that cap, my reasons for not wearing 
which have heretofore been stated, — that cap 
which to one who knows how to wear it be- 
comingly, is worth more than a coronet or a 
mitre ; and confers upon the wearer a more 
lasting distinction. 

His happy mind, like the not less happy 
and not more active intellect of Humboldt 
King of Travellers, was excursive in its 
habits. To such discursive — or excursive- 
ness I also was prone, and he who observed 
in me this propensity encouraged it, temper- 
ing, however, that encouragement with his 
wonted discretion. Let your imagination, 
he said, fly like the lady-bird, 

North, south, and east, and west, 

but take care that it always comes home to 
rest. 

Perhaps it may be said therefore of his 
unknown friend and biographer as Passovier 
said of Michel de Montaigne, il estoit per- 
sonnage hardy, qui se croyoit, et comme tel se 
laissoit aisement emporter a la beaute de son 
esprit ; tellement que par ses ecrits il prenoit 
plaisir de desplaire plaisamment. 

Perhaps also some one who for his own 
happiness is conversant with the literature 
of that affluent age, may apply to the said 
unknown what Balzac said of the same great 
Michael, Michael the second, (Michael Angel o 
was Michael the first,) Montaigne sqait lien 
ce qui il dit ; mais, sans violer le respect qui 
luy est deu, je pense aussi, qiiil ne scait pas 
toujour s ce quHl va dire. 

Dear Reader you may not only say this of 
the unknown, sans violer le respect qui luy 
est deu, but you will pay him what he will 
consider both a great and a just compliment, 
in saying so. 

For I have truly endeavoured to observe 



the precepts of my revered Mentor, and to 
follow his example, which I venture to hope 
the judicious reader will think I have done 
with some success. He may have likened 
me for the manner in which I have conducted 
this great argument to a gentle falcon, which, 
however high it may soar to command a 
wider region with its glance, and however 
far it may fly in pursuit of its quarry, returns 
always to the falconer's hand. 

Learned and discreet reader, if you should 
not always discern the track of associations 
over which I have passed as fleetly as Ca- 
milla over the standing corn ; — if the story 
which I am relating to thee should seem in 
its course sometimes to double like a hare 
in her flight, or in her sport, — sometimes to 
bound forward like a jerboa, or kangaroo, 
and with such a bound that like Milton's 
Satan it overleaps all bounds ; or even to 
skip like a flea, so as to be here, there and 
everywhere, taking any direction rather 
than that which will bring it within your 
catch ; — learned and discreet reader, if any 
of these similitudes should have occurred to 
you, think of Pindar, read Landor's Gebir, 
and remember what Mr. Coleridge has said 
for himself formerly, and prophetically for 
me, intelligenda non intellectum adfero. 
Would you have me plod forward like a tor- 
toise in my narration, foot after foot in 
minute steps, dragging his slow tail along ? 
Or with such deliberate preparation for pro- 
gressive motion that like a snail the slime of 
my way should be discernible ? 

A bye-stander at chess who is ignorant of 
the game presently understands the straight 
and lateral movement of the rooks, the dia- 
gonal one of the bishops, and the power which 
the Queen possesses of using both. But the 
knight perplexes him, till he discovers that 
the knight's leap, eccentric as at first it seems, 
is nevertheless strictly regulated. 

We speak of erratic motions among the 
heavenly bodies ; but it is because the course 
they hold is far beyond our finite compre- 
hension. 

Therefore I entreat thee, dear reader, thou 
who hast the eye of a hawk or of a sea gull, 
and the intellectual speed of a greyhound, 



404 



THE DOCTOR. 



do not content thyself with glancing over 
this book as an Italian Poet says 

Precip itevolissimevolmente. 

But I need not exhort thee thus, who art 
quick to apprehend and quick to feel, and 
sure to like at first sight whatever upon 
better acquaintance deserves to be loved. 



CHAPTER CLX. 

MENTION OF ONE TOR WHOM THE GERMANS 
WOULD COIN A DESIGNATION WHICH MIGHT 
BE TRANSLATED A ONCE-READER. MANY 
MINDS IN THE SAME MAN. A POET'S 
UNREASONABLE REQUEST. THE AUTHOR 
OFFERS GOOD ADVICE TO HIS READERS, 
AND ENFORCES IT BY AN EPISCOPAL 
OPINION. 

Judge not before 

Thou know mine intent : 

But read me throughout, 
And then say thy fill ; 

As thou in opinion 
Art minded and bent, 

Whether it be 

Either good or ill. E. P. 

I have heard of a man who made it a law 
for himself never to read any book again 
which had greatly pleased him on a first 
perusal ; lest a second reading should in 
some degree disturb the pleasurable im- 
pression which he wished to retain of it. 
This person must have read only for his 
amusement, otherwise he would have known 
that a book is worth little if it deserves to 
be perused but once : and moreover that as 
the same landscape appears differently at 
different seasons of the year, at morning and 
at evening, in bright weather and in cloudy, 
by moonlight and at noon-day, so does the 
same book produce a very different effect 
upon the same reader at different times and 
under different circumstances. 

I have elsewhere said that the man of one 
book is proverbially formidable ; but the 
man of one reading, though he should read 
through an ample library would never be- 
come so. 

The studious man who at forty re-peruses 
books which he has read in his youth or 
early manhood, vivid as his recollections of 
them may be, finds them new, because he 



brings another mind to the perusal. Worth- 
less ones with which he may formerly have 
been delighted appear flat and unprofitable 
to his maturer judgment ; and on the other 
hand sterling merit which he was before un- 
able to appreciate, he can now understand and 
value, having in his acquired knowledge and 
habits of reflection the means of assaying it. 

Sometimes a Poet, when he publishes 
what in America would be called a lengthy 
poem, with lengthy annotations, advises the 
reader in his preface, not to read the notes 
in their places, as they occur, lest they 
should interrupt his clear perception and 
enjoyment of the piece, but to read the 
poem by itself at first; and then, for his 
more full contentment, to begin again, and 
peruse the notes in their order, whereby he 
will be introduced to the more minute and 
recondite merits of the work. 

If the poets who calculate upon many 
such readers are not wise in their generation, 
they are happy in it. 

What I request of my dear readers is far 
more reasonable, and yet perhaps not much 
more likely to be granted ; I request them, 
that injustice to themselves, — for that they 
may not lose any part of the pleasure which 
I have designed for them ; and in justice to 
me, — that I may not be defrauded of any 
portion of that grateful applause, which 
after a due perusal they will undoubtedly 
bestow upon the benevolent unknown ; — 
and in justice to the ever-honoured subject 
of these volumes, — lest a hasty and erroneous 
judgment of his character should be formed, 
when it is only partially considered; — I 
request that they would not dip into these 
volumes before they read them, nor while 
they are reading them, but that they would 
be pleased to go through the book regularly, 
in the order of the chapters, and that when 
they recommend the book to their friends, 
(as they will do with the friendly intention 
of contributing to their entertainment and 
instruction,) they would particularly advise 
them to begin at the beginning, or more 
accurately speaking at the seventh chapter 
before the beginning, and so peruse it con- 
secutively. 



THE DOCTOR. 



405 



So doing, reader, thou wilt perceive the 
method and the order of the work, develop- 
ing before thee as thou readest ; thou wilt 
then comprehend and admire the connection 
of the parts, and their dependence upon 
each other, and the coherence and beauty of 
the whole. Whereas were } 7 ou only to dip 
into it here and there, you would from such 
a cursory and insufficient inspection come 
perhaps to the same conclusion, " wherein 
nothing was concluded" as the man did 
concerning Bailey's Dictionary, who upon 
returning the book to a neighbour from 
whom he had borrowed it, said that he was 
much obliged to him for the loan, and that 
he had read it through, from beginning to 
end, and had often been much entertained 
by it, and was sure that the Author must 
have been a very knowing person ; — but — 
added he — to confess the truth, I have 
never been able clearly to make out what 
the book is about. 

Now as opposite causes will sometimes 
produce a like effect, thou mightest, by 
reading this book partially, come to the 
same inconclusive conclusion concerning it, 
that our friend did by reading straight 
forward through Bailey's Dictionary ; though 
considering what there is in that Dictionary, 
his time might have been worse employed. 
— I very well remember when I was some 
ten years old, learning from an abridgment 
of it as much about Abracadabra as I know 
now. I exhort thee therefore to begin cib 
ovo, with the ante-initial chapters, and to 
read the whole regularly ; and this advice I 
give, bearing in mind what Bishop Hacket 
says in his life of the Lord Keeper, Arch- 
bishop Williams, when he inserts a speech of 
that Chancellor-Prelate's, at full length : 

" This he delivered, thus much : and I 
took counsel with myself not to abbreviate it. 
For it is so compact and pithy that he that 
likes a little, must like it all. Plutarch 
gives a rule for sanity to him that eats a 
tortoise, f/ o\t]v, ») /xri o\ojg, " eat it up all, 
or not a whit." The reason assigned for 
this rule would look better in Plutarch's 
Greek than in the Episcopal English ; being- 
paraphrased it imports that a small portion 



of such food is apt to produce intestinal 
pains ; but that a hearty meal has the 
wholesome effect of those pills which by a 
delicate and beautiful euphuism of Dr. 
Kitchener's are called Peristaltic Persuaders. 
" So," proceeds the Bishop, " the speech of 
a great orator is instructive when it is 
entire : pinch it into an epitome, you mangle 
the meaning and avile the eloquence." 



CHAPTER CLXI. 

WESLEY AND THE DOCTOR OF THE SAME 
OPINION UPON THE SUBJECT OF THESE 
CHAPTERS. A STUPENDOUS EXAMPLE OF 
CTCLOP^DIAN STOLIDITY. 

A good razor never hurts, or scratches. Neither would 
good wit, were men as tractable as their chins. But in- 
stead of parting with our intellectual bristles quietly, we 
set them up, and wriggle. Who can wonder then if we 
are cut to the bone ? Guesses at Truth. 

Both Mr. Wesley and Dr. Dove, who, much 
as they differed concerning Methodism, 
agreed remarkably well in their general 
method of thinking, would have maintained 
the morality and propriety of shaving, 
against all objections founded upon the 
quantity of time expended in that practice. 
If the one had preached or the other des- 
canted on the 27th verse of the 19th Chapter 
of Leviticus, each would have shown that no 
general application could be made of the 
prohibition therein contained. But what 
would they have said to the following phy- 
sical argument which is gravely advanced in 
Dr. Abraham Rees's New Cyclopedia ? 

" The practice of cutting the hair of the 
head and the beard is attended with a pro- 
digious increase of the secretion of the 
matter of hair. It is ascertained that a 
man of fifty years of age will have cut from 
his head above thirteen feet, or twice his 
own length of hair ; and of his beard, in the 
last twenty-five years of the same period — 
above eight feet. The hair likewise, besides 
this enormous length, will be thicker than if 
it had been left uncut, and must lose most 
of its juices by evaporation, from having its 
tube and the ends of its fibres always ex^ 



406 



THE DOCTOR. 



posed. — The custom of shaving the beard, 
and cutting the hair of the head, has, we 
believe, been justly deprecated by some 
physiologists. The latter has been supposed, 
and with much apparent reason, to weaken 
the understanding, by diverting the blood 
from the brain to the surface of the head. 
The connection which exists between the 
beard and the organs of generation, and 
likewise between the muscular strength of 
the individual, would seem to render it im- 
proper to interfere with its natural mode of 
growth. Bichat attributes the superior 
strength of the ancients to their custom of 
wearing their beards; and those men who 
do not shave at present are distinguished for 
vigour and hardihood." 

Thus far we have had to deal only with a 
grave folly, and I shall follow the writer no 
farther. 

What would John Wesley and Daniel 
Dove have said to the speculations and 
assertions in this curious passage ? They 
were both men of reading, both speculative 
men and both professors, each in his way, of 
the art of medicine. They would have 
asked what proof could be produced that 
men who let their beards grow are stronger 
than those who shave, or that the ancients 
were superior in bodily strength to the men 
of the present day ? Thus they would have 
treated his assumed facts ; and for his phi- 
losophy, they would have inferred, that if 
cutting the hair weakened the understand- 
ing, and the story of Samson were a physical 
allegory, the person who wrote and reasoned 
thus must have been sheared at least twice 
a week from his childhood. 

If on the other hand they had been as- 
sured that the writer had worn his hair long, 
then they would have affirmed that, as in 
the case of the Agonist, it was " robustious 
to no purpose." 

When the Russian soldiers were first 
compelled to part with their beards that they 
might look like other European troops, they 
complained that the cold struck into their 
jaws and gave them the tooth-ache. The 
sudden deprivation of a warm covering 
might have occasioned this and other local 



affections. But they are not said to have 
complained that they had lost their wits. 

They are said indeed in the days of Peter 
the Great to have made a ready use of them 
in relation to this very subject. Other 
arguments had been used in vain for per- 
suading them to part with that comfortable 
covering which nature had provided for 
their cheeks and chins, when one of their 
Priests represented to them that their good 
Czar had given orders for them to be shaved 
only from the most religious motives and a 
special consideration of what concerned them 
most nearly. They were about to march 
against the Turks. The Turks as they well 
knew wore beards, and it was of the utmost 
importance that they should distinguish 
themselves from the misbelievers by this 
visible mark, for otherwise their protector 
St. Nicholas in whom they trusted would not 
know his own people. This was so cogent a 
reason that the whole army assented to it, 
and a general shaving took place. But 
when the campaign against the Turks was 
over and the same troops were ordered to 
march against the Swedes, the soldiers called 
for the Priest, and told him they must now 
let their beards grow again ; — for the 
Swedes shaved, and they must take care St. 
Nicholas might know his friends from his 
foes. 



CHAPTER CLXII. 

amount of evert individual's personal 
sins according to the estimate of 
mr. toplady. the doctor's opinion 
thereon. a bill for certain church 
repairs. a romish legend which is 
likely to be true, and part op a 
Jesuit's sermon. 

Mankind, tho' satirists with jobations weary us, 
Has only two weak parts if fairly reckon'd ; 

The first of which, is trifling with things serious ; 
And seriousness in trifles is the second. 

Remove these little rubs, whoe'er knows how, 

And fools will be as scarce, — as wise men now. 

Bishop. 

It is not often that a sportive or fanciful 
calculation like that of Mr. Campbell can be 



THE DOCTOR. 



407 



usefully applied, or in the dialect of the 
Evangelical Magazine, improved. 

I remember well the look, and the voice 
and the manner with which my ever-to-be- 
honoured friend pointed out to me a memo- 
rable passage of this kind in the works of 
the Reverend Augustus Toplady, of whom 
he used to say that he was a strong-headed, 
wrong-headed man ; and that in such men 
you always found the stronger the head, the 
wronger the opinions ; and the more wrongly 
their opinions were taken up, the more 
strongly they were persisted in. 

Toplady after some whimsical calculations 
concerning the national debt, proceeds to a 
"spiritual improvement" of the" subject. 
He asserts that because " we never come up 
to that holiness which God requires, we 
commit a sin every second of our existence," 
and in this view of the matter, he says, our 
dreadful account stands as follows. At ten 
years old each of us is chargeable with 
315,036,000 sins ; and summing up the 
account at every intermediate stage of ten 
years, he makes the man of fourscore debtor 
for 2,510,288,000. 

In Toplady's creed there were no venial 
sins, any more than in Sir George Mac- 
kenzie's, who used this impious argument 
for the immortality of the soul, that it must 
needs be immortal because the smallest sin, 
" the least peccadillo against the Almighty 
who is Infinite cannot be proportionably 
punished in the swift glass of man's short 
life." 

And this man, said the Doctor, laying his 
finger upon Toplady's book, thinks himself 
a Christian, and reads the Bible and believes 
it ! He prints and vouches for the au- 
thenticity of a painter's bill at Cirencester 
delivered in to the Churchwarden of an 
adjacent parish in these words : — Mr. 
Charles Ferebee, Churchwarden of Sid- 
dington, to Joseph Cook, Debtor : To 
mending the Commandments, altering the 
Belief, and making a new Lord's Prayer, 
£l Is. 

The Painter made no such alteration in 
the Christian creed, as he himself did, when 
he added to it, that the Almighty has pre- 



destined the infinitely greater number of his 
creatures to eternal misery ! 

" God," says good old Adam Littleton, 
"made no man purposely to damn him. Death 
was one of man's own inventions, and will be 
the reward of his evil actions." 

The Roman Catholics have a legend from 
which we may see what proportion of the 
human race they suppose to be redeemed 
from perdition ; it relates that on the day of 
St. Bernard's death there died threescore 
thousand persons, of whom only four souls 
were saved, the Saint's being one; — the 
salvage therefore is one in fifteen thousand ! 

But one legend may be set against another, 
and Felix Faber the Monk of Ulm gives 
us one of better import, when he relates 
the story of a lovely child who in her twelfth 
year was stricken with the plague, during 
the great pestilence, which, in the middle of 
the fourteenth century, swept off a greater 
portion of the human race than is ever known 
to have perished in any similar visitation. As 
the disease increased upon her, she became 
more beautiful and more cheerful, looking 
continually upward and rejoicing ; for she 
said she saw that Heaven was open, and 
innumerable lights flowing upward thither, 
as in a stream, — which were the souls of 
the elect, ascending as they were released. 
When they who stood beside her bed were 
silent and seemed as if they gave no credit 
to her words, she told them that what she 
saw was no delusion, and added in token of 
its sure truth, that her own death would 
take place that night, and her father die on 
the third day following : she then pointed 
to seven persons, foretelling to each the day 
of their decease, and named some others 
who were not present, who would, in like 
manner, be cut off* by the plague, saying at 
what time each of them would expire ; and 
in every instance, according to the legend, 
the prediction was punctually fulfilled. This 
is a tale which may in all its parts be true ; 
for such predictions at such a time, when 
whole cities were almost depopulated by the 
pestilence, were likely not only to be veri- 
fied, but in a great degree to bring about 
their own verification ; and the state of her 



408 



THE DOCTOR. 



mind would lead to her interpretation of 
those ocular spectra which were probably 
effects of the disease, without supposing it 
to be a happy delirium, heightening her ex- 
pectation of that bliss which faith had assured 
to her, and into which her innocent spirit 
was about to enter. 

Had the story been fabricated it would 
not have been of so humane a character. 
The Roman Catholics, as is well known, 
believe that all who are not of what they 
please to call the Holy, Roman, Catholic and 
Apostolic Church, are doomed to everlasting 
perdition ; this doctrine is part of the creed 
which their laity profess, and to which their 
clergy swear. If any member of that Church 
reject an opinion so uncharitable in itself, 
and in its consequences so infinitely mis- 
chievous, he may be a Roman Catholic by 
his connections, by courtesy, by policy, or 
by fear ; but he is not so in reality, for he 
refuses to believe in the infallibility of his 
Church, which has on no point declared itself 
more peremptorily than upon this. All other 
Christians of every persuasion, all Jews, all 
Mahometans, and all Heathens are goats ; 
only the Romanists are the Sheep of God's 
pasture, — and the Inquisitors, we may sup- 
pose, his Lambs ! Of this their own flock 
they hold that one half are lost sheep : though 
a liberal opinion, it is esteemed the most 
probable one upon that subject, and the best 
founded, because it is written that one shall 
be taken and one left, and that of the ten 
virgins who went with their lamps to meet 
the bridegroom, five were wise, and five 
foolish. 

An eloquent Jesuit preaching before the 
Court in his own country stated this opinion, 
and made an application from it to his 
hearers with characteristic integrity and 
force. " According to this doctrine," said 
he, " which is held by many Saints, (and is 
not the most straitened, but a large and 
favourable one,) if I were this day preaching 
before another auditory, I should say that 
half of those who heard me belonged to the 
right hand, and half unto the left. Truly a 
most wonderful and tremendous considera- 
tion, that of Christians and Catholics, en- 



lightened with the faith, bred up with the 
milk of the Church, and assisted by so many 
sacraments and aids, half only should be 
saved ! That of ten men who believe in 
Christ, and for whom Christ died, five should 
perish ! That of an hundred fifty should be 
condemned ! That of a thousand five 
hundred go to burn eternally in Hell ! who 
is there that does not tremble at the 
thought ? But if we look at the little Chris- 
tianity and the little fear of God with which 
men live, we ought rather to give thanks to 
the Divine Mercy, than to be astonished at 
this justice. 

" This is what I should say if I were 
preaching before a different audience. But 
because to-day is a day of undeceiving," — 
(it was the first Sunday in Advent,) — 
" and the present Auditory is what it is, let 
not those who hear me think or persuade 
themselves, that this is a general rule for all, 
even although they may be or call them- 
selves Catholics. As in this life there is a 
wide difference between the great and 
powerful and those who are not so, so will it 
be in the Day of Judgement. They are on 
the right hand to-day, but as the world will 
then have had so great a turn, it is much to 
be feared that many of them will then be on 
the left. Of others half are to be saved, and 
of the great and powerful, how many? 
Will there be a third part saved? Will 
there be a tenth ? I shall only say (and 
would not venture to say it, unless it were 
the expressed oracle and infallible sentence 
of supreme Truth,) I shall only say that 
they will be very few, and those by great 
wonder. Let the great and mighty listen, 
not to any other than the Lord himself in 
the Book of Wisdom. Prcebite aurem vos 
qui continetis multitudinem, quoniam data est 
a Domino potestas vobis. ' Give ear ye that 
rule the people, for power is given you of 
the Lord.' Ye princes, ye ministers who 
have the people under your command, ye to 
whom the Lord hath given this power to 
rule and govern the commonwealth, prcebite 
aurem, give ear to me ! And what have 
they to hear from God who give ear so ill to 
men ? A proclamation of the Day of Judge- 



THE DOCTOR. 



409 



merit far more portentous and terrible than 
that which has to summon the dead ! Ju- 
dicium durissimum his qui prcesunt fiet ; 
exiguo enim conceditur misericordia ; potentes 
autem potenter tormenta patientur : A sharp 
judgement shall be to them that be in high 
places. For mercy will pardon the mean ; 
but mighty men shall be mightily tormented. 
The Judgement with which God will judge 
those who rule and govern is to be a sharp 
Judgement, because mercy will be granted 
to the mean; but the mighty shall be 
mightily tormented, potentes potenter tormenta 
patientur. See here in what that power is 
to end which is so greatly desired, which is 
so panted after, which is so highly esteemed, 
which is so much envied ! The mighty fear 
no other power now, because the power is in 
their own hands, but when the sharp Judge- 
ment comes they will then see whose Power 
is greater than theirs ; potentes potenter 
patientur." 

This was a discourse which might have 
made Felix tremble. 



CHAPTER CLXIII. 

AN OPINION OF EL VENERABLE PADRE 
MAESTRO FRAY LUIS DE GRANADA, AND 
A PASSAGE QUOTED FROM HIS WORKS, 
BECAUSE OF THE PECULIAR BENEFIT TO 
WHICH PERSONS OF A CERTAIN DENOMI- 
NATION WILL FIND THEMSELVES ENTITLED 
UPON READING OR HEARING IT READ. 

Chacun tourne en realties, 
Autant qu'il pent, ses propres songes ; 

Vhomme est de. glace aux verites, 
II est defeu pour les mensonges. 

Li Fontaine. 

The translated extract in the preceding 
Chapter from the most eloquent of the 
Portuguese preachers, el mismissimo Vieyra, 
en su mesma ?nesmedad, as he is called in 
Fray Gerundio, brings to my mind the most 
eloquent and the most popular of the Spanish 
divines, P. M. Luis de Granada. He held 
an opinion wherein, (as will appear hereafter,) 
the Philosopher of Doncaster did not agree 
with him, that everything under the sky 



was created for man directly or indirectly, 
either for his own use, or for the use of 
those creatures which minister to it ; for, 
says the Spaniard, if he does not eat mosqui- 
toes he eats the birds that eat them ; if he 
does not eat the grass of the field, the cattle 
graze there that are necessary for his use. 

I have a very particular reason for giving 
the famous and Venerable Dominican's 
opinion in his own words. 

Todo quanto ay debaxo del Cielo, 6 es para 
el Jwmbre, 6 para cosas de que se ha de servir 
el hombre ; porque si el no come el mosquito 
que buela por el ayre, come lo el pajaro de que 
el se mantiene ; y si el no pace la yerva del 
campo, pacela el ganado, de que el tiene 
necessidad. 

My reason for transcribing this sentence 
in its original language, is that by so doing I 
might confer a great act of kindness upon 
every Roman Catholic who reads the present 
Chapter. For be it known unto every such 
reader, that by perusing it, he becomes 
entitled to an indulgence of an hundred 
days, granted by D. Pasqual Aragon, Car- 
dinal by the Title of Santa Balbina, and 
Archbishop of Toledo ; and moreover to 
eighteen several indulgences of forty days 
each, granted by eighteen most illustrious 
and most reverend Lords Archbishops and 
Bishops ; such indulgences having been pro- 
claimed, para los que leyeren, 6 oyeren leer 
qualquier capitulo, parr of o, operiodo de lo que 
escrivio el dicho V. P. M. Fray Luis de 
Granada. 

It might be a question for the casuists 
whether a good papist reading the paragraph 
here presented to him, and not assenting to 
the opinion expressed therein, would be 
entitled to this discount of eight hundred 
and twenty days from his time due in 
Purgatory. But if he accords with the 
Venerable Dominican, he can no more doubt 
his own right to participate in the Episcopal 
and Archiepiscopal grants, than he can call 
in question the validity of the grants them- 
selves. 



410 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CLXIY. 

AN INQUIRY, IN THE POULTRY-YARD, TNTO 
THE TRUTH OF AN OPINION EXPRESSED 
BY ARISTOTLE. 

This is some liquor poured out of his bottle ; 
A deadly draught for those of Aristotle. 

J. C. sometime of M. H. Oxon. 

Aristotle was of opinion that those animals 
which have been tamed, or are capable of 
being so, are of a better nature, or higher 
grade, than wild ones, and that it is advan- 
tageous for them that they should be brought 
into subjection by man, because under his 
protection they are safe. 

Tm f/Av ya.i> vifAt^tx, tojv otygiw fiiX-rio) rr t v Quirtv, rovroi? 
5s <zu.<ri (ZiXrtov «££S<r0«s< vx' owdgaffov, rvy%&vu yoc.% 
fftuTYigia,; otlrug. 

Our Philosopher was not better disposed to 
agree with Aristotle upon this point, than 
with the more commonly received notion of 
Father Luis de Granada. He thought that 
unless men were more humane in the days of 
Alexander the Great than they are now, 
and than they have been in all times of 
which we have any knowledge, the Stagyrite 
must have stated what ought to be, rather 
than what is. 

So our Philosopher thought; and so I, 
faithfully retaining the lessons of my beloved 
Master, am prepared to prove. I will go no 
farther than to the Poultry Yard, and bor- 
rowing the names of the Dramatis Personse 
from a nursery story, one of his Uncle 
William's, which has been told with the 
greatest possible success to all my children 
in succession, as it was to me, and their 
Uncles and Aunts before them, I will ques- 
tion the Poultry upon the subject, and 
faithfully report their evidence. 

Voich' avete gV intelletti sani 
Mirate la dottrina eke s'asconde 
Sotto queste coperte alle e profonde.* 

" Chick-pick, Chick-pick, which is best for 
you ; to be a wild Chick-pick, or to live, as 
you are living, under the protection, and 
care, and regular government of Man ? " 

* Orlando Innamorato. 



Chick-pick answers and says, "Nature 
provides for my support quite as abundantly 
and as surely as you can do, and more 
wisely; you do not make my life happier or 
more secure while it lasts, and you shorten 
it ; I have nothing to thank you for." 

" Hen-pen, Hen-pen, which is best for 
you ; to be a wild Hen-pen, or to live as you 
are living, under the protection, and care, 
and regular government of Man ? " 

Hen-pen answers and says : " Had I been 
bred up as my mother if she had been a 
wild Hen-pen would have bred me, I should 
have had the free use of my wings. I have 
nothing to thank you for ! You take my 
eggs. Sometimes you make me - hatch in 
their stead a little unnatural brood who run 
into the water, in spite of all my fears and 
of all that I can do to prevent them. You 
afford me protection when you can from 
foumarts and foxes ; and you assist me in 
protecting my chicken from the kite, and 
the hawk, but this is that you may keep them 
for your own eating ; you fatten them in 
coops, and then comes the Cook ! " 

" Cock-lock which is best for you ; to be a 
wild Cook-lock, or to live as you are living, 
under the protection, and care, and regular 
government of Man ? " 

Cock-lock answers and says, " Is there a 
man impudent enough to ask me the ques- 
tion ! You squailf at us on Shrove Tuesday; 
you feed us with Cock-bread, and arm us 
with steel spurs, that we may mangle and 
kill each other for your sport ; you build 
cock-pits ; you make us fight Welsh mains, 
and give subscription cups to the winner. 
And what would that Cock-lock say, who 
was a Cock-lock till you made him a Capon- 
lapon ! " 

"Duck-luck, Duck-luck, which is best 
for you, to be a wild Duck-luck, or to live 
as you are living under the protection, and 
care, and regular government of Man ? " 

Duck-luck answers and says, "I was 
created to be one of the most privileged of 
God's creatures, born to. the free enjoyment 



t Squail : " To throw a stick, as at a cock." Grose's 
Provincial Glossary. 



THE DOCTOR. 



411 



of three elements. My wings were to bear 
me whither I would thro' the sky, as change 
of season required change of climate for my 
well being ; the waters were to afford me 
pastime and food, the earth repose and 
shelter. Xo bird more joyous, more active, 
more clean or more delighting in cleanliness 
than I should be, if the society of man had 
not corrupted my instincts. Under your 
regular government my wings are rendered 
useless to me ; I waddle about the miserable 
precincts to which I am confined, and dabble 
in the dirt and grope for garbage in your 
gutters. And see there are green peas in the 
garden ! " 

" Turkey-lurkey, Turkey-lurkey, which is 
best for you ; to be a wild Turkey-lurkey, 
or to live as you are living, under the pro- 
tection and care, and regular government 
of Man P " 

Turkey-lurkey answers and says, " You 
cram us as if to show that there may be as 
much cruelty exercised in giving food as in 
withholding it. Look at the Norwich 
coaches for a week before Christmas ! Can 
we think of them, think you? without wish- 
ing ourselves in the woods like our blessed 
ancestors, where chine, sausages and oyster- 
sauce are abominations which never have 
been heard of!" Sir Turkey-lurkey then 
shook and ruined and reddened the collops 
of his neck, and gobbled out his curses upon 
man. 

" Goosey-loosey, Goosey-loosey, which is 
best for you ; to be a wild Goosey-loosey, 
or to live as you are living, under the pro- 
tection, and care, and regular government of 
Man?" 

Goosey-loosey answers and says, " It is 
not for any kindness to us that you turn us 
into your stubbles. You pluck us that you 
may lie the softer upon our feathers. You 
pull our quills that you may make pens of 
them. O St. Michael, what havoc is com- 
mitted amongst us under the sanction of 
your arch-angelic name ! And O Satan ! 
what punishment wilt thou exact from those 
inhuman wretches who keep us in a state of 
continual suffering in order to induce a 
disease by which our livers may be enlarged 



for the gratification of wicked epicures ! 
"We might curse man for all that we know 
of his protection, and care, and regular go- 
vernment ; but" — 

" But ! " said Goosey-loosey, and lifting up 
her wings significantly she repeated a third 
time that word "But ! " and with a toss of the 
head and a twist of the snaky neck which at 
once indicated indignation and triumph, 
turned away with all the dignity that Goose- 
nature could express. 

I understood the meaning of that But. 

It was not one of those dreaded, ominous, 
restrictive, qualifying, nullifying or nega- 
tiving Buts of which Daniel, the tenderest 
of all tender poets, says, 

Ah ! now comes that bitter word of But, 

Which makes all nothing that was said before ! 

That smoothes and wounds, that strokes and dashes more 

Than flat denial, or a plain disgrace. 

It was not one of those heart-withering, joy- 
killing, and hope- annihilating Buts. It was 
a minatory But, full of meaning as ever 
Brewer's Butt was full of beer. 

However, I will not broach that But in 
this Chapter. 



CHAPTER CLXY. 

A QUESTION ASKED AND SIGHTLY ANSWERED, 
WITH NOTICES OF A GREAT IMPORTATION 
ANNOUNCED IN THE LEITH COMMERCIAL 
LIST. 

" But tell me yet what followed on that But." 

Daniel. 

Great, Reader, are the mysteries of Gram- 
marians ! Dr. Johnson considered But as 
only a Conjunction, whereas, says Mr. Todd, 
it is in a fact a Conjunction, Preposition, 
Adverb and Interjection, as Dr. Adam 
Smith long since ingeniously proved. With 
Home Tooke it is a verb to boot, being ac- 
cording to him the imperative of the Saxon 
beon-ucan, to be out; but in this Mr. Todd 
supposes him to be out himself. And Xoah 
Webster says it is also a Participle and a 
^Nbun. Pity that some one has not proved 
it to be a Pronoun ; for then it would have 
belonged to all the eight parts of speech. 



412 



THE DOCTOR. 



Great are the mysteries of Grammarians ! 

O Reader, had you in your mind 
Such stores as subtlety can bring, 

O gentle Reader, you would find 
A mystery in every thing. 

For once, dear Reader, I who pride myself 
upon lucid order of arrangement, and per- 
spicuity of language, instead of making, 
which I have heretofore done, and shall 
hereafter do, the train of my associations as 
visible as the tract of a hare in the dewy 
grass or in the snow, will let it be as little 
apparent as that of a bird in the air, or a 
serpent on a rock ; or as Walter Landor in 
his poems, or his brother Robert's, whose 
poetry has the true Landorean obscurity, as 
well as the Landorean strength of diction and 
the Landorean truth and beauty of feeling 
and of thought : perhaps there is no other 
instance of so strongly marked an intellectual 
family likeness. 

Thus having premised, I propound the 
following question : Of all the Birds in the 
air, and all the beasts in the field, and all 
the fishes in the sea, and all the creatures of 
inferior kind, who pass their lives wholly, or 
in part, according to their different stages of 
existence, in air, earth or water, what crea- 
ture has produced directly or indirectly the 
most effect upon mankind? — That, which 
you, Reader, will deserve to be called, if you 
do not, after a minute's reflection, answer 
the question rightly. 

The Goose ! 

Now, Reader, you have hit the But. 

Among the imports in the Leith Com- 
mercial List, for June 1830, is an entry of 
1,820,000 goose quills, brought by the Anne 
from Riga, for Messrs. Alexander Duncan 
and Son of Edinburgh. 

One million, eight hundred and twenty 
thousand goose quills ! The number will 
present itself more adequately to thy ima- 
gination when it is thus expressed in words. 

O Reader, consider in thy capacious mind 
the good and the evil in which that million, 
eight hundred and twenty thousand quills 
will be concerned ! 

Take notice that the whole quantity is of 
foreign growth — that they are all imported 
quills, and so far from being all that were 



imported, that they were brought by one 
ship, and for only one house. Geese enough 
are not bred in Great Britain for supplying 
pens to schools, counters, public offices, 
private families, authors, and last not least 
in their consumption of this article, young 
ladies, — though they call in the crow-quills 
to their aid. Think of the Lawyers, Reader ! 
and thou wilt then acknowledge that even if 
we were not living at this time under a 
government of Newspapers, the Goose is 
amply revenged upon mankind. 

And now you understand Goosey-loosey's 
But. 



CHAPTER CLXVI. 

A WISH CONCERNING WHAXES, WITH SOME 
REMARKS UPON THEIR PEACE IN PHYSICAL 
AND MORAL CLASSIFICATION. DOCTOR 

ABRAHAM REES. CAPTAIN SCORESBY. THE 
WHALE FISHERY. 

Your Whale he will swallow a hogshead for a pill ; 
But the maker of the mouse-trap is he that hath skill. 

Ben Jonson. 

When gas-lights came into general use, I 
entertained a hope that Whales would no 
longer be slaughtered for the sake of their 
oil. The foolishness of such a hope may be 
excused for its humanity. 

I will excuse you Reader, if in most cases 
you distrust that word humanity. But you 
are not to be excused if you suspect me of 
its counterfeit, that mock humanity which is 
one characteristic of this dishonourable and 
dishonest age. I say you are not to be ex- 
cused, if being so far acquainted as by this 
time you must be with the philosophy of the 
Doctor, you suspect me his faithful and 
dutiful disciple of this pitiful affectation. 

How the thought concerning Whales came 
just now into my mind will be seen when 
its application shall in due course be made 
apparent. Where I am is always well known 
to myself, though every Reader may not 
always discover my whereabout. And before 
the thought can be applied I must show upon 
what our Philosopher's opinions concerning 
Whales, or fancies if you think proper so to 
call them, were founded; mine — upon this 



THE DOCTOR. 



413 



and most other matters, baring been as I 
gratefully acknowledge, derived from him. 
Linnaeus in his classification, as is well 
j known, arranges Whales with Quadrupeds, 
an arrangement at which Uncle Toby, if he 
had been told of it, would have whistled 
Lilli-bullero, and the Doctor if he had not 
been a man of science himself, would hare 



I;.: i:.z ii: 



Bat On : ie T ; by never could have been told 
of it, because he good man died before Lin- 
naeus dreamt of fbrminsr a svstem : and 
Doctor Dove was a man of science, so that 
Lilli-lullrr; — :.: i~i. "^'_is:"-ii ..:::". tlis 
:■::•;;;:: n. n:r D;.n i'.z i:.~ ::fr:::;.in ring 

Whistle the one, Reader, or sing the other, 
which you will, or if you will, do both: when 
you hear that in Dr. Kees's Cyclopaedia it is 
said, " the Whale has no other claim to a 
place among fishes, than from its fish-like 
appearance and its living in the water.™ The 
Whale has its place among them, whatever 
the Cyclopaedists may think of its claim, and 
will never have it any where else : and so 
very like a fish it is, — so strongly in the 
odour of fishiness. which is a good odour if 
it be not too strong, — that if the Green- 
landers had been converted by the Jesuits 
instead of the Moravians, the strictest disci- 
plinarian of that order would without doubt 
have allowed his converts to eat Whale upon 
£jii i:-y*. 

But whether Whale be fish or flesh, or if 
makers of system should be pleased to make 
it fowl, (for as it is like a Quadruped except 
that it has no feet, and cannot live upon 
land, so it may be like a bird, except that it 
has neither legs, wings, nor feathers, and 
cannot live in the air.) wherever naturalists 
may arrange it. its local habitation is among 
fishes, and fish in common language it always 
will be called. This whole question matters 
not to our present purpose. Our Philoso- 
pher had regard to its place in the scale of 
existence, a scale which he graduated not 
according to size, (tho' that also must 
sometimes be taken into the account,) nor 



by intellect, which is yet of greater considera- 
tion, but according to those affections or 
moral feelings, which, little acquainted as we 
u e with the nature of the lower creatures, 
are in many instances too evident to be called 
in question. 

Now in this respect no other creature in 
the water ranks so high as the Whale. 

The affection of the parent for its young is 
both in itself and its consequences purely 
good, however those men seek to degrade it 
who ascribe all feelings, and all virtuous 
emotions, whether in man or beast, to self- 
ishness, being themselves conscious that 
they have no worthier motive for any of 
their own actions.* Martin Luthe: says 
that the Hebrew word which we translate 
by curse, carries not with it in the original 
language so strong a meaning as is given to 
it in his mother tongue, — consequently in 
ours. The Hebrew imprecation, he says, 
imports no more than "ill betide thee!" 
intending by ill temporal misfortune, or 
punishment, the proper reward of ill deeds ; 
not what is implied by cursing in its dread- 
ful acceptation. A curse, then, in the Hebrew 
sense, be upon those who maintain this 
sensual, and sensualising opinion ; an opinion 
of which it is the sure effect to make bad 
men worse, and the folly and falsehood of 
which birds and beasts might teach them, 
were it not that — because their hearts are 
gross, seeing they see not, and hearing they 
hear not, neither do they understand. 

The Philosopher of Doncaster affirmed 
that virtue as well as reason might be clearly 
perceived in the inferior creation, and that 
their parental affection was proof of it. The 
longer the continuance of this affection in 
any species the higher he was disposed : 
place that species in the scale of animated life. 
This continuance bears no relation to their 
size in birds, and little in quadrupeds ; but 
in the whale it se ems to be somewhat more 
proportional, the young depending upon 

* - T'zt-r -z; i~— : ill -2 rural acrs i^^ri 

: :.z: :"r_— :'-; '.- :~z :..;:_- :.i\::~. :.: L :":_;' r 
wrong mankind." •. 

A Tale of Paraguay, canto ii. 13. 



414 



THE DOCTOR. 



the mother more than twelve months cer- 
tainly, how much longer has not been 
ascertained. And so strong is the maternal 
affection that it is a common practice among 
whalers to harpoon the cub as a means of 
taking the mother ; for this creature, altho' 
harmless and timid at all other times, totally 
disregards danger when its young is to be 
defended, gives every possible indication of 
extreme agony for its young's sake, and 
suffers itself to be killed without attempting 
to escape. The mighty Ceticide Captain 
Scoresby describes a most affecting instance 
of this. " There is something," he observes, 
" extremely painful in the destruction of a 
whale, when thus evincing a degree of 
affectionate regard for its offspring, that 
would do honour to the superior intelligence 
of human nature; yet," he adds, " the object 
of the adventure, the value of the prize, the 
joy of the capture, cannot be sacrificed to 
feelings of compassion." That conclusion, if 
it were pursued to its legitimate con- 
sequences, would lead farther than Captain 
Scoresby would follow it ! 

The whale fishery has indeed been an 
object of almost portentous importance ac- 
cording to the statements made by this well- 
informed and very able writer. That on 
the coast of Greenland proved, he says, in a 
short time the most lucrative and the most 
important branch of national commerce that 
had ever been offered to the industry of 
man. The net profits which the Dutch 
derived from the Greenland fishery during 
an hundred and seven years are stated at 
more than 20 millions sterling. 

The class of Captains and seamen, em- 
ployed in the southern whale-fishery, says a 
person engaged in that business himself, are 
quite different from any other. Lads taken 
from the streets without shoes and stockings, 
become many of them masters of ships and 
men of very large property. " There was 
an instance, a short time ago, of one dying 
worth i?60,000 ; and I can point out twenty 
instances of persons worth 7 or 8, or 
.£10,000 who have risen, without any pa- 
tronage whatever, by their own exertions. 
It does not require any patronage to get on 



in the fishery." Such is the statement of 
one who was examined before a Committee 
of the House of Commons in 1833, upon the 
state of Manufactures, Commerce and Ship- 
ping. 

In a pamphlet written about the middle 
of the last century to recommend the pro- 
secution of this trade, is was stated that the 
whale-fishery is of the nature of a lottery, 
where tho' the adventurers are certain losers 
on the whole, some are very great gainers ; 
and this, it was argued, instead of being a 
discouragement, was in fact the most powerful 
motive by which men were induced to engage 
in it. 

If indeed the pleasure of gambling be in 
proportion to the stake, as those miserable 
and despicable persons who are addicted to 
that vice seem to think it is ; and if the 
pleasure which men take in field sports be 
in proportion to the excitement which the 
pursuit calls forth, whaling must be in both 
respects the most stimulating of all maritime 
adventures. One day's sport in which 
Captain Scoresby took three whales, pro- 
duced a return of ^2.100, and several years 
before he retired from this calling he had 
been personally concerned in the capture of 
three hundred and twenty-two. And his 
father in twenty-eight voyages, in which he 
commanded a ship, brought home 498 whales, 
producing 4246 tons of oil, the value of 
which, with that of the whale-bone, exceeded 
^150,000, "all fished for under his own 
direction out of the sea." 

The whale fishery is even of more im- 
portance as a nursery for seamen, for of all 
naval services it is the most severe ; and this 
thorough seaman describes the excitement 
and the enjoyment of a whaler's life as being 
in proportion to the danger. " The dif- 
ficulties and intricacies of the situation, 
when the vessel is to be forced through 
masses of drift ice, afford exercise," he says, 
" for the highest possible exertion of nautical 
skill, and are capable of yielding to the 
person who has the management of a ship a 
degree of enjoyment, which it would be 
difficult for navigators accustomed to mere 
common-place operations duly to appreciate. 



THE DOlV 



415 



The ordinary management of a ship, under 
a strong gale, and Trith great Yeloei". in- 
hibits evolutions of considerable elegance; 
but these cannot be compared with the 
navigation in the intricacies of floating ice, 
where the evolutions are frequent, and per- 
petually varying : where manoeuvres are to 
be accomplished, that extend to the very 
limits of possibility ; and where a degree of 
hazard attaches to some of the operations, 
which would render a mistake of the helm, 
— or a miscalculation of the powers of a 
ship, irremediate and destructive." — How 
wonderful a creature is man, that the sense 
of power should thus seem to constitute his 
highest a nimal enjoyment ! 

In proportion to the excitement of such 

■3. !iff. C:.-; ::.::: S: ii'fsfj iesirifes i:s reii^iiv.s 

tendency upon a well disposed mind, and 

this certainly has been exemplified in his 

own person. M Perhaps there is no situation 

in life," he says, "in which an habitual 

reliance upon Providence, and a well founded 

dependance on the Divine protection and 

support, is of such sensible value as it is 

found to be by those employed in seafaring 

occupations, and especially in the fishery for 

whales. These are exposed to a great 

variety of dangers, many of which they must 

I voluntarily face; and the success of their 

I exertions depends on a variety of causes, 

over many of which they have no controul. 

The anxiety arising from both these causes 

I is greatly repressed, and often altogether 

subdued, when, convinced of the infallibility 

and universality of Providence by the in- 

j ternal power of religion, we are enabled to 

[ commit all our ways unto God, and to look 

for his blessing as essential to our safety, 

and as necessary for our sac aess." 

John Xewton of Olney has in his narrative 
of his own remarkable life, a passage that 
entirely accords with these remarks of 
Captain Scoresby, and which is in like 
manner the result of experience. 'A sea- 
firing life," he says. u is necessarily excluded 
from the benefit of public ordinance 
christian communion. — In other res:: : : ; . I 
know not any calling that seems more 
j favourable, or affords greater advance, as tc 



an awakened mind, for promoting the life of 
God in the soul, especially to a person who 
has the command of a ship, and thereby has 
it in his power to restrain gross irregularities 
in others, and to dispose of his own time. — 
To be at sea in these circumstances, with- 
drawn out of the reach of innumerable 
temptations, with opportunity and a turn of 
mind disposed to observe the wonders of 
God, in the great deep, with the two noblest 
objects of sight, the expanded heavens and 
the expanded ocean, continually in view ; 
and where evident interpositions of Divine 
Providence in answer to prayer occur almost 
every day : these are helps to quicken and 
confirm the life of faith, which in a good 
measure supply to a religious sailor the 
want of those advantages which can be 
only enjoyed upon the shore. And indeed 
though my knowledge of spiritual things (as 
knowledge is usually estimated) was at this 
time very small, yet I sometimes look back 
with regret upon those scenes. I never 
knew sweeter or more frequent hours of 
divine communion than in my two last 
voyages to Guinea, when I was either almost 
secluded from society on ship-board, or 
when on shore among the natives,'" 

"What follows is so beautiful (except the 
extravagant condemnation of a passionate 
tenderness which he. of all men, should have 
been the last to condemn) that the passage, 
though it has set us ashore, must be con- 
tinued a little farther. " I have wandered,"' 
he proceeds, " thro' the woods, reflecting on 
the singular goodness of the Lord to me in 
a place where, perhaps, there was not a 
person who knew him, for some thousand 
miles round me. Many a time upon these 
occasions I have restored the beautiful lines 
of Tibullus * to the right owner ; lines full 
of blasphemy and madness, when addressed 
to a creature, but full of comfort and pro- 
priety in the mouth of a believer. 

Sic ego desertis possum bene there s-yleis, 

Qua nulla humano sit via irita : 
Tu miAi cur arum requies, in node rel atra 

Lumen, ei in soils tu mihi turba iocis. 



* Mr. Newton, by an easy slip of the memory, has 
ascribed the lines to Propertius. R. S. 



416 



THE DOCTOE. 



CHAPTER CLXYH. 

A MOTTO WHICH IS WELL CHOSEN BECAUSE 
NOT BEING APPLICABLE IT SEEMS TO BE 
SO. THE AUTHOR NOT ERRANT HERE OR 
ELSEWHERE. PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER - 
OSOPHIES. 

Much from my theme and friend have I digressed, 
But poor as I am, poor in stuff for thought, 

And poor in thought to make of it the best, 
Blame me not, Gentles, if I soon am caught 

By this or that, when as my theme suggest 
Aught of collateral aid which may be wrought 

Into its service : Blame me not, I say : 

The idly musing often miss their way. 

Charles Llotd. 

The pleasing pensive stanza, which thou, 
gentle Reader, hast just perused, is prefixed 
to this Chapter because it would be so feli- 
citous a motto, if only it were applicable ; 
and for that very reason it is felicitous, its 
non-applicabnity fm-nishing a means of happy 
application. 

U y a du bonheur etde V esprit a employer 
les paroles (Tun po'ete a une chose a quoy le 
po'ete ne pense jamais, et a les employer si a 
propos quelles semblent avoir este faites 
expres pour le sujet auquel elles sont appli- 
quees* 

" Good Sir, you understand not ;" — yet I 
am not saying with the Pedagogue at the 
Ordinary, 

— Let's keep them 
In desperate hope of understanding us ; 
Riddles and clouds are very lights of speech. 
I'll veil my careless anxious thoughts as 'twere 
In a perspicuous cloud, that so I may 
Whisper in a loud voice, and even be silent 
When I do utter words. f — 

Here, as everywhere, my intention is to be 
perfectly intelligible ; I have not digressed 
either from my theme or friend; I am 
neither poor in stuff for thought, nor in 
thought for working ; nor, (if I may be per- 
mitted so to say) in skill for manipulating it. 
I have not been idly musing, nor have I 
missed my road, but. have kept the track 
faithfully, and not departed from the way in 
which I was trained up. All that I have 
been saying belongs to, and is derived from 
the philosophy of my friend : yes, gentle 
Reader, all that is set before thee in these 
well stored volumes. Una est enim philoso- 



phia, quascumque in oras disputationis re- 
gionesve delata est. Nam sive de cceli naturd 
loquitur, sive de terra, sive de divind vi, sive 
de humand, sive ex inferior e loco, sive ex 
aqua, sive ex superiore, sive ut impelled, 
homines, sive ut doceat, sive ut deter r eat, sive 
ut concitet, sive ut incendat, sive ut rejlectat, 
sive ut leniat, sive ad paucos, sive ad multos, 
sive inter alienos, sive cum suis, sive secum, 
rivis est deducta philosophia, nonfontibus. 

We speak of the philosophy of the Porch, 
and of the Grove, and of the Sty when we 
would express ourselves disdainfully of the 
i Epicureans. But we cannot, in like manner, 
give to the philosophy which pervades these 
volumes, a local habitation and a name, 
because the philosophy of Doncaster would 
popularly be understood to mean the philo- 
sophy of the Duke of Grafton, the Marquis 
of Exeter, and Mr. Gully, tho' .that indeed 
belongs not to Philosophy but to one of its 
dialects, varieties, or corrupted forms, which 
are many ; for example, there is Eallosophy 
practised professionally by Advocates, and 
exhibited in great perfection by Quacks 
and Political Economists ; Failosophy, the 
science of those who make bankruptcy a 
profitable adventure ; Fellowsophy, which 
has its habitat in common rooms at Cam- 
bridge and Oxford ; Feelosophy common to 
Lawyers and Physicians ; Fillyosophy well 
understood on the turf, and nowhere better 
than in Doncaster ; and finally the Foolo- 
sophy of Jeremy Bentham, and of all those 
who have said in their hearts — what it 
saddens a compassionate heart to think that 
even the Fool should say ! 



* P. BOCHOCRS. 



t Cartwright. 



CHAPTER CLXYIII. 

NE-PLUS-ULTRA-WHALE-FISHING. AN OPI- 
NION or captain scoresbt's. the doc- 
tor DENIES THAT ALL CREATURES WERE 
MADE FOR THE USE OF MAN. THE CON- 
TRARY DEMONSTRATED IN PRACTICE BY 
BELLARMINE. 

Sequar quo vocas, omnibus enim rebus omnibusque ser- 
monibus, aliquid salutare miscendum est. Seneca. 

The hardiest of Captain Scoresby's sailors 
would never, methinks, have ventured upon 



THE DOCTOS. 



417 



a manner of catching the whale used by the 
Indians in Florida, which Sir Richard Haw- 
kins says is worthy to "be considered, inas- 
much as the barbarous people have found 
out so great a secret, by the industry and 
diligence of one man, to kill so great and 
huge a monster. Let not the reader think 
meanly of an able and judicious, as well as 
brave, adventurous, and unfortunate man, 
because he believed what he thus relates : 

_e Indian discovering a whale, pro- 
cureth two round billets of wood, sharpened 
both at one end, and so binding them to- 
gether with a cord, casteth himself with 
them into the sea. and swimmeth towards 
the whale. If he come to him the whale 
escapeth not ; for he placeth himself upon 
his neck: and altho' the whale goeth to 
the bottom, he must of force rise pre- 
— ..:.- to breathe, for which nature hath 
given him two great holes in the top of his 
head by which every time that he breatheth, 
he spouteth out a great quantity of water ; 
the Indian forsaketh not his hold, but meth 
with him, and thrusteth in a log into one of 
Ins s| rulers, and with the other knocketh it 
i n s : fast, that by no means the whale can 
get H out: that fastened, at another oppor- 
tunity, he thrusteth in the second log into 
the other spouter, and with all the force he 
can, keepeth it in. The whale not being 
able to breathe swimmeth presently ashore, 
and the Indian a cock-horse upon him ! " 
Hawkins says that many Spaniards had 

irsed to him upon this subject, who 
had been eye-witnesses of it ! 

sf ::her animals when attacked," 

plain Scoresby, ■'instinctively pursue 

a conduct which is generally the best cal- 

1 to secure then escape j but not so 
the white. Were it to remain on the stir- 
rer being harpooned, to press steadily 

::: in one direction, and to exert the 
wonderful strength that it possesses : or were 
it to await the attacks of its enemies, and 
repel them by well-timed nourishes of its 
tremendous tail, i : w ol 1 : : a D victoriously 
jnspnte the field with man. who;: sti 
and bulk scarcely exceed a nine-hundredth 
part of its own. Br.t. like the rest of the 



lower animals, it was designed by Him who 
4 created great whales,' and every living 
creature that moveth to be subject to man ; 
and therefore when attacked by him, it 
perishes by its simplicity."' 

Captain Scoresby now holds a commission 
in the spiritual service as a fisher of men, — 
a commission which I verily believe has been 
most properly applied for and worthily be- 
stowed. Whether this extraordinary change 
in life has produced any change in his 
opinion upon this subject I know not : or 
whether he still thinks that whales were 
made subject to man, in order that man 
might slaughter them for the sake of their 
blubber and their whalebone. 

Nevertheless it was a foolish wish of mine 
that gas-lights might supersede the use of 
train-oil; foolish because a little foresight 
might have made me apprehend that oil-gas 
might supersede coal-gas ; and a little re- 
flection would have shown that tho' col- 
lieries are much more necessary than the 
Greenland fishery can be pretended to be, 
far greater evil is connected with them, and 
that this evil is without any incidental good. 
For the Greenland fishery unquestionably 
makes the best seamen: and a good seaman, 
good in the moral and religious, as well as 
in the nautical sense of the word, is one of 
the highest characters that this world's 
rough discipline can produce. "Ay." says 
an old Lieutenant, living frugally upon his 
poor half-pay. "ay that he is, by ." 

But it was not otherwise a foolish wish : 
for that the whale was made for the use of 
man in any such way as the whalers take for 
granted, I am very far from believing. 

All creatures animate and inanimate, are 
constituent parts of one great system : and 
so far dependent upon each other, and in a 
certain sense each made for all. The whale 
is a link in the chain, and the largest that 
has yet been found, for no one h. - 
caught a Kraken. 

Cicero makes Crassus the orator commend 

c ient philosophy which taught that all 

things were thus I: — 3fihi guide m 

;77/, majus quiddam animo complexi, 

rmdto plus etiam ridisse videntur, quam quart-' 



418 



THE DOCTOK. 



turn nostrorum ingeniorum acies intueri potest ; 
qui omnia hcec, quce supra et subter, unum 
esse, et una vi atque una consensione natures 
constricta esse dixerunt. Nullum est enim 
genus rerum quod aut avulsum a cceteris per 
seipsum constare, aut, quo ccetera si careant, 
vim suam atque ceternitatem conservare possint. 
He expresses a doubt indeed that hcec major 
esse ratio videtur, quam ut hominum possit 
sensu, aut cogitatione, comprehendi : and with 
the proper reserve of such a doubt, our Philo- 
sopher gave a qualified assent to the opinion, 
restricting it, however, religiously to the in- 
ferior and visible creation : but as to the 
notion that all things were made for the 
use of man, in the sense that vulgar men 
believe, this he considered to be as presump- 
tuous and as absurd as the converse of the 
proposition which Pope puts into the mouth 
of the pampered Goose. " The monstrous 
faith of many made for one," might seem 
reasonable and religious when compared 
with such a supposition. 

" Made for thy use," the Doctor would 
say, " tyrant that thou art, and weak as thou 
art tyrannical ! Will the unicorn be willing 
to serve thee, or abide by thy crib ? Canst 
thou bind him with his band in the furrow ; 
or will he harrow the vallies after thee? 
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook, 
will he make a covenant with thee, wilt thou 
take him for a servant! Wilt thou bind 
him for thy maidens ? Shall thy companions 
make a banquet of him? Shall they part 
him among the merchants ? Made for thy 
use, — when so many may seem to have 
been made for thy punishment and humi- 
liation ! " 

There is a use indeed in these, but few 
men are so ready to acknowledge and act 
upon it as Bellarmine was, who being far 
more indulgent to musquitos and other 
small deer than to heretics, allowed them 
free right of pasture upon his corporal do- 
mains. He thought they were created to 
afford exercise for our patience, and more- 
over that it is unjust for us to interrupt them 
in their enjoyment here, when we consider 
that they have no other paradise to expect. 
Yet when the Cardinal Controversialist gave 



breakfast, dinner, or supper of this, kind, he 
was far from partaking any sympathetic plea- 
sure in the happiness which he imparted ; for 
it is related of him that at one time he was 
so terribly bitten a bestiolis quibusdam ne- 
quam ac damnificis, (it is not necessary to 
inquire of what species,) as earnestly to 
pray that if there were any torments in Hell 
itself so dreadful as what he was then en- 
during, the Lord would be pleased not to 
send him there, for he should not be able to 
bear it. 

What could the Cardinal then have 
thought of those Convents that were said 
to have an apartment or dungeon into which 
the Friars every day during the warm sea- 
son, brushed or shook the fleas from their 
habits thro' an aperture above, (being the 
only entrance,) and where, whenever a frail 
brother was convicted of breaking the most 
fragile of his vows, he was let down naked 
and with his hands tied ! This earthly Pur- 
gatory was called la Pulciara, that is, the 
Fleaery, and there the culprit was left till it 
was deemed that he had suffered punishment 
enough in this life for his offence. 

Io lengo omai per infallibil cosa, 

Che sian per nostro nidi nati gV insciti 

Per renderei la vita aspra e nojosa. 

Certo in quei primi giorni benedetti 
Ne gli orti del piacer non abitaro 
Quest/' sozzi e molesti animaletti ; 

Ne' con gli allri animali a pnro a paro 
Per saper come avessero a chiamarsi 
Al cospetto d' Adam si presentaro : 

* * * 
Nacquero dunque sol per nostro male 

Queste malnate bestie, efur prodottt 
In pena de la colpa originate. 

* * * 
E come V uomo a sospirar ridutlo 

Per V interno sconcerto de gli affetli 
Pravi, germoglia miserabil frutto ; 

Cose la terra fra suoi varj effetti 
Pel reofermento, onde bollir si sente. 
Da se produce i velenosi insetti. 

Infin, da la materia putrescente, 
Nascon V abbominevoli bestiuole, 
Ed e questa per me cosa evidente. 

So che not voglion le moderne scuole ; 
Ma cib che monta ? In simile argomento 
E' lecito a ciascun dir cib che vuole.* 



THE DOCTOR. 



419 



CHAPTER CLXIX. 

LINKS AND AFFINITIES. A MAP OF THE 
author's INTELLECTUAL COURSE IN THE 
FIVE PRECEDING CHAPTERS. 



IJ (fiXi QotTSzi, -rol H xxi n-iSiy 



Plato. 



And now it may be agreeable to the reader 
to be presented here with a sort of synopsis, 
or itinerary, whereby as in a chart he may 
trace what he perhaps has erroneously con- 
sidered the erratic course of association in 
the five antecedent Chapters. 

First, then, Aristotle held that domesticated 
animals were benefited by their connection 
with man. 

Secondly, the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove thought that Aristotle was not 
altogether right when he held that domes- 
ticated animals were benefited by their 
connection with man. 

Thirdly, Chick-Pick, and Hen-Pen, and 
Cock-Lock, and Duck-Luck, and Turkey- 
Lurkey, and Goosey-Loosey, being con- 
sulted, confirmed the opinion of the Bio- 
grapher and Disciple of Dr. Dove, that 
Aristotle was not altogether right when he 
held that domesticated animals were bene- 
fited by their connection with man. 

Fourthly, it was seen that Goosey-Loosey 
ended her speech abruptly and significantly 
with the word But : When Chick-Pick and 
Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck-Luck, 
and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey-Loosey, 
being consulted, confirmed the opinion of 
the Biographer and Disciple of Dr. Dove, 
that Aristotle was not altogether right when 
he held that domesticated animals were 
benefited by their connection with man. 

Fifthly, it was observed that Grammarians 
have maintained many and mysterious opi- 
nions concerning the nature of the word But, 
with which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion' of the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 



right when he held that domesticated animals 
were benefited by their connection with man. 

Sixthly, a question was propounded, after 
it had been observed that Grammarians have 
maintained many and mysterious opinions 
concerning the nature of the word But, with 
which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 
right when he held that domesticated animals 
were benefited by their connection with man. 

Seventhly, the Reader answered the ques- 
tion which the writer propounded, after it 
had been observed that Grammarians have 
maintained many and mysterious opinions 
concerning the nature of the word But, with 
which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 
right when he held that domesticated animals 
were benefited by their connection with man. 

Eighthly, it appeared that the Reader had 
hit the But, when he answered the question 
which the writer propounded, after it had 
been observed that Grammarians have main- 
tained many and mysterious opinions con- 
cerning the nature of the word But, with 
which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 
right when he held that domesticated animals 
were benefited by their connection with man. 

Ninthly, there was an entry of one million, 
eight hundred and twenty thousand Goose 
Quills, entered in that place, because the 
Reader had hit the But, when he answered 
the question which the writer propounded, 
after it had been observed that Grammarians 



420 



THE DOCTOR. 



L c 



have maintained many and mysterious opi- 
nions concerning the nature of the word But, 
with which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 
right when he held that domesticated ani- 
mals were benefited by their connection 
with man. 

Tenthly, the Reader was called upon to 
consider the good and evil connected with 
those one million, eight hundred and twenty 
thousand goose quills, the entry of which 
was entered in that place, because the Reader 
had hit the But, when he answered the ques- 
tion which the writer propounded, after it had 
been observed that Grammarians have main- 
tained many and mysterious opinions concern- 
ing the nature of the word But, with which 
Goosey-Loosey ended her speech abruptly 
and significantly, after Chick-Pick, and Hen- 
Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck-Luck, and 
Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey-Loosey, being 
consulted, had confirmed the opinion of the 
Biographer and Disciple of Dr. Dove, that 
Aristotle was not altogether right when he 
held that domesticated animals were bene- 
fited by their connection with man. 

Eleventhly, a wish concerning Whales was 
expressed, which was associated, it has not 
yet appeared how, with the feeling in which 
the Reader is called upon to consider the 
good and the evil connected with those one 
million, eight hundred and twenty thousand 
goose quills, the entry of which was entered 
in that place, because the Reader had hit 
the But, when he answered the question 
which the writer propounded, after it had 
been observed that Grammarians have main- 
tained many and mysterious opinions con- 
cerning the nature of the word But, with 
which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech ab- 
ruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of 



Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 
right when he held that domesticated animals 
were benefited by their connection with man. 

Twelfthly, Captain Scoresby was intro- 
duced in consequence of a wish concerning 
Whales having been expressed, which was as- 
sociated, it has not yet appeared how, with the 
feeling in which the Reader was called upon 
to consider the good and the evil connected 
with those one million, eight hundred and 
twenty thousand goose quills, the entry of 
which was entered in that place, because the 
Reader had hit the But, when he answered 
the question which the writer propounded, 
after it had been observed that Grammarians 
have maintained many and mysterious opi- 
nions concerning the nature of the word But, 
with which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick- Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, had confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of Dr. 
Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether right 
when he maintained that domesticated animals 
were benefited by their connection with man. 

Thirteenthly, some curious facts concern- 
ing the Greenland fishery were stated on 
the authority of Captain Scoresby, who was 
introduced in consequence of a wish concern- 
ing Whales having been expressed, which 
was associated, it has not yet appeared how, 
with the feeling to which the Reader was 
called upon to consider the good and the 
evil connected with those one million, eight 
hundred and twenty thousand goose quills, 
the entry of which was entered in that place, 
because the Reader had hit the But, when 
he answered the question which the writer 
propounded, after it had been observed that 
Grammarians have maintained many and 
mysterious opinions concerning the nature 
of the word But, with which Goosey-Loosey 
ended her speech abruptly and significantly, 
after Chick-Pick, and Hen-Pen, and Cock- 
Lock, and Duck-Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, 
and Goosey-Loosey, being consulted, con- 
firmed the opinion of the Biographer and 
Disciple of Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not 
altogether right when he held that domesti- 



THE DOCTOR 



421 



cated animals were benefited by their con- 
nection with man. 

Fourteenthly, a beautiful stanza was quoted 
from a poem by Mr. Charles Lloyd, which, 
becoming applicable as a motto because it 
seemed inapplicable, was applied, after some 
curious facts concerning the Greenland fishery 
had been stated on the authority of Captain 
Scoresby, who was introduced in consequence 
of a wish concerning Whales having been 
expressed, which was associated, it has not 
yet appeared how, with the feeling in which 
the Reader was called upon to consider the 
good and the evil connected with those one 
million, eight hundred and twenty thousand 
goose quills, the entry of which was entered 
in that place, because the Reader had hit 
the But, when he answered the question 
which the writer propounded, after it had 
been observed that Grammarians have main- 
tained many and mysterious opinions con- 
cerning the nature of the word But, with 
which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech 
abruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, confirmed the opi- 
nion of the Biographer and Disciple of Dr. 
Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether right 
when he held that domesticated animals were 
benefited by their connection with man. 

Fifteenthly, that the writer in all which 
went before had adhered, and was at present 
adhering to the philosophy of Dr. Dove, was 
shown in relation to a beautiful stanza that 
had been quoted from a poem by Mr. Charles 
Lloyd, which, becoming applicable as a 
motto because it seemed to be inapplicable, 
was applied, after some curious facts con- 
cerning the Greenland fishery had been 
stated on the authority of Captain Scoresby, 
who was introduced in consequence of a wish 
concerning Whales having been expressed, 
which was associated, it has not yet appeared 
how, with the feeling in which the Reader 
was called upon to consider the good and 
the evil connected with those one million, 
eight hundred and twenty thousand goose 
quills, the entry of which was entered in that 
place, because the Reader had hit the But, 



when he answered the question which the 
writer propounded, after it had been ob- 
served that Grammarians have maintained 
many and mysterious opinions concerning 
the nature of the word But, with which 
Goosey-Loosey ended her speech abruptly 
and significantly, after Chick-Pick, and Hen- 
Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck-Luck, and 
Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey-Loosey, being- 
consulted, confirmed the opinion of the Bio- 
grapher and Disciple of Dr. Dove, that Aris- 
totle was not altogether right when he held 
that domesticated animals were benefited 
by their connection with man. 

Sixteenthly, an assertion of Captain Scores- 
by's that Whales were created for man was 
brought forward, when it had been shown 
that the writer in all which went before had 
adhered, and was at present adhering to the 
philosophy of Dr. Dove, in relation to a 
beautiful stanza that had been quoted from 
a poem by Mr. Charles Lloyd, which, becom- 
ing applicable as a motto because it seemed 
to be inapplicable, was applied, after some 
curious facts concerning the Greenland fish- 
ery had been stated on the authority of 
Captain Scoresby, who was introduced in 
consequence of a wish concerning Whales 
having been expressed, which was associated, 
it has not yet appeared how, with the feeling 
in which the reader was called upon to con- 
sider the good and the evil connected with 
those one million, eight hundred and twenty 
thousand goose quills, the entry of which 
was entered in that place, because the Reader 
had hit the But, when he answered the ques- 
tion which the writer propounded, after it 
had been observed that Grammarians have 
maintained many and mysterious opinions 
concerning the nature of the word But, with 
which Goosey-Loosey ended her speech ab- 
ruptly and significantly, after Chick-Pick, 
and Hen-Pen, and Cock-Lock, and Duck- 
Luck, and Turkey-Lurkey, and Goosey- 
Loosey, being consulted, confirmed the 
opinion of the Biographer and Disciple of 
Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not altogether 
right when he held that domesticated ani- 
mals were benefited by their connection 
with man. 



422 



THE DOCTOR. 



Seventeenthly and lastly, the Biographer 
and Disciple of Dr. Dove opposed the asser- 
tion of Captain Scoresby that Whales were 
created for man, which assertion was brought 
forward when it bad been shown, that the 
writer in all which went before had adhered, 
and was at present adhering to the philo- 
sophy of Dr. Dove, in relation to a beautiful 
stanza that had been quoted from a poem of 
Mr. Charles Lloyd, which, becoming appli- 
cable as a motto because it seemed to be 
inapplicable, was applied, after some curious 
facts concerning the Greenland fishery had 
been stated on the authority of Captain 
Scoresby, who was introduced in conse- 
quence of a wish concerning Whales having 
been expressed, which was associated, it has 
not yet appeared how, with the feeling in 
which the Reader was called upon to con- 
sider the good and the evil connected with 
those one million, eight hundred and twenty 
thousand goose quills, the entry of which was 
entered in that place, because the Reader 
had hit the But, when he answered the 
question which the writer propounded, 
after it had been observed that Gramma- 
rians have maintained many and myste- 
rious opinions concerning the nature of 
the word But, with which Goosey-Loosey 
ended her speech abruptly and significantly, 
after Chick-Pick, and Hen-Pen, and Cock- 
Lock, and Duck-Luck, and Turkey -Lurkey, 
and Goosey-Loosey, being consulted, con- 
firmed the opinion of the Biographer and 
Disciple of Dr. Dove, that Aristotle was not 
altogether right when he held that domes- 
ticated animals were benefited by their con- 
nection with man. 

You see, Reader, where we are, and whence 
we came, and I have thus retraced for you 
the seventeen stages of association by which 
we have proceeded from the one point to the 
other, because you will have much more 
satisfaction in seeing the substance of the 
aforesaid five chapters thus clearly and co- 
herently recapitulated, than if it had been 
in the common form, simply and compen- 
diously capitulated at the head of each. For 
in this point I agree with that good, patient, 
kind-hearted, industrious, ingenious, odd, 



whimsical and yet withal dullus homo, James 
Elphinstone, Radical Reformer of English 
Orthography. He says, and you shall have 
the passage in Elphinstonography, as he 
printed it, "I own myself an ennemy 
to hwatevver seems quaint in dhe verry 
contents ov a chapter ; and dho dhe starts 
ov surprize be intollerabell, wons plezzure 
iz no les balked by anticipation. Hoo in- 
deed prezents a bil ov fare, widh an enter- 
tainment ? Hwen dhe entertainment iz 
over, dhe bil may doubtles com in, to re- 
fresh dhe memmory, edher widh plan or 
particulers, dhat hav regaled dhe various 
pallates ov dhe company." 



CHAPTER CLXX. 

THE AUTHOR REPEATS A REMARK OF HIS 
DAUGHTER UPON THE PRECEDING CHAP- 
TER ; COMPLIMENTS THE LORD BROUGHAM 
AND VAUX UPON HIS LUNGS AND LARYNX ; 
PHILOSOPHISES AND QUOTES, AND QUOTES 
AND PHILOSOPHISES AGAIN AND AGAIN. 

Fato, Forfuna, Predestinaxione, 

Sorte, Caso, Ventura, son di quelle 
Cose che dan gran noja a le persone, 

E vi si dicon su di gran novelle. 
Ma in fine Iddio d' ogrti cose e padrone : 

E chi e savio domina a le stelle ; 
Chi non e savio paxiente e forte, 

Lamcntisi di se, non de la sorte. Orl. Inn. 

"Pappa, it's a breathless chapter!" says 
one whose eyes when they are turned toward 
me I never meet without pleasure, unless 
sorrow has suffused them, or illness dimmed 
their light. 

Nobody then can give so much effect to 
it in reading aloud as the Lord Chancellor 
Brougham and Vaux, he having made a 
speech of nine hours long upon the state of 
the law, and thereby proved himself to be 
the most long-winded of living men. And 
fit it is that he should be so ; for there are 
very few men to whom, whether he be right 



listen. 



Ye' give me space a while for to respire, 
And I myself shall fairly well out-wind.* 



Henry Mori;. 



THE DOCTOR. 



423 



For I have read no idle or unprofitable 
lesson in this remuneration. Were we thus 
to retrace the course of our own lives, there 
are few of us who would not find that that 
course had been influenced, and its most 
important events brought about, by inci- 
dents which might seem as casually or ca- 
priciously connected as the seventeen links 
of this mental chain. Investigate anything 
backward through seventeen generations of ; 
motives, or moving causes, whether in pri- 
vate or in public life : see from what slight 
and insignificant circumstances friendships 
have originated, and have been dissolved : 
by what accidents the choice of a profession, : 
or of a wife, have been determined, and on i 
how inconsiderable a point the good or ill i 
fortune of a life has depended : — deaths, ' 
marriages, wealth or poverty, opinions more 
important than all other things, as in their 
consequence affecting our happiness not 
only here but hereafter : victories and de- 
feats, war and peace, change of ministries 
and of dynasties, revolutions, the overthrow 
of thrones, the degradation, and the ruin, 
and the destruction, and the disappearance 
of nations ! Trace any of these backward 
link by link, and long before we are lost in 
the series of causes, we shall be lost in 
thought, and in wonder ; so much will there 
be to humble the pride of man. to abate his 
presumption, and to call for and confirm his 
faith. 

On dit que quand les Chinois. qui n'ont pas 
Tusage des horologes, commencerent a voir 
ces roues, ces balanders, ces volans, ces con- 
trepoids, et tout Tattirail de ces grandes 
machines, cons ide rant les pieces a part et 
comme desmembrees, ils lien firent pas grand 
estat. pource qu'ils ne scavoient a quel usage 
devoient servir toutes ces pieces : mots comme 
elles furent montees, et qu'ils oihjrent les 
heures sur le tymbre. ils furent si surp?-is 
cTestonnement, qu'ils s'assembloient a trouppes 
pour voir le mouvement de Taiguille, et pour 
entendre les heures; et appellerent ces ma- 
chines en leur langue, Le Ter qei paele. 
Je dis que qui considera les parties de la Pro- 
vidence Divine comme desmemhrees et a piece, 
tant de ressorts, tant d'accordans divers, tant 



cTevenemens qui nous semblent casuels, ne se 
pourra jamais imaginer la beaute de cette ma- 
chine, la sagesse de cette Providence, la con- 
duitte de ce grand corps ; a cause qiCon fait 
tort a un ouvrage fait a la Jlosaique de le voir 
a lambeau.x ; il le faut voir monte et range 
par le menu pour marquer sa beaute. JIais 
quand on entend Theatre qui sonne sur le tym- 
bre, on commence d cognoistre qu'il y avoit 
au dedans une belle et agreeable police qui 
paroist au dehors par la sonnerie. Ainsi en 
est il a peupres de la vie oVun homme* 

May not that which frequently has been, 
instruct us as to what will be ! is a question 
which Hobbes proposes, and which he an- 
swers in the negative. " Xo ;" he replies to 
it, " for no one knows what may be, except 
He who knows all things, because all things 
contribute to everything." — 

Nonne 
Id quod s&pefuit, nos decet id quod erit ; 
Kon ; scit cnim quod erit, nisi qui sciat omnia, nemo; 
Omni contribuunt ovinia namque rei. 

The philosopher of Doncaster was far from 
agreeing with the philosopher of Malmesbury 
upon this as upon many other points. De 
minimis non curat lex, was a maxim with him 
in philosophy as well as in law. There were 
many things he thought, which ended in as 
little as they began, fatherless and childless 
actions, having neither cause nor conse- 
quence, bubbles upon the stream of events, 
which rise, burst, and are no more : — 

A moment seen, then gone for ever.f 

What John Newton said is nevertheless 
true ; the way of man is not in himself! nor 
can he conceive what belongs to a single 
step. " When I go to St. Mary Woolnoth," 
he proceeds, " it seems the same whether I 
turn down Lothbury or go through the Old 
Jewry ; but the going through one street 
and not another may produce an effect of 
lasting consequence.'' He had proof enough 
of this in the providential course of his own 
eventful life ; and who is there that cannot 



* Garasse Thi* passage is remarkable. Pa'ey evi- 
dently borrowed the illustration from Burnet's Theoria 
Sacra ;— whether Burnet borrowed it from Garasse is not 
so clear : he was about forty years Burnet's senior, 
t Burns. 



424 



THE DOCTOR. 



call to mind some striking instances in his 
own ? 

" There is a time coming," said this good 
man, "•when our warfare shall be accom- 
plished, our views enlarged, and our light 
increased ; then with what transports of 
adoration and love shall we look back upon 
the way by which the Lord led us! We 
shall then see and acknowledge that mercy 
and goodness directed every step ; we shall 
see that what our ignorance once called 
adversities and evils, were in reality bless- 
ings which we could not have done well 
without; that nothing befell us without a 
cause, that no trouble came upon us sooner, 
or pressed us more heavily, or continued 
longer, than our case required : in a word, 
that our many afflictions were each in their 
place, among the means employed by divine 
grace and wisdom, to bring us to the pos- 
session of that exceeding and eternal weight 
of glory which the Lord has prepared for his 
people. And even in this imperfect state, 
though we are seldom able to judge aright 
of our present circumstances, yet if we look 
upon the years of our past life, and compare 
the dispensations we have been brought 
through, with the frame of our minds under 
each successive period ; if we consider how 
wonderfully one thing has been connected 
with another; so that what we now number 
amongst our greatest advantages, perhaps 
took their first rise from incidents which we 
thought hardly worth our notice ; and that 
we have sometimes escaped the greatest 
dangers that threatened us, not by any 
wisdom or foresight of our own, but by that 
intervention of circumstances, which we nei- 
ther desired nor thought of; — I say, when 
we compare and consider these things by the 
light afforded us in the Holy Scriptures, we 
may collect indisputable proof from the 
narrow circle of our own concerns, that the 
wise and good providence of God watches 
over his people from the earliest moment 
of their life, over-rules and guards them 
through all their wanderings in a state of 
ignorance, and leads them in a way they 
know not, till at length his providence and 
grace concur in those events and impres- 



sions which bring them to the knowledge of 
Him and themselves." 

" All things are brought upon us by 
Nature and Fate," says the unknown specu- 
lator who foisted his theology upon the 
world under the false name of Hermes Tris- 
megistus : " and there is no place deserted 
by Providence. But Providence is the 
reason, perfect in itself, of super-celestial 
Deity. From it are the two known Powers, 
Necessity and Fate. Fate is the Minister 
of Providence and of Necessity ; and the 
Stars are the ministers of Fate. And no 
one can fly from Fate, nor protect himself 
against its mighty force ; for the Stars are 
the arms of Fate, and according to it all 
things are affected in Nature and in Men." 
Take the passage in the Latin of Franciscus 
Patricius, who produced these mystic trea- 
tises from the Ranzovian Library. 

Omnia verojiunt Naturd et Fato. Et non 
est locus desertus a Providentid. Providentia 
vero est per se perfecta ratio superccelestis 
Dei. Dues autem sunt ab ed notce potential. 
Necessitas et Fatum. Fatum autem ministrum 
est Providentice et Necessitatis. Fati vero 
ministrcB sunt stettce. Neque enim Fatum 
fug ere quis potest, neque se custodire ab ipsius 
vi magna. Arma namque Fati sunt Stella?, 
secundum ipsum namque cuncta efficiuntur 
Natura et hominibus. 

Thus, says P. Garasse, there are six or 
seven steps down to man ; Providence, Ne- 
cessity, Fate, the Stars, Nature, and then 
Man at the lowest step of the ladder. For 
Providence, being ratio absoluta cadestis Dei, 
is comme hors de pair : and has under her a 
servant, who is called Necessity, and Neces- 
sity has under her, her valet Fate, and Fate 
has the Stars for its weapons, and the Stars 
have Nature for their arsenal, and Nature 
has them for her subjects : The one serves 
the other, en sorte que le premier qui 
manque a son devoir, desbauclie tout Vattirail; 
mais a condition, qixil est hors de la puissance 
des hommes d'eviter les armes du Destin qui 
sont les Estoiles. Or je confesse que tout ce 
discours mest si obscur et enigmatique quefen- 
tendrois mieux les resveries d'un phrenetique, 
ou les pensees obscures de Lycophron; je 



THE DOCTOR. 



425 



masseure que Trismegiste ne s entendoit non 
plus lyrs quil faisoit ce discours, que nous 
rentendons maintenani." 

The Jesuit is right. Necessity, Tate and 
Xature are mere abstractions. The Stars 
keep their courses and regard not us. Be- 
tween Man and his Maker nothing is inter- 
posed ; nothing can be interposed between 
the Omnipresent Almighty and the crea- 
tures of His hand. Eeceive this truth into 
thy soul whoever thou be'est that readest, 
and it will work in thee a death unto sin 
and a new birth unto righteousness ! And 
ye who tremble at the awful thought, re- 
member that, though there be nothing be- 
tween us and our Judge, w e have a Mediator 
and Advocate with Him. who is the propi- 
tiation for our sins, and who is " able to 
save them to the uttermost that come to 
:iirough Him." 



CHAPTEE CLXXL 
co:sTArsrs-G paet of a sexmox, which the 

EIADEB WELL FTNT> WOSTH MOBS THAB 
MOST WHOLE ONES THAT IT MAY BE HIS 
EOKTENE TO HEAE. 

Jefais une grande provision de bon sens en prenant ce 
que Us autres en ont. Madame de Mai>-tenox. 

Reader ! I set some learning before you in 
the last chapter, and u however some may 
cry out that all endeavours at learning in a 
book like this, especially where it steps 
beyond their little, (or let me not wrong 
them) no brain at all, is superfluous, I am 
contented," with great Ben, "that these fas- 
tidious stomachs should leave my full tables, 
and enjoy at home their clean empty 
trenchers." 

In pursuance of the same theme I shall 
set before you here some divine philosophy 
in the words of Dr. Scott, the author of the 
C hristian Life. M The goods and evils that 
befall us here." says that wise and excellent 
preacher, who being dea I -;-: speaketh, and 
will continue to speak while there be any 
virtue and while there be any prais — 



" the goods and evils, which befall us here, 
are not so truly to be estimated by them- 
selves as by their effects and consequents. 
For the Divine Providence which runs 
through all things, hath disposed and con- 
nected them into such a series and order, 
that there is no single event or accident 
(but what is purely miraculous) but depends 
upon the whole system, and hath innumer- 
able causes antecedent to it, and innumer- 
able consequents attending it ; and what 
the consequents will be, whether good or 
bad, singly and apart by itself, yet in con- 
junction with all those consequents that will 
most certainly attend it, the best event, for 
aught we know, may prove most mischievous, 
and the worst most beneficial to us. So 
that for us boldly to pronounce concerning 
the good or evil of events, before we see the 
train of consequents that follow them, is 
very rash and inconsiderate. As, for in- 
stance, you see a good man oppressed with 
sorrows and afflictions, and a bad man 
crowned with pleasures and prosperities : 
and considering these things apart by them- 
selves, you conclude that the one fares very 
ill, and the other very well : but did you at 
the same time see the consequents of the 
one's adversity and the other's prosperity, 
it's probable you would conclude the quite 
contrary, viz. that the good man's adversity 
was a blessing, and the bad man's prosperity 
a curse. For I dare boldly affirm that good 
men generally reap more substantial benefit 
from their afflictions, than bad men do from 
their prosperities. The one smarts indeed 
at present, but what follows ? perhaps his 
mind is cured by it of some disease that is 
ten times worse to him than his outward 
affliction : of avarice and impatience, of 
envy or discontent, of pride or vanity of 
spirit : his riches are lessened, but his virtues 
are improved by it : his body is impaired, 
but his mind is grown sound and hale bv it, 
and what he hath lost in health, or wealth, 
or pleasure, or honour, he hath gained with 
vast advantage in wisdom and goodness, in 
tranquillity of mind and self-enjoyment, and 
methinks no man who believes he hath a 
soul should grudge to suffer anv tolerable 



426 



THE DOCTOR. 



affliction for bettering of his mind, his will, 
and his conscience. 

" On the other hand the bad man triumphs 
and rejoices at present ; but what follows ? 
His prosperity either shrivels him into mi- 
serableness, or melts him into luxury ; the 
former of which impoverishes, and the latter 
diseases him : for if the former be the effect 
of his prosperity, it increases his needs, 
because before he needed only what he had 
not, but now he needs both what he hath 
not, and what he hath, his covetous desires 
treating him as the falconer doth his hawk, 
luring him off from what he hath seized to 
fly at new game, and never permitting him 
to prey upon his own quarry : and if the 
latter be the effect of his prosperity, that is 
if it melts him into luxury, it thereby 
wastes his health to be sure, and commonly 
his estate too, and so whereas it found him 
poor and well, it leaves him poor and 
diseased, and only took him up from the 
plough, and sets him down at the hospital. 
In general, while he is possessed of it, it only 
bloats and swells him, makes him proud and 
insolent, griping and oppressive ; pampers 
and enrages his lust, stretches out his desires 
into insatiable bulimy, sticks his mind full 
of cares, and his conscience of guiles, and 
by all those woeful effects it inflames his 
reckoning with God, and treasures up wrath 
for him against the day of wrath ; so that 
comparing the consequences of the good 
man's adversity, with those of the bad man's 
prosperity, it is evident that the former fares 
well even in his worst condition, and the 
latter ill in his best. ' It is well for me,' 
saith David, ' that I was afflicted, for before 
I was afflicted I went astray, but now I have 
kept thy commandments.' But, on the con- 
trary, when the wicked spring as the grass, 
saith the same author, and when all the 
workers of iniquity do flourish, then it is 
that they shall be destroyed for ever ! If 
then in the consequents of things, good men 
are blessed in their afflictions and bad men 
plagued in their prosperities, as it is apparent 
they generally are, these unequal distribu- 
tions are so far from being an argument 
against Providence, that they are a glorious 



instance of it. For wherein could the divine 
Providence better express its justice and 
wisdom together, than by benefiting the 
good, and punishing the bad by such cross 
and improbable methods r" 



INTERCHAPTER XVII. 

A POPULAR LAY NOTICED, WITH SUNDRY RE- 
MARKS PERTINENT THERETO, SUGGESTED 
THEREBY, OR DEDUCED THEREFROM. 

Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit : by and by 
it will strike. Tempest. 

There was a female personage of whom I 
will venture to say that every one of my 
English readers, (Quakers perhaps excepted) 
has heard tell; and a great many of my 
Scotch, Welsh, Irish, and Transatlantic ones 
also — I venture to say this because her 
remarkable story has been transmitted to us 
in a Lay, a species of composition the full 
value of which has never been understood 
till the present age. Niebuhr and his learned 
followers assure us that the whole early 
history of Rome is founded upon no other 
authority than that of Lays, which have 
long since perished. And very possibly 
there may be German professors of Divinity 
who in like manner trace the Jewish history 
before Samuel to the Lays of Samson, 
Jephthah, Gideon, and other heroes of the 
Kritarchy, of Joshua, and of Moses, and so 
of the Patriarchs upwards. 

To be sure it might startle us somewhat if 
these Lays were called by the old-fashioned 
name of Ballads, or old songs ; and had 
either of those appellations been used we 
might hesitate a little before we gave im- 
plicit credit to so great a discovery. 

Returning, however, to the personage of 
the Lay to which I have alluded, and which 
has been handed down from mother and 
nurse to child by immemorial tradition, and 
not stopping to inquire whether the tale 
itself is an historical matter of fact, or what 
is now called a mythos, and whether the 
personage is a mythological personage, the 



THE DOCTOE. 



427 



Lay of the Little Woman when reduced to 
history, or prose narration, says that she 
went to market to sell her eggs ; — in his- 
torifying the fact from this metrical docu- 
ment, I must take care to avoid any such 
collocation of words as might lead me into 
the worst of all possible styles, that of 
poetical prose. Numerous prose indeed not 
only carries with it a charm to the ear but 
affords such facility to the utterance, that the 
difference between reading aloud from a 
book so composed, or from one which has 
been written without any feeling of numer- 
ousness on the writer's part, is as great and 
perceptible as the difference between travel- 
ling upon an old road, or a macadamised 
one. Twenty pages of the one will exhaust 
the reader more than threescore of the other, 
just as there was more fatigue in a journey 
of fifty miles, fifty years ago, than there is 
in thrice the distance now. The fact is 
certain, and may no doubt be physically 
explained. But numerous prose and poe- 
tical prose are things as different as grace- 
fulness and affectation. 

All who remember the story will recollect 
that the Little Woman fell asleep by the way- 
side ; and probably they will agree with me 
in supposing, that this must have happened 
on her return from market, after she had 
sold her eggs, and was tired with the busi- 
ness and excitement of the day. A different 
conclusion would perhaps be drawn from the 
Lay itself, were it not that in historical Lays 
many connecting circumstances are passed 
over because they were so well known at 
the time the Lay was composed that it was 
deemed unnecessary to touch upon them ; 
moreover it should be observed that in Lays 
which have been orally transmitted for many 
generations before they were committed to 
writing, the less important parts are liable 
to be dropped. Of this there is evidently an 
example in the present case. Most country- 
women who keep the market go on horseback, 
and it is not mentioned in the Lay that the 
Little Woman went on foot ; yet that she 
did so is certain ; for nothing could be more 
likely than that being tired with walking 
she should sit down to rest herself by the 



way-side, and nothing more unlikely than 
that if she had been on horseback, she 
should have alighted for that purpose. 

And here it is proper in this glose, com- 
mentary or exposition, to obviate an in- 
jurious suspicion which might arise con- 
cerning the character of the Little Woman, 
namely, that she must have been in liquor. 
Had it been a Lay of present times, this, it 
must be admitted, would have been very 
probable, the British Parliament having 
thought fit to pass an Act, by virtue, or by 
vice of which, in addition to the public- 
houses previously established, which were so 
numerous that they have long been a curse 
to the country, — in addition I say to these, 
39,654 beer shops, as appears by a Parlia- 
mentary paper, were licensed in the year 
1835. This Utilitarian law ought to have 
been entitled an Act for the increase of 
Drunkenness, and the promotion of sedition, 
brutality, wretchedness, and pauperism. But 
the Little Woman lived when there were 
not more public houses than were required 
for the convenience of travellers ; perhaps 
before there were any, when strangers were 
entertained in monasteries, or went to the 
parsonage, as was the custom within the 
present century in some parts of Switzerland. 
In Iceland they are lodged in the Church at 
this time ; but this seems never to have been 
the case in England. 

It was a hot day, probably at the latter 
end of summer, or perhaps in autumn ; this 
must be inferred from the circumstances of 
the story ; and if the Little Woman called 
at a gossip's house, and was offered some 
refreshment, it is very possible that being 
thirsty she may have drank a peg lower in 
the cup than she generally allowed herself 
to do ; and that being somewhat exhausted, 
the ale, beer, cyder, or metheglin may have 
had more effect upon her than it would have 
had at another time, and that consequently 
she may have felt drowsy as soon as she sate 
down. This may be admitted without im- 
peaching her reputation on the score of 
temperance ; and beyond this it is certain, 
as will presently be made appear, that her 
head could not have been affected. 



428 



THE DOCTOR. 



Sleep, however, 

— weigh'd her eye-lids down 
And steep'd her senses in forgetfulness. 

It will sometimes press heavily on the lids, 
even when the mind is wakeful, and fever- 
ishly, or miserably employed ; but it will 
seldom steep the senses unless it be of that 
sound kind which denotes a healthy body 
and a heart at ease. They who sleep soundly 
must be free from care. In the south of 
Europe men of the lower classes lie down in 
the sun or shade according to the season, 
and fall asleep like dogs at any time. The 
less they are raised above animal life, the 
sounder the sleep is, and the more it seems 
to be an act of volition with them; when 
they close their eyes there is nothing within 
to keep them waking. 

Well, our Little Woman was sleeping on 
a bank beside the way, when a Pedlar hap- 
pened to come by. Not such a Pedlar as 
the one in Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion, 
who was what Randolph's Pedlar describes 
himself to be, " a noble, generous, under- 
standing, royal, magnificent, religious, he- 
roical, and thrice illustrious Pedlar;" if 
Randolph had been a Highlander this de- 
scription might have been adduced as a 
proof of the prophetic faculty, — a second 
sight of that glorious poem, the well esta- 
blished fame of which and the effect which 
it has produced and is producing upon 
the present generation both of authors and 
readers must be so peculiarly gratifying to 
Lord Jeffrey. No ; he was such a Pedlar 
as Autolycus, and if the Little Woman lived 
in the days of King Leontes, it may possibly 
have been Autolycus himself; for he had 
" a quick eye and a nimble hand," and was 
one who " Held honesty for a fool and Trust, 
his brother, for a very simple gentleman." 
The distance between Bohemia and England 
makes no difficulty in this supposition. Gyp- 
sies used to be called Bohemians ; and more- 
over, as Uncle Toby would have told Trim, 
Bohemia might have been a maritime country 
in those days ; and when he found it con- 
venient to return thither, the readiest way 
was to get on board ship. 

It is said, however, in the Lay, that the 



Pedlar's name was Stout. It may have been 
so ; and yet I am disposed to think that this 
is a corrupt passage, and that stout in this 
place is more probably an epithet, than a 
name. The verse may probably have run 
thus, 

There came by a Pedlar, a losell stout, 

a stout thief being formerly as common a 
designation as a sturdy beggar. This rogue 
seeing her asleep by the way-side, cut her 
petticoats all round about up to the knee ; 
whence it appears not only how soundly she 
must have been sleeping, and how expert he 
was in this branch of his trade, but also that 
her pockets were in her petticoats and not a 
separate article of her dress. 

At the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert 
with the Lady Susan Vere, which was per- 
formed at the Court of Whitehall, in the 
year 1604, with all the honour that could be 
done to a great favourite, many great ladies 
were made shorter by the skirts, like the 
Little Woman ; and Sir Dudley Carleton 
says "they were well enough served that 
they could keep cut* no better." If the 
reader asks what is keeping cut ? he asks a 
question I cannot answer. 

I have already observed that the weather 
was warm, and the proof is twofold, first in 
the Little Woman's sitting down by the 
way, which in cold weather she would not 
have done ; and, secondly, because when she 
awoke and discovered the condition in which 
this cut-purse had left her, she began to 
quiver and quake, for these words are 
plainly intended to denote at the same time 
a sense of chilliness, and an emotion of fear. 
She quivered perhaps for cold, having been 
deprived of so great a part of her lower 
garments ; but she quaked for fear, consi- 
dering as well the danger she had been in, 
as the injury which she had actually sus- 
tained. The confusion of mind produced by 
these mingled emotions was so remarkable 
that Mr. Coleridge might have thought it 
not unworthy of his psychological and tran- 
scendental investigations ; and Mr. Words- 



Quccre ? To be in the fashion — to be as others are i 



THE DOCTOR. 



429 



worth might make it the subject of a mo- 
dern Lay to be classed either among his 
poems of the Fancy, or of the Imagination 
as might to him seem fit. For the Lay says 
that the Little Woman, instead of doubting 
for a while whether she were asleep or 
awake, that is to say whether she were in a 
dream because of the strange, and indeco- 
rous, and uncomfortable, and unaccountable 
condition in which she found herself, doubted 
her own identity, and asked herself whether 
she were herself, or not ? So little was she 
able to answer so subtle a question satisfac- 
torily that she determined upon referring it 
to the decision of a little dog which she had 
left at home, and whose fidelity and in- 
stinctive sagacity could not, she thought, be 
deceived. " If it be I," said she, " as I hope 
it be, he will wag his little tail for joy at my 
return ; if it be not I, he will bark at me 
for a stranger." Homeward, therefore, the 
Little Woman went, and confused as she 
was, she found her way there instinctively 
like Dr. Southey's Ladurlad, and almost in 
as forlorn a state. Before she arrived, 
night had closed, and it became dark. She 
had reckoned rightly upon her dog's fidelity, 
but counted too much upon his sagacious 
instinct. He did not recognise his mistress 
at that unusual hour, and in a curtailed 
dress wherein he had never seen her before, 
and instead of wagging his tail, and fawn- 
ing, and whining, to bid her welcome as she 
had hoped, he began to bark angrily, with 
faithful but unfortunate vigilance, mistaking 
her for a stranger who could have no good 
reason for coming about the premises at that 
time of night. And the Lay concludes with 
the Little Woman's miserable conclusion 
that as the dog disowned her, she was not 
the dog's Mistress, not the person who 
dwelt in that house, and whom she had sup- 
posed herself to be, in fact not herself, but 
somebody else, she did not know who. 



INTERCHAPTER XVIII. 

APPLICATION OP THE LAY. CALEB d'aNVERS. 
IRISH LAW. ICON BASILIKE. JUNIUS. 

THOMAS A. KEMPIS. PELIX HEMMERLIN. 
A NEEDLE LARGER THAN GAMMER GUR- 
TON'S AND A MUCH COARSER THREAD. 
THOMAS WARTON AND BISHOP STILL. THE 
JOHN WEBSTERS, THE ALEXANDER CUN- 
INGHAMS, THE CURINAS AND THE STE- 
PHENS. 

Lo que soy, raxona poco 
Torque de sombra a mi va nada, o poco. 

FUENTE DESEADA. 

The sagacious reader will already have ap- 
plied the Lay of the Little Woman to the 
case of Dr. Dove's disciple and memorialist, 
and mentally apostrophising him may have 
said, 

— de te 
Fabula narratur. 

Even so, dear Reader, the Little Woman 
was a type of me, and yet but an imperfect 
one, for my case is far more complicated 
than hers. The simple doubt which dis- 
tressed her, (and a most distressing one it 
must be admitted that it was,) was whether 
she were herself or not ; but the compound 
question which has been mooted concerning 
me is whether I am myself or somebody else, 
and whether somebody else is himself or 
me. 

When various conjectures were formed 
and assertions hazarded concerning the 
Author or Editor of the Craftsman, some 
representing Caleb D'Anvers as an ima- 
ginary person, a mere fictitious character 
made use of to screen the performances of 
men in the dark, that formidable opponent 
of Sir Robert Walpole's administration said, 
" I hope it will not be expected that I should 
stand still and see myself reasoned out of 
my existence." 

Every one knows that it is possible to be 
reasoned out of our rights and despoiled in 
consequence of our property in a court of 
law; but every one may not know that it is 
possible to be reasoned out of our existence 
there : I do not mean condemned to death, 
and executed accordingly upon the testi- 



430 



THE DOCTOR. 



mony of false witnesses, as those who suffered 
for the Popish plot were ; or upon circum- 
stantial evidence, honestly produced, and 
disproved when it was too late ; but that an 
individual may be judicially declared to be 
not in existence, when actually present in 
the Court to give the Lawyers and the Law 
the lie. 

On the 2d of March, 1784, the Irish 
Attorney General was heard before the 
Irish House of Lords in the case of Hume 
and Loftus. In the course of his argument 
he contended that judgments were of the 
most sacred nature, and that to reverse one 
was in effect to overturn the law and the 
constitution ; the record was binding, and a 
bar to all other evidence being produced to 
the Court. " He instanced a case wherein 
a judgment had been given on the presumed 
death of a man's wife, who, as afterwards 
appeared, was not dead, but was produced in 
person to the Court, and was properly iden- 
tified, and it was prayed to the Court to 
reverse the judgment given on supposition 
of her death which had been pronounced by 
the same Court, as in the pleading stated. 
Nevertheless the Court, with the Woman 
before their eyes, pronounced her dead, and 
confirmed the judgment, saying, that the 
verdict was not that which was binding, but 
the judgment, in consequence of the verdict 
having become a record, could not be re- 
versed." 

This woman, upon hearing such a decision 
concerning herself pronounced, might well 
have called in question not her identity, but 
the evidence of her senses, and have supposed 
that she was dreaming, or out of her wits, 
rather than that justice could be so outraged, 
and common sense so grossly insulted in a 
Court of Law. 

Happily my case is in no worse court than 
a Court of Criticism, a Court, in which I 
can neither be compelled to plead nor to 
appear. 

Dr. Wordsworth rendered good service to 
English History when he asked who wrote 
Eitcojv BereriXuo), for it is a question of great 
historical importance, and he has shown, 
by a careful investigation of all the evidence 



which it has been possible to collect, that it 
is the work of Charles himself, confirming 
thus that internal evidence which is of the 
most conclusive kind. 

Who was Junius is a question which is 
not likely ever to be determined by dis- 
cussion after so many fruitless attempts ; 
but whenever the secret shall by any chance 
be discovered, considerable light will be 
thrown upon the political intrigues of the 
earlier part of a most important reign. 

But who or what I am can be of no im- 
portance to any but myself. 

More than one hundred and fifty treatises 
are said to have been published upon the 
question whether Thomas a Kempis was the 
Author of the well-known book de Imitatione 
Christi. That question affects the Augus- 
tinians ; for if it were proved that this 
native of Kemp near Cologne, Thomas Ham- 
merlein by name, were the transcriber only 
and not the writer of that famous treatise, 
they would lose the brightest ornament of 
their order. This Hammerlein has never 
been confounded with his namesake Felix, 
once a Doctor and Precentor Clarissimus, 
under whose portrait in the title page of one 
of his volumes where he stands Hammer in 
hand, there are these verses. 

Felicis si tejuvat indulsisse libellis 

Malleoli, prcsens dilige lector opus. 
Illius ingenium variis scabronibus actum 

Perspicis, et stimulos sustinuisse graves. 
Casibus adversis, aurum velut igne, probatus 

Hostibus usque suis Malleus acer erat. 
Ilinc sibi conveniens sorlitus nomen, ut essct ' 

Hemmerlin dictus, nomine, reque, statu. 
At Felix tandem, vitioque illcesus ab omni 

Carceris e tenebris sydera clara subit. 

This Hemmerlin in his Dialogue between a 
Nobleman and a Rustic, makes the Rustic 
crave license for his rude manner of speech 
saying, Si ruralis consuetudine moris in- 
eptissime loquar per te non corripiar, quia non 
sermonis colorum quoque nitorem, sed sensus 
sententiarumque requiro rigorem. Nam le- 
gitur quod Demon sedehat et braccam cum 
reste suebat; et dixit, si non est pulchra, tamen 
est consucio firma. The needle must have 
been considerably larger than Gammer 
Gurton's, which is never-the-less and ever 
will be the most famous of all needles. 



THE DOCTOR. 



431 



Well was it for Hodge when Diccon the 
Bedlam gave him the good openhanded blow 
which produced the catastrophe of that 
Right Pithy, Pleasant, and Merry Comedy 
entitled Gammer Gurton's Needle, — Well 
was it I say for Hodge that the Needle in 
the episcopal comedy was not of such calibre 
as that wherewith the Auld Gude Man, as 
the Scotch, according to Sir Walter, re- 
spectfully call the Old Wicked One, in their 
caution never to give any unnecessary 
offence, — Well, again I say, was it for 
Hodge that his Gammer's Neele, her dear 
Neele, her fair long straight Neele that was 
her only treasure, was of no such calibre as 
the Needle which that Old One used, when 
mending his breeks with a rope he observed 
that though it was not a neat piece of sewing 
it was strong, — for if it had been such a 
Needle, Diccon's manual joke must have 
proved fatal. Our Bishops write no such 
comedies now ; yet we have more than one 
who could translate it into Aristophanic 
Greek. 

Wherefore did Thomas Warton (never to 
be named without respect and gratitude by 
all lovers of English literature) say that 
when the Sermons of Hugh Latimer were in 
vogue at Court, the University might be 
justified in applauding Gammer Gurton's 
Needle? How could he who so justly ap- 
preciated the Comedy, disparage those 
sermons ? He has spoken of the play as the 
first in our language in Avhich a comic story 
is handled with some disposition of plot and 
some discrimination. " The writer," he says, 
" has a degree of jocularity which sometimes 
rises above buffoonery, but is often disgraced 
by lowness of incident. Yet in a more 
polished age he would have chosen, nor 
would he perhaps have disgraced, a better 
subject. It has been thought surprising 
that a learned audience could have endured 
some of these indelicate scenes. But the 
established festivities of scholars were gross ; 
nor was learning in that age always ac- 
companied by gentleness of manners." Nor 
is it always now, nor has it ever been, O 
Thomas Warton! — if it had, you would not 
when you wore a great wig, — had taken the 



degree of B.D., — been Professor of Poetry in 
the University of Oxford, — and wast more- 
over Poet Laureate, — most worthy of that 
office of all who have held it since Great 
Ben, — you would not in your mellow old 
age, when your brother was Master of Win- 
chester School, have delighted as you did in 
hunting rats with the Winchester Boys. 

O Thomas Warton ! you had and could 
not but have a hearty liking for all that is 
properly comic in the pithy old episcopal 
comedy ! but that you should even seem to 
disparage Latimer's Sermons is to me more 
than most strange. For Latimer would 
have gained for himself a great and enduring 
name in the pulpit, if he had not been called 
upon to bear the highest and holiest of all 
titles. The pithy comedy no doubt was 
written long before its author was con- 
secrated Bishop of Bath and Wells, and we 
may be sure that Bishop Still never reckoned 
it among his sins. If its language were 
rendered every where intelligible and its 
dirtiness cleaned away, for there is nothing 
worse to be removed, Gammer Gurton's 
Needle might succeed in these days as a 
farce. 

Fuller says he had read in the Register of 
Trinity College, Cambridge, this commend- 
ation of Bishop Still that he was ayadbg 
KovporpoQog nee Collegio gravis aut onerosus. 
Still was Master of that College, as he had 
been before of St. John's. 

" What style," says Sir John Harrington, 
" shall I use to set forth this Still, whom 
(well nigh thirty years since) my reverend 
tutor in Cambridge styled by this name, 
'Divine Still,' who, when myself came to 
him to sue for my grace to be bachelor, first 
examined me strictly, and after answered 
me kindly, that 'the grace he granted me 
was not of grace but of merit;' who was 
often content to grace my young exercises 
with his venerable presence ; who, from that 
time to this, hath given me some helps, more 
hopes, all encouragements, in my best 
studies ; to whom I never came, but I grew 
more religious ; from whom I never went, 
but I parted better instructed : Of him, 
therefore, my acquaintance, my friend, my 



432 



THE DOCTOR. 



instructor, and last my diocesan; if I speak 
much it were not to be marvelled ; if I speak 
frankly, it is not to be blamed ; and though 
I speak partially, it were to be pardoned. 
Yet to keep within my proportion, custom 
and promise, in all these, I must say this 
much of him ; his breeding was from his 
childhood in good literature, and partly in 
music *, which was counted in those days a 
preparative to Divinity ; neither could any 
be admitted to primam tonsuram, except he 
could first bene le, bene con, bene can (as 
they call it), which is to read well, to 
construe well, and to sing well ; in which 
last he hath good judgment, and I have 
heard good music of voices in his house. 

" In his full time, more full of learning, 
he became Bachelor of Divinity, and after 
Doctor ; and so famous for a Preacher, and 
especially a disputer, that the learned'st 
were even afraid to dispute with him ; and 
he finding his own strength would not stick 
to warn them in their arguments to take 
heed to their answers, like a perfect fencer 
that will tell beforehand in which button 
he will give the venew, or like a cunning 
chess-player that will appoint beforehand 
with which pawn, and in what place, he will 
give the mate. 

" One trifling accident happened to his 
Lordship at Bath, that I have thought since 
of more consequence, and I tell him that I 
never knew him non plus in argument, but 
there. There was a craft's-man in Bath, 
a recusant puritan, who, condemning our 
Church, our Bishops, our sacraments, our 
prayers, was condemned himself to die at 
the assizes, but, at my request, Judge 
Anderson reprieved him, and he was suffered 
to remain at Bath upon bail. The Bishop 
conferred with him, in hope to convert him, 
and first, My Lord alleged for the authority 
of the church, St. Augustine ! The Shoe- 
maker answered, ' Austin was but a man.' 
He (Still) produced, for the antiquity of 
Bishops, the Fathers of the Council at Nice. 

* The Greek sense of /xoviriyJ? is well known. Cf 
Arist. Pol. lib. viii. c. iii. As Cicero says, " Summam 
eruditionem Graeci sitam censebant in nervorum vocum- 
que cantibns," &c. Cic. Tuscul. i. c. ii. 



He answered, ' They were also but men, 
and might err.' ' Why then,' said the Bishop, 
' thou art but a man, and must, and dost err.' 
' No, Sir,' saith he, ' the Spirit bears witness 
to my spirit ; I am the child of God.' 'Alas ! ' 
said the Bishop, ' thy blind spirit will lead 
thee to the gallows.' ' If I die,' saith he, 'in 
the Lord's cause, I shall be a martyr.' The 
Bishop turning to me, stirred as much to 
pity as impatience ; — 'This man,' said he, 'is 
not a sheep strayed from the fold, for such 
may be brought in again on the shepherd's 
shoulders, but this is like a wild buck broke 
out of a park, whose pale is thrown down, 
that flies the farther off, the more he is 
hunted.' Yet this man, that stopped his 
ears like the adder to the charms of the 
Bishop, was after persuaded by a lay-man, 
and grew conformable. But to draw to an 
end ; in one question this Bishop, whom I 
count an oracle for learning, would never 
yet give me satisfaction, and that was, when 
I asked him his opinion of witches. He 
saith ' he knows other men's opinions, both 
old and new writers, but could never so 
digest them, to make them an opinion of his 
own.' All I can get is ' this, that the Devil 
is the old Serpent our enemy, that we pray 
to be delivered from daily ; as willing to 
have us think he can do too much as to have 
us persuaded he doth nothing.' " 

In the account of Webster and his 
Writings, prefixed to his Works by their 
able editor Mr. Dyce, that editor finds it 
necessary to bestow much pains in showing 
that John Webster the Dramatist and 
Player, was not John Webster the Puritan 
and Chaplain in the Army ; but, on the 
other hand, Mr. Payne Collier, who is a 
great authority in our stage literature, 
contends that he was one and the same 
person, and that when in the Prefatory 
Address to his Saint's Guide, he speaks of 
the " damnable condition" from which the 
Lord in his wonderful mercy had brought 
him, he could hardly mean anything but his 
condition as a player. It remained then to 
be argued, whether either of these persons 
were the John Webster, Practitioner in 
Physic and Chirurgery, who wrote or com- 



THE DOCTOR. 



433 



piled a work entitled Metalographia, a 
volume of Sermons entitled The Judgment 
set and the Books opened, and a tract called 
Academiarum JSxamen, or the Examination 
of Academies, wherein is discussed and ex- 
amined the Matter, Method, and Customs of 
Academic and Scholastic Learning, and the 
insufficiency thereof discovered and laid 
open : as also some expedients proposed for 
the reforming of schools and the perfecting 
and promoting of all kind of science. A 
powerful Tract Mr. Dyce calls it ; and it 
must have been thought of some importance 
in its day, for it provoked an answer from 
Seth Ward, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, 
and Wilkins, afterwards the well known 
Bishop of Chester, (from whom Peter Wilkins 
may perhaps have been named,) wrote in it 
an Epistle to the Author. One of these 
Websters wrote a remarkable book against 
the then prevalent belief in witchcraft, though 
he was himself a believer in astrology and 
held that there are great and hidden virtues 
in metals and precious stones, as they are by 
Nature produced, by mystical Chemistry 
prepared and exalted, or commixed and 
insculped in their due and fit constellation. 
Which of the John Websters was this ? If 
it has not been satisfactorily ascertained, 
whether there were one, two, three or four 
John Websters after so much careful in- 
vestigation by the most eminent bibliologists, 
though it is not supposed that on the part of 
any John Webster there was any design to 
conceal himself and mystify the public, by 
whom can the question be answered con- 
cerning the authorship of this Opus, except 
by me the Opifex, and those few persons 
trusted and worthy of the trust, who are, 
like me, secret as the grave ? 

There is a history (and of no ordinary 
value) of Great Britain from the Revolution 
to the Accession of George I. written in 
Latin by Alexander Cunningham, translated 
from the Author's Manuscript by Dr. 
William Thompson, and published in two 
quarto volumes by Dr. Hollingbery in 1787. 
That the Author was Minister for George 
I. to the Venetian Republic .is certain ; but 
whether he were the Alexander Cunningham 



that lived at the same time, whose editions 
of Virgil and Horace are well known, and 
whose reputation as a critic stood high 
among the continental scholars of the last 
century, is altogether doubtful. If they 
were two persons, each was born in Scotland 
and educated in Holland, each a friend and 
favourite of Carstares, King William's con- 
fidential secretary for Scotch affairs, each 
a remarkably good Chess Player, each an 
accomplished Latinist, and each concerned 
in the education of John Duke of Argyle. 
Upon weaker evidence, says Dr. Thompson, 
than that which seems to prove the identity 
of the two Cunninghams, decisions have been 
given that have affected fortunes, fame, life, 
posterity and all that is dear to mankind ; 
and yet, notwithstanding these accumulated 
coincidences, he comes at length to the con- 
clusion, that there are circumstances which 
seem incompatible with their identity, and 
that probably they were different persons. 

But what signifies it now to any one 
whether certain books published in the 
seventeenth century were written by one 
and the same John Webster, or by four 
persons of that name ? What signifies it 
whether Alexander Cunningham the his- 
torian was one and indivisible, like the 
French Republic, or that there were two 
Alexander Cunninghams, resembling each 
other as much as the two Sosias of the 
ancient drama, or the two Dromios and their 
twin masters in the Comedy of Errors? 
What signifies it to any creature upon 
earth ? It may indeed afford matter for 
inquiry in a Biographical Dictionary, or in 
the Gentleman's Magazine, and by possibility 
of the remotest kind, for a law- suit. And 
can we wonder that an identity of names 
has sometimes occasioned a singular con- 
fusion of persons, and that Biographers and 
Bibliographers should sometimes be thus at 
fault, when we find that the same thing has 
deceived the most unerring of all Messengers, 
— Death himself. 

Thus it was. There was a certain man, 
Curina by name, who lived in a village not 
far from Hippo in the days of St. Augustine. 
This man sickened and died; but because 



434 



THE DOCTOR 



there seemed to be some faint and inter- 
mitting appearances of life, his friends 
delayed burying him for some days. Those 
appearances at length ceased ; it could no 
longer be doubted that he was indeed dead ; 
when behold he opened his eyes, and desired 
that a messenger might immediately be sent 
to his neighbour and namesake Curina the 
blacksmith, and inquire how he was. The 
answer was that he had just expired. The 
resuscitated Curina then related that he 
himself had verily and indeed died, and that 
his soul had been carried before the Judge 
of the Dead, who had vehemently reproved 
the Ministering Spirits that brought him 
thither, seeing it was not for him but for 
Curina the Blacksmith that they had been 
sent. This was not only a joyful surprise 
for the reprieved or replevied Curina, but a 
most happy adventure in other respects. He 
had not only an opportunity of seeing 
Paradise in his excursion, but a friendly hint 
was given him there, that as soon as his 
health was restored he should repair to Hippo 
and there receive baptism from St. Augus- 
tine's hands. 

When the wrong soul happens thus to be 
summoned out of the body, Pope St. Gre- 
gory the Great assures us that there is no 
mistake ; and who shall question what the 
Infallible Pope and Saint affirms ? " Peter," 
saith he, in one of his Dialogues, " when 
this happeneth, it is not, if it be well con- 
sidered, any error, but an admonition. For 
God of his great and bountiful mercy so 
disposeth, that some after their death do 
straightways return again to life, in order 
that having seen the torments of Hell, which 
before when they heard of they would not 
believe, they may at least tremble at them 
after they have with their own eyes beheld 
them. For a certain Sclavonian who was a 
Monk, and lived with me here in this city, 
in my Monastery, used to tell me, that at 
such time as he dwelt in the wilderness, he 
knew one Peter, a Monk born in Spain, who 
lived 'with him in the vast desert called 
Evasa, which Peter (as he said) told him 
how before he came to dwell in that place, 
he by a certain sickness died, and was 



straightway restored to life again, affirming 
that he had seen the torments and innumer- 
able places of Hell, and divers who were 
mighty men in this world hanging in those 
flames ; and that as himself was carried to 
be thrown also into the same fire, suddenly 
an Angel in a beautiful attire appeared, who 
would not suffer him to be cast into those 
torments, but spake unto him in this manner : 
4 Go thy way back again, and hereafter 
carefully look unto thyself how thou leadest 
thy life ! ' after which words his body by 
little and little became warm, and himself 
waking out of the sleep of everlasting death, 
reported all such things as had happened 
about him ; after which time he bound 
himself to such fasting and watching, that 
though he had said nothing, yet his life and 
conversation did speak what torments he 
had seen and was afraid of; and so God's 
merciful providence wrought in his temporal 
death that he died not everlastingly. 

"But because man's heart is passing 
obdurate and hard, hereof it cometh that 
though others have the like vision and see 
the same pains, yet do they not always keep 
the like profit. For the honourable man 
Stephen, whom you knew very well, told me 
of himself, that at such time as he was upon 
business, resident in the City of Constan- 
tinople, he fell sick and died : and when they 
sought for a surgeon to bowel him and to 
embalm his body and could not get any, he 
lay unburied all the night following; in 
which space his soul was carried to the dun- 
geon of Hell, where he saw many things 
which before when he heard of, he had little 
believed. But when he was brought before 
the Judge that sat there, the Judge would 
not admit him to his presence, saying, 'I 
commanded not this man to be brought, but 
Stephen the Smith ! ' upon which words he 
was straightway restored to life, and Stephen 
the Smith, that dwelt hard by, at that very 
hour departed this life, whose death did show 
that the words which he had heard were 
most true. But though the foresaid Stephen 
escaped death in this manner at that time, 
yet three years since, in that mortality which 
lamentably wasted this city, (and in which, 



THE DOCTOR. 



435 



as you know, men with their corporal eyes 
did behold arrows that came from Heaven, 
which did strike divers,) the same man ended 
his days. At which time a certain soldier 
being also brought to the point of death, his 
soul was in such sort carried out of his 
body that he lay void of all sense and feel- 
ing, but coming quickly again to himself, he 
told them that were present what strange 
things he had seen. For he said, (as many 
report who knew it very well,) that he saw 
a Bridge, under which a black and smoaky 
river did run that had a filthy and intoler- 
able smell ; but upon the further side thereof 
there were pleasant green meadows full of 
sweet flowers ; in which also there were 
divers companies of men apparelled in white; 
and such a delicate savour there was that 
the fragrant odour thereof did give wonder- 
ful content to all them that dwelt and walked 
in that place. Divers particular mansions 
also there were, all shining with brightness 
and light, and especially one magnifical and 
sumptuous house, which was a-building, the 
bricks whereof seemed to be of Gold ; but 
whose it was that he knew not. 

" There were also upon the bank of the 
foresaid river certain houses, but some of 
them the stinking vapour which rose from 
the river did touch, and some other it 
touched not at all. Now those that desired 
to pass over the foresaid Bridge were subject 
to this manner of trial ; if any that was 
wicked attempted to go over, down he fell 
into that dark and stinking river ; but those 
that were just and not hindered by sin, 
securely and easily passed over to those plea- 
sant and delicate places. There he said also 
that he saw Peter, who was Steward of the 
Pope's family, and died some four years since, 
thrust into a most filthy place, where he 
was bound and kept down with a great 
weight of iron ; and inquiring why he was 
so used, he received this answer, which all 
we that knew his life can affirm to be most 
true ; for it was told him that he suffered 
that pain, because when himself was upon 
any occasion to punish others, that he did it 
more upon cruelty than to show his obedi- 
ence ; of which his merciless disposition none 



that knew him can be ignorant. There also 
he said that he saw a Priest whom he knew, 
who coming to the foresaid Bridge passed 
over with as great security as he had lived 
in this world sincerely. 

" Likewise upon the same Bridge he said 
that he did see this Stephen whom before 
we spake of, who, being about to go over, 
his foot slipped, and half his body hanging 
beside the Bridge, he was of certain terrible 
men that rose out of the river drawn by the 
legs downward, and by certain other white 
and beautiful persons he was by the arms 
pulled upward, and while they strove thus, 
the wicked spirits to draw him downward 
and the good to lift him upward, he that 
beheld all this strange sight returned to life, 
not knowing in conclusion what became of 
him. By which miraculous vision we learn 
this thing concerning the life of Stephen, to 
wit, that in him the sins of the flesh did strive 
with his works of alms. For in that he was 
by the legs drawn downward, and by the 
arms plucked upward, apparent it is, that 
both he loved to give alms, and yet did not 
perfectly resist the sins of the flesh which did 
pull him downward ; but in that secret ex- 
amination of the Supreme Judge, which of 
them had the victory, that neither we know 
nor he that saw it. Yet more certain it is 
that the same Stephen after that he had seen 
the places of Hell, as before was said, and 
returned again to his body, did never per- 
fectly amend his former wicked life, seeing 
many years after he departed this world 
leaving us in doubt whether he were saved 
or damned." 

Hereupon Peter the Deacon said to Pope 
St. Gregory the Great, " What, I beseech 
you, was meant by the building of that house 
in those places of delight, with bricks of 
gold ? For it seemeth very ridiculous that 
in the next life we should have need of any 
such kind of metal." Pope Gregory the 
Great answered and said, " What man of 
sense can think so ? But by that which w r as 
shown there, (whosoever he was for whom 
that house was built,) we learn plainly what 
virtuous works he did in this world ; for he 
that by plenty of alms doth merit the reward 



436 



THE DOCTOR. 



of eternal light, certain it is that he doth 
build his house with gold. For the same 
soldier who had this vision said also, (which 
I forgot to tell you before,) that old men 
and young, girls and boys, did carry those 
bricks of gold for the building of that house, 
by which we learn that those to whom we 
show compassion in this world do labour for 
us in the next. There dwelt hard by us a 
religious man called Deusdedit, who was a 
shoemaker, concerning whom another saw 
by revelation that he had in the next world 
a house a-building, but the workmen thereof 
laboured only upon the Saturday; who 
afterward inquiring more diligently how he 
lived, found that whatsoever he got by his 
labour all the week, and was not spent upon 
necessary provision of meat and apparel, all 
that upon the Saturday he bestowed upon 
the poor in alms, at St. Peter's Church; and 
therefore see what reason there was that 
his building went forward upon the Satur- 
day." 

It was a very reasonable question that 
Peter the Deacon asked of Gregory the 
Great, when he desired to know how it came 
to pass that certain persons who were sum- 
moned into the other world, were told when 
they got there that they were not the per- 
sons who had been sent for. And it was not 
ill answered by the Pope that if properly 
considered, this when it happeneth is not an 
error, but an admonition. Yet that there 
was a mistake in the two cases of Curina 
and Stephen and their respective namesakes 
and blacksmiths cannot be disputed, — a 
mistake on the part of the Ministering 
Spirits. This may be accounted for by sup- 
posing that inferior Spirits were employed in 
both cases, those for whom they were sent 
not being of a condition to be treated with 
extraordinary respect on such an occasion. 
Comets were never kindled to announce the 
death of common men, and the lowest 
Spirits might be deputed to take charge of 
the Blacksmiths. But Azrael himself makes 
no mistakes. 

Five things the Mahommedans say are 
known to no created Beings, only to the 
Creator ; the time of the Day of Judgment ; 



the time of rain ; whether an unborn child 
shall be male or female ; what shall happen 
to-morrow, and when any person is to die. 
These the Arabians call the five keys of 
secret knowledge, according to a tradition of 
their Prophet, to whom questions of this 
kind were propounded by Al Hareth Ebnn 
Amru. But it may be inferred from a tra- 
dition which Al Beidawi has preserved that 
one of these keys is committed to the Angel 
of Death, when he is sent Out in person to 
execute the irrevocable decree. 

The Arabians tell us that Solomon was 
exercising his horses one day when the hour 
for evening prayer was announced. Imme- 
diately he alighted, and would not allow 
either his own horse or any other in the field 
to be taken to the stables, but gave orders 
that they should be turned loose, being from 
thenceforth dedicated to the Almighty's 
service, which the Arabians we are told call 
JRebath fi sebil Allah. To reward the king 
for this instance of his piety, Allah gave him 
a mild and pleasant, but strong wind, to be 
at his orders from that time forth and carry 
him whithersoever he would. 

Once on a time Azrael passed by Solomon 
in a visible form, and in passing looked 
earnestly at a certain person who was sitting 
with the king. That person not liking the 
earnestness and the expression of his look, 
asked Solomon who it was, and Solomon re- 
plied it was the Angel of Death. He looks 
as if he wanted me, said the affrighted man ; 
I beseech you, therefore, order the Wind to 
carry me instantly to India ! Solomon spake 
the word, and no sooner was it spoken, than 
the Wind took him up and set him down 
where he desired to be. The Angel then 
said to Solomon, I looked so earnestly at that 
Man out of wonder, because that being com- 
manded to take his soul in India, I found 
him here with thee in Palestine. 

But, my good Reader, you and I must 
make no tarriance now with Solomon Ben 
Daoud, wisest of men and mightiest of Magi- 
cians, nor with St. Gregory the Great, Pope 
and Punster, and his friend Peter the Dea- 
con, though you and I might delight in the 
Pope's veracious stories as much as good 



THE DOCTOR. 



437 



Peter himself. We must wind up the 
volume * with one Interchapter more. 

Saggio e' il consigliator che sol ricorre 
A quelV ultimo fin, che in cor sifisse, 
Quel sol rimira, e tutto VaU.ro abborre, 
Come al suo proprio danno consentisse j 
E' chifarcL in tal guisa, rarofia 
Che d' incontrare il ver per da la via. 



INTERCHAPTER XIX. 

THE AUTHOR DIFFERS IN OPINION FROM SIR 
EGERTON BRYDGES, AND THE EMPEROR 
JULIAN. SPEAKS CHARITABLY OF THAT 
EMPEROR, VINDICATES PROTEUS FROM HIS 
CENSURE, AND TALKS OF POSTHUMOUS 
TRAVELS AND EXTRA MUNDANE EXCUR- 
SIONS, AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN LIM- 
BOLAND. 

Petulant. If he says black's black, — if I have a humour 
to say it is blue — let that pass. All's one 
for that. If I have a humour to prove it, 
it must be granted. 

Wiiwould. Not positively must, — But it may, it may. 

Petulant. Yes, it positively must,— upon proof positive. 

Witwould. Ay, upon proof positive it must ; but upon 
proof presumptive it only may. That's a 
logical distinction now. Congreve. 

"In the ignotum pro magnifico" says Umbra, 
" resides a humble individual's best chance 
of being noticed or attended to at all." Yet 
many are the attempts which have been 
made, and are making, in America too as 
well as in Great Britain, by Critics, Critickins 
and Criticasters, (for there are of all de- 
grees,) to take from me the Ignotum, and 
force upon me the Magnificum in its stead, 
to prove that I am not the humble, and 
happily unknown disciple, friend, and, 
however unworthy, memorialist of Dr. Dove, 
a nameless individual as regards the public, 
holding the tenour of my noiseless way con- 
tentedly towards that oblivion which sooner 
or later must be the portion of us all ; but 
that I am what is called a public character, 
a performer upon the great stage, whom 
every one is privileged to hiss or to applaud ; 
myself a Doctor, LL.D. according to the 
old form, according to the present usage 
D.C.L. — a Doctor upon whom that trili- 



* Note. This refers to the former Editions in seven 
volumes. 

t L' AVARCHIDE. 



teral dignity was conferred in full theatre, 
amid thundering peals of applauding hands, 
and who heard himself addressed that day 
in Phillimorean voice and fluent latinity by 
all eulogistic epithets ending in issimus or 
errimus. I an issimus ! — I an errimus ! — No 
other issimus than that Ipsissimus ego which 
by these critics I am denied to be. 

These critics will have it that I am among 
living authors what the ever memorable 
Countess of Henneberg was among women ; 
that I have more tails to my name than the 
greatest Bashaw bears among his standards, 
or the largest cuttle fish to his headless body 
or bodyless head ; that I have executed 
works more durable than brass, and loftier 
than the Pyramids, and that I have touched 
the stars with my sublime forehead, — what 
could have saved my poor head from being 
moonstruck if I had. 

Believe them not, O Reader ! I never exe- 
cuted works in any material more durable 
than brass, I never built any thing like a 
pyramid, Absurdo de tamana grandeza no se 
ha escrito en letras de molde. And as for the 
alleged proofs, which, depriving me of my 
individuality and divesting me even of entity, 
would consubstantiate me with the most 
prolific of living writers, no son mas que ayre 
6 menos que ayre, una sombra 6 menos que 
sombra, pues son nada, y nada es lo que nunca 
ha tenido ser verdadero. % " It is in vain," as 
Mr. Carlyle says when apostrophising Mira- 
beau the father upon his persevering en- 
deavours to make his son resemble him in 
all points of character, and be as it were his 
second self, "it is in vain. He will not be 
Thou, but must and will be himself, an- 
other than Thou." In like manner, It is in 
vain, say I : I am not, and will not and can- 
not be any body but myself; nor is it of any 
consequence to any human being who or 
what I am, though perhaps those persons 
may think otherwise who say that " they de- 
light more in the shadow of something than 
to converse with a nothing in substance." § 

Lord Shaftesbury has said that " of all the 
artificial relations formed between mankind, 



X Nicolas Peres. 



§ HURLOTHRUMBO. 



438 



THE DOCTOR. 



the most capricious and variable is that of 
Author and Reader." He may be right in 
this ; but when he says 'tis evident that an 
Author's art and labour are for his Reader's 
sake alone, I cannot assent to the position. 
For though I have a great and proper re- 
gard for my readers, and entertain all due 
respect for them, it is not for their sake alone 
that my art and labour have been thus em- 
ployed, — not for their benefit alone, still 
less for their amusement, that this Opus has 
been edified. Of the parties concerned in 
it, the Readers, sooth to say, are not those 
who have been either first or second in my 
consideration. The first and paramount ob- 
ject was to preserve the Doctor's memory ; 
the second to gratify myself by so doing ; 
for what higher gratification can there be 
than in the performance Gf a debt of grati- 
tude, one of those debts truly to be called 
immense, which 

— A grateful mind 
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once 
Indebted and discharged * 

That there are some readers who would 
think themselves beholden, though in far less 
degree, to me, as I am to the revered sub- 
ject of these memorials, was an after consi- 
deration. 

Sir Egerton Brydges says he never took 
up a book which he could read without 
wishing to know the character and history 
of the author. " But what is it," he says, 
" to tell the facts that he was born, married 
or lived single and died ? What is common 
to all can convey no information. We desire 
to know an author's feelings, his temper, his 
disposition, his modes of thinking, his habits; 
nay even his person, his voice, and his mode 
of expressing himself, the society in which 
he has lived, and the images and lessons 
which attended upon his cradle." Most of 
this, Sir Egerton, you can never know other- 
wise than by guess work. Yet methinks my 
feelings, my temper, my disposition, and my 
modes of thinking are indicated here, as far 
as a book can indicate them. You have 
yourself said ; " if it could be proved that 

* Milton. 



what one writes, is no index to what he 
thinks and feels, then it would be of little 
value and no interest ;'' but you are confi- 
dent that such delusive writers always be- 
tray themselves; " Sincerity," you say, "has 
always a breath and spirit of its own." Yes, 
Sir Egerton, and if there is not that spirit in 
these volumes, there is no vitality in them ; 
if they have not that breath of life, they 
must be still-born. 

Yet I cannot agree with you in the opinion 
that those who make a false display of fine 
feelings, whether in prose or verse, always 
betray themselves. The cant of sentimenta- 
lism passes as current with the Reading 
Public, as cant of a different description 
with those who call themselves the Religious 
Public. Among the latter, the proudest and 
the most uncharitable people in this nation 
are to be found ; and in proof that the most 
intensely selfish of the human race may be 
sentimentalists, and super-sentimentalists, it 
is sufficient to name Rousseau. 

Perhaps some benevolent and sagacious 
Reader may say to me as Randolph said to 
his friend Owen Feltham, — 

Thy book I read, and read it with delight, 
Resolving so to live as thou dost write ; 
And yet I guess thy life thy book produces 
And but expresses thy peculiar uses. 

But the Reader who should apply to me 
and my Opus the French lines, 

A Vauteur on connoit Vouvrage, 
A Vouvrage on connoit Vauteur, 

though he may be equally benevolent, would 
not be equally sagacious. It is not for mere 
caprice that I remain Ignotus and Innomi- 
nabilis ; not a Great Unknown, an Ignoto- 
lemagne, but simply an Unknown, "Ayvworoc, 
VInconnu, Sconciuto, the Encubierto, the 
Desconocido — 

This precious secret let me hide. 
I'll tell you every thing beside.t 

Critics, we know, affect always to have 
strange intelligence ; but though they should 
say to me 

You may 
As soon tie up the sunbeams in a net 
As keep yourself unknown J, 



t Cotton. 



% Shirley. 



THE DOCTOR. 



439 



I shall still continue in darkness inscrutable. 
Nor am I to be moved from this determina- 
tion by the opinion which the Emperor 
Julian expressed concerning Proteus, when 
he censured him for changing himself into 
divers forms, lest men should compel him to 
manifest his knowledge. For, said Julian, 
"if Proteus were indeed wise, and knew, 
as Homer says, many things, I praise him 
indeed for his knowledge, but I do not 
commend his disposition ; seeing that he 
performed the part, not of a philanthropist, 
but rather of an impostor, in concealing 
himself lest he should be useful to man- 
kind." 

This was forming a severer opinion of the 
Ancient of the Deep, the old Prophet of the 
Sea, than I would pronounce upon Julian 
himself, though the name of Apostate clings 
to him. Unhappy as he was in the most 
important of all concerns, he was at least a 
true believer in a false religion, and there- 
fore a better man than some of those kings 
who have borne the title of Most Christian 



or Most Catholic. I wish he had kept his 
beard clean ! But our follies and weak- 
nesses, when they are nothing worse, die 
with us, and are not like unrepented sins to 
be raised up in judgment. The beard of the 
imperial Philosopher is not populous now. 
And in my posthumous travels, if in some 
extramundane excursion I should meet him 
in that Limbo which is not a place of punish- 
ment, but where odd persons as well as odd 
things are to be found, and in the Public 
Library of that Limbo we should find a cer- 
tain Opus conspicuously placed and in high 
repute, translated, not into the Limbo tongue 
alone, but into all languages, and the Impe- 
rial Philosopher should censure the still 
incognoscible Author for still continuing in 
incognoscibility for the same reason that he 
blamed the Ancient of the Deep, I should 
remind him of the Eleusinian Mysteries, 
whisper the Great Decasyllabon in his ear, 
and ask him whether there are not some 
secrets which it is neither lawful nor fitting 
to disclose. 



THE DOCTOR, 



be. 




PART THE SECOND 



3|o0tf)utnou0 



" There is a physiognomy in the Titles of Books no less than in the faces 
of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to expect from the 
one as the other." — Butler's Remains. 



TO THE SECOND PART. 



INVENIAS ETIAM DISJECTI MEMBRA POET-flS. 



In the distribution of the lamented Southey's 
literary property, the History of the Brazils, 
his much treasured MS. History of Portugal, 
The Doctor, &c. and the MS. materials for 
its completion, fell to the share of Edith 
May Warter, his eldest child, and, as he 
used to call her, his right hand, — to whom 
he addressed the Dedication of the Tale of 
Paraguay, and to whom he commenced a 
little Poem of which the lines following are 
almost the last, if not the very last, he ever 
wrote in verse. 

O daughter dear, who bear'st no longer now 

Thy Father's name, and for the chalky flats 

Of Sussex hast exchanged thy native land 

Of lakes and mountains, — neither change of place, 

Condition, and all circumstantial things, 

Nor new relations, and access of cares 

Unfelt before, have alienated thee 

Nor wean'd thy heart from this beloved spot, 

Thy birth place, and so long thy happy home ! 

The present portion of " The Doctor, &c." 
is drawn up from the MS. materials alluded 
to, as nearly as possible in the order the 
Author had intended, and the seventh and 
concluding volume is in the press and will 
shortly be published.* 

The whole of the MS. sheets, previous to 
being sent to the press, were cautiously ex- 
amined by his no less amiable and excellent, 
than highly gifted Widow, who, at the time, 
was staying with us on a visit at West- 
Tarring. Had the lamented Southey con- 
tinued the work, it was his intention, in this 
volume, to have advanced a step in the 
story, — and the Interchapters, no doubt, 
would have been enlarged, according to 
custom. His habit was, as he said, " to lay 
the timbers of them, and to jot down, from 
time to time, remarks serious or jocose, as 
they occurred to him." Full readily would 
this holy and humble man of heart have ac- 
ceded to the truth conveyed in these lines 

* This refers to the Edition in Seven Volumes, 8vo. 



from Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philo- 
sophy, — and none the less for their dactylic 
cadence. 

There is a grave-faced folly, and verily a laughter loving 

wisdom ; 
And what, if surface judges account it vain frivolity ? 
There is indeed an evil in excess, and a field may lie 

fallow too long ; 
Yet merriment is often as a froth, that mantleth on the 

strong mind : 
And note thou this for a verity, — the subtlest thinker 

when alone, 
From ease of thoughts unbent, will laugh the loudest 

with his fellows : 
And well is the loveliness of wisdom mirrored in a cheer- 
ful countenance, 
Justly the deepest pools are proved by dimpling eddies ; 
For that, a true philosophy commandeth an innocent life, 
And the unguilty spirit is lighter than a linnet's heart ; 
Yea, there is no cosmetic like a holy conscience ; 
The eye is bright with trust, the cheek bloomed over 

with affection, 
The brow unwrinkled with a care, and the lip triumphant 

in its gladness.f 

The only liberty taken with the original 
MS. is the omission of, now and then a 
name, or even a paragraph, which might 
have given pain to the living. Such pas- 
sages were thrown off playfully, and were, 
as Mrs. Southey can testify, erased by the 
author continually. It was no custom of 
Southey to cast " fire-brands, arrows, and 
death," and to say, " Am I not in sport ? " j 

It only remains to add that the Editor has 
carefully verified all references, — that he is 
responsible for the headings of the chapters 
(some few excepted,) — for the Mottoes to 
Chapters CLXXX. and CLXXXL, — and 
for the casual foot notes. 

John Wood Warter. 

Vicarage House, 
West-Tarring, Nov. 2btk, 1846. 



t Of Ridicule, 1st Series. On my acquainting Mrs. 
Southey with my intention of quoting these lines, she 
wrote me word back : — " That very passage I had noted, 
as singularly applicable to him we knew so well, — whom 
the world, the children of this generation, — knew so 
little ! " 

t Prov. xxvi. 18, 19. 



The ancient sage who did so long maintain 

That bodies die, but souls return again, 

With all the births and deaths he had in store, 

Went out Pythagoras and came no more. 

And modern Asgill, whose capricious thought 

Is yet with stores of wilder notions fraught, 

Too soon convinced, shall yield that fleeting breath, 

Which play'd so idly with the darts of death. 

Prior. 



I swell with my imaginations, 
Like a tall ship, bound out for the Fortunate Islands ; 
Top and top-gallant ! my flags, and my figaries, 
Upon me, with a lusty gale of wind 
Able to rend my sails. I shall o'errun 
And sink thy little bark of understanding 
In my career. 

Shirley. 



Tu as icy dequoy faire un grand repas : la sotise, Vegare- 
ment, le desordre, la negligence, la paresse, et milles autres 
defauts cacher & mon aveuglement, ou ct mon ignorance, 
sont semis en pir amide et a plats renforcez. Gobe, gobe, 
mon cher Lecteur a ton aise ! qu'il ne te resle ny faim ny 
appetit, puis que tu pens satisfaire Pun et V autre, et que 
tu as tout, Abastanza, comme disent les Italiens ; c'est a 
dire presque d gogo. 

La Precieuse. 



Let the looks and noses of judges hover thick, so they 
bring the brains ; or if they do not, I care not. When I 
suffered it to go abroad, I departed with my right ; and 
now, so secure an interpreter I am of my chance, that 
neither praise nor dispraise shall affect me. 

Ben Jonson. 



Deep-reaching wits, here is no deep stream for you to 
angle in. Moralizers, you that wrest a never-meant 
meaning out of every thing, applying all things to the 
present time, keep your attention for the common stage ; 
for here are no quips in characters for you to read ! Vain 
glozers, gather what you will 1 Spite, spell backward 
what thou canst ! 

Nash, Summer's Last Will. 



MSS. MOTTOES FOR THE DOCTOR, &c. 



THE DOCTOR, 

&c. 



PART THE SECOND. 



CHAPTER CLXXIL 

Descartes' notion concerning the pro- 
longation OP LIFE. A SICILIAN PROPOSAL 
FOR BREEDING UP CHILDREN TO BE IM- 
MORTAL. ASGILL'S ARGUMENT AGAINST 
THE NECESSITY OP DYING. 

O harmless Death ! whom still the valiant brave, 
The wise expect, the sorrowful invite ; 

And all the good embrace, who know the Grave 
A short dark passage to eternal light. 

Sir William Davenant. 

Sir Kenelm Digby went to Holland for 
the purpose of conversing with Descartes, 
who was then living in retirement at Egmont. 
Speculative knowledge, Digby said to him, 
was, no doubt, a refined and agreeable pur- 
suit, but it was too uncertain and too useless 
to be made a man's occupation, life being so 
short that one has scarcely time to acquire 
well the knowledge of necessary things. It 
would be far more worthy of a person like 
Descartes, he observed, who so well under- 
stood the construction of the human frame, if 
he would apply himself to discover means 
of prolonging its duration, rather than at- 
tach himself to the mere speculation of philo- 
sophy. Descartes made answer that this 
was a subject on which he had already medi- 
tated ; that as for rendering man immortal, 
it was what he would not venture to promise, 
but that he was very sure he could prolong 
his life to the standard of the Patriarchs. 

Saint-Evremond, to whom Digby repeated 
this, says that this opinion of Descartes was 
well known both to his friends in Holland and 
in France. The Abbe Picot, his disciple and 
his martyr, was so fully persuaded of it, that 



it was long before he would believe his master 
was dead, and when at length unwillingly 
convinced of what it was no longer possible 
to deny or doubt, he exclaimed, que e'en etoit 
faitet que la Jin du Genre humain alloit venir! 

A certain Sicilian physician who com- 
mented upon Galen, was more cautious if 
not more modest than Descartes. He affirm- 
ed that it was certainly possible to render 
men immortal, but then they must be bred 
up from the earliest infancy with that view ; 
and he undertook so to train and render 
them, — if they were fit subjects. — Poor 
children ! if it had indeed been possible thus 
to divest them of their reversionary interest 
in Heaven. 

A much better way of abolishing death 
was that which Asgill imagined, when he 
persuaded himself from Scripture that it is 
in our power to go to Heaven without any 
such unpleasant middle passage. Asgill's is 
the worst case of intolerance that has occur- 
red in this country since persecution has 
ceased to affect life or member. 

This remarkable man was born about the 
middle of the seventeenth century, and bred 
to the Law in Lincoln's Inn, under Mr. 
Eyre, a very eminent lawyer of those days. 
In 1698 he published a treatise with this 
title — " Several assertions proved, in order 
to create another species of money than Gold 
and Silver," and also an " Essay on a Regis- 
try for Titles of Lands." Both subjects 
seem to denote that on these points he was 
considerably advanced beyond his age. But 
the whole strength of his mind was devoted 
to his profession, in which he had so com- 



446 



THE DOCTOR. 



pletely trammelled and drilled his intellectual 
powers, that he at length acquired a habit 
of looking at all subjects in a legal point of 
view. He could find flaws in an hereditary 
title to the crown. But it was not to seek 
flaws that he studied the Bible ; he studied 
it to see whether he could not claim under 
the Old and New Testament something more 
than was considered to be his share. The 
result of this examination was, that in the 
year 1700 he published " An Argument 
proving that according to the Covenant of 
Eternal Life revealed in the Scriptures Man 
may be translated from hence into that Eter- 
nal Life without passing through death, 
although the Human Nature of Christ him- 
self could not be thus translated till he had 
passed through death." 

That the old motto (says he), worn upon 
tomb-stones, " Death is the Gate of Life," 
is a lie, by which men decoy one another into 
death, taking it to be a thoroughfare into 
Eternal Life, whereas it is just so far out of 
the way. For die when we will, and be 
buried where we will, and lie in the grave 
as long as we will, we must all return from 
thence, and stand again upon the Earth 
before we can ascend into the Heavens. 
Hinc itur ad astra. He admitted that " this 
custom of the world to die hath gained 
such a prevalency over our minds by pre- 
possessing us of the necessity of death, that 
it stands ready to swallow his argument 
whole without digesting it." But the domi- 
nion of death, he said, is supported by our 
fear of it, by which it hath bullied the world 
to this day. Yet " the custom of the World 
to die is no argument one way or other;" 
however, because he knew that custom itself 
is admitted as an evidence of title, upon 
presumption that such custom had once a 
reasonable commencement, and that this 
reason doth continue, it was incumbent upon 
him to answer this Custom by showing the 
time and reason of its commencement, and 
that the reason was determined. 

" First then," says he, " I do admit the 
custom or possession of Death over the 
world to be as followeth : that Death did 
reign from Adam to Moses by an uninter- 



rupted possession over all men, women and 
children, created or born, except one breach 
made upon it in that time by Enoch ; and 
hath reigned from Moses unto this day by 
the like uninterrupted possession, except one 
other breach made upon it in this time by 
Elijah. And this is as strong a possession 
as can be alledged against me. 

" The religion of the World now is that 
Man is born to die. But from the beginning 
it was not so, for Man was made to live. 
God made not Death till Man brought it 
upon himself by his delinquency. Adam 
stood as fair for Life as Death, and fairer 
too, because he was in the actual possession 
of Life, — as Tenant thereof at the Will of 
God, and had an opportunity to have made 
that title perpetual by the Tree of Life, 
which stood before him with the Tree of 
Knowledge of Good and Evil. And here 
'tis observable how the same act of man is 
made the condition both of his life and death: 
' put forth thy hand and pull and eat and die,' 
or ' put forth thy hand and pull and eat and 
live for ever.' 'Tis not to be conceived that 
there was any physical virtues in either of 
these Trees whereby to cause life or death ; 
but God having sanctified them by those 
two different names, he was obliged to make 
good his own characters of them, by com- 
manding the whole Creation to act in such 
a manner as that Man should feel the effects 
of this word, according to which of the 
Trees he first put forth his hand. And it is 
yet more strange, that man having life and 
death set before him at the same time and 
place, and both to be had upon the same 
condition, that he should single out his own 
death, and leave the Tree of Life untouched. 
And what is further strange, even after his 
election of death he had an interval of time 
before his expulsion out of Paradise, to have 
retrieved his fate by putting forth his hand 
to the Tree of Life ; and yet he omitted 
this too ! 

" But by all this it is manifest that as the 
form or person of man in his first creation 
was capable of eternal life without dying, 
so the fall of man, which happened to him 
after his creation, hath not disabled his per- 



THE DOCTOR. 



447 



son from that capacity of eternal life. And, 
therefore, durst Man even then have broken 
through the Cherubim and naming sword, 
or could he now any way come at the Tree 
of Life, he must yet live for ever, notwith- 
standing his sin committed in Paradise and 
his expulsion out of it. But this Tree of 
Life now seems lost to Man ; and so he 
remains under the curse of that other Tree, 
1 in the day that thou eatest thereof thou 
shalt die.' Which sentence of the Law is 
the cause of the death of Man, and was the 
commencement of the Custom of Death in 
the World, and by the force of this Law 
Death has kept the possession (before ad- 
mitted) to this day. 

" By his act of delinquency and the sen- 
tence upon it, Adam stood attainted and 
became a dead man in law, though he was 
not executed till about nine hundred years 
afterwards." Lawyer as Asgill was, and 
legally as he conducts his whole extraor- 
dinary argument, he yet offers a moral ex- 
tenuation of Adam's offence. Eve after her 
eating and Adam before his eating, were, 
he says, in two different states, she in the 
state of Death, and he in the state of Life ; 
and thereby his was much the harder case. 
For she by her very creation was so much 
a part of himself that he could not be happy 
while she was miserable. The loss of her 
happiness so much affected him by sympathy 
that all his other enjoyments could do him 
no good ; and, therefore, since he thought it 
impossible for her to return into the same 
state with him, he chose, rather than be 
parted from her, to hazard himself in the 
same state with her. Asgill then resumes 
his legal view of the case : the offence, he 
says, was at last joint and several ; the sen- 
tence fell upon Mankind as descendants from 
these our common ancestors, and so upon 
Christ himself. And this is the reason why 
in the genealogy of our Saviour as set down 
by two Evangelists his legal descent by 
Joseph is only counted upon, " because all 
legal descents are accounted from the father." 
As he was born of a Virgin to preserve his 
nature from the defilement of humanity, so 
was he of a Virgin espoused to derive upon 



himself the curse of the Law by a legal 
father : for which purpose it was necessary 
that the birth of Christ should, in the terms 
of the Evangelists, be on this wise and no 
otherwise. And hence the Genealogy of 
Christ is a fundamental part of Eternal Life. 

The reader will soon perceive that tech- 
nically as Asgill treated his strange argu- 
ment, he was sincerely and even religiously 
convinced of its importance and its truth. 
" Having shewn," he proceeds, " how this 
Law fell upon Christ, it is next incumbent 
on me to shew that it is taken away by his 
death, and consequently that the long pos- 
session of Death over the World can be no 
longer a title against Life. But when I say 
this Law is taken away, I don't mean that 
the words of it are taken away ; for they 
remain with us to this day, and being matter 
of Record must remain for ever ; but that 
it is satisfied by other matter of Record, by 
which the force of it is gone. Law satis- 
fied is no Law, as a debt satisfied is no debt. 
Now the specific demand of the Law was 
Death ; and of a man ; and a man made 
under the Law. Christ qualified himself to 
be so : and as such suffered under it, thus 
undergoing the literal sentence. This he 
might have done and not have given the 
Law satisfaction, for millions of men before 
him had undergone it, and yet the Law was 
nevertheless dissatisfied with them and others, 
but He declared It is finished before he 
gave up the ghost. By the dignity of his 
person he gave that satisfaction which it was 
impossible for mankind to give." 

For the Law, he argues, was not such a 
civil contract that the breach of it could be 
satisfied ; it was a Law of Honour, the breach 
whereof required personal satisfaction for 
the greatest affront and the highest act of 
ingratitude to God, inasmuch as the slighter 
the thing demanded is, the greater is the 
affront in refusing it. " Man by his very 
creation entered into the labours of the 
Creator and became Lord of the Universe 
which was adapted to his enjoyments. God 
left him in possession of it upon his parole 
of honour, only that he would acknoAvledge 
it to be held of Him, and as the token of 



448 



THE DOCTOR. 



this tenure that he would only forbear from 
eating of one tree, withal telling him that if 
he did eat of it, his life should go for it. If 
man had had more than his life to give, God 
would have had it of him. This was rather 
a resentment of the affront, than any satis- 
faction for it ; and therefore to signify the 
height of this resentment, God raises man 
from the dead to demand further satisfac- 
tion from him. Death is a commitment to 
the prison of the Grave till the Judgment 
of the Great Day; and then the grand 
Habeas Corpus will issue to the Earth and 
to the Sea, to give up their dead : to remove 
the Bodies, with the cause of their com- 
mitment. 

" Yet was this a resentment without 
malice; for as God maintained his resent- 
ment under all his love, so He maintained 
his love under all his resentment. For his 
love being a love of kindness flowing from 
his own nature, could not be diminished by 
any act of man ; and yet his honour being 
concerned to maintain the truth of his word, 
he could not falsify that to gratify his own 
affection. And thus he bore the passion of 
his own love, till he had found out a salvo 
for his honour by that Son of Man who gave 
him satisfaction at once by the dignity of 
his person. Personal satisfactions by the 
Laws of Honour are esteemed sufficient or 
not, according to the equality or inequality 
between the persons who give or take the 
affront. Therefore God to vindicate his 
honour was obliged to find out a person for 
this purpose equal to Himself: the invention 
of which is called the manifold wisdom of 
God, the invention itself being the highest 
expression of the deepest love, and the exe- 
cution of it, in the death of Christ, the deepest 
resentment of the highest affront. 

" Now inasmuch as the person of our 
Saviour was superior to the human nature, 
so much the satisfaction by his death sur- 
mounted the offence. He died under the 
Law, but he did not arise under it, having 
taken it away by his death. The life re- 
gained by him in his resurrection was by 
Conquest, by which, according to all the 
Laws of Conquest, the Law of Death is 



taken away. For by the Laws of Conquest the 
Laws of the conquered are ipso facto taken 
away, and all records and writings that re- 
main of them are of no more force than 
waste paper. Hence the title of Christ to 
Eternal Life is become absolute, — by abso- 
lute," — says this theologo-jurist, — "I mean 
discharged from all tenure or condition, and 
consequently from all forfeiture. And as 
his title to life is thus become absolute by 
Conquest, so the direction of it is become 
eternal by being annexed to the Person of 
the Godhead : thus Christ ever since his re- 
surrection did, and doth, stand seized of an 
absolute and indefeazable Estate of Eternal 
Life, without any tenure or condition or 
other matter or thing to change or determine 
it for ever." " I had reason," says Asgill, 
" thus to assert the title of Christ at large ; 
because this is the title by and under which 
I am going to affirm my argument, and to 
claim Eternal Life for myself and all the 
world. 

" And first I put it upon the Profession of 
Divinity to deny one word of the fact as I 
have repeated it. Next I challenge the 
Science of the Law to shew such another 
Title as this is. And then I defy the Logi- 
cians to deny my Argument : of which this 
is the abstract : That the Law delivered to 
Adam before the Fall is the original cause 
of Death in the World : That this Law is 
taken away by the Death of Christ : That 
therefore the legal power of death is gone. 
And I am so far from thinking this Cove- 
nant of Eternal Life to be an allusion to the 
forms of Title amongst men, that I rather 
adore it as the precedent for them all; 
believing with that great Apostle that the 
things on Earth are but the patterns of 
things in the Heavens where the Originals 
are kept." This he says because he has be- 
fore made it appear that in the Covenant of 
Eternal Life all things requisite to consti- 
tute a legal instrument are found, to wit, 
the date, the parties, the contents, and con- 
sideration, the sealing, and execution, the 
witnesses, and the Ceremony required of 
Man, whereby to execute it on his part and 
take the advantage of it. 



THE DOCTOR. 



449 



By the sacrifice which our Lord offered 
of himself, this technical but sincere and 
serious enthusiast argues, more than an 
atonement was made. " And that this super- 
abundancy might not run to waste, God 
declared that Man should have Eternal Life 
absolute as Christ himself had it ; and hence 
Eternal Life is called the Gift of God through 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, over 
and above our redemption. Why then," 
he asks, " doth Death remain in the World? 
Why because Man knows not the Way of Life 
— ' the way of Life they have not known.' 
Because our faith is not yet come to us — 
' when the Son of Man comes shall he find 
faith upon the earth ? ' Because Man is a 
beast of burden that knows not his own 
strength in the virtue of the Death and the 
power of the Resurrection of Christ. Un- 
belief goes not by reason or dint of argu- 
ment, but is a sort of melancholy madness, 
by which if we once fancy ourselves bound, 
it hath the same effect upon us as if we really 
were so. Death is like Satan, who appears 
to none but those who are afraid of him : 
Resist the Devil and he will flee from you. 
Because Death had once dominion over us, 
we think it hath, and must have it still. 
And this I find within myself, that though I 
can't deny one word I have said in fact or 
argument, yet I can't maintain my belief 
of it without making it more familiar to my 
understanding, by turning it up and down 
in my thoughts and ruminating upon some 
proceedings already made upon it in the 
World. 

" The Motto of the Religion of the World 
is Mors Janua Vitce ; if we mean by this the 
Death of Christ, we are in the right ; but if 
we mean our own Death, then we are in the 
wrong. Far be it from me to say that Man 
may not attain to Eternal Life, though he 
should die ; for the Text runs double. ' / 
am the Resurrection and the Life ; he that 
liveth and helieveth on me, shall never die ; 
and though he were dead he shall live.'' This 
very Text shews that there is a nearer way 
of entering into Eternal Life than by the 
way of Death and Resurrection. Whatever 
circumstances a man is under at the time of 



his death, God is bound to make good this 
Text to him, according to which part of it he 
builds his faith upon ; if he be dead there's 
a necessity for a resurrection ; but if he be 
alive there's no occasion for Death or Re- 
surrection either. This text doth not main- 
tain two religions, but two articles of faith 
in the same religion, and the article of faith 
for a present life without dying is the higher 
of the two. 

"No man can comprehend the heights 
and depths of the Gospel at his first entrance 
into it; and in point of order, 'the last 
enemy to be destroyed is Death.' The first 
essay of Faith is against Hell, that though 
we die we may not be damned ; and the full 
assurance of this is more than most men 
attain to before Death overtakes them, 
which makes Death a terror to men. But 
they who attain it can sing a requiem ' Lord, 
now lettest thou thy Servant depart in 
peace! ' and if God takes them at their word, 
they lie down in the faith of the Resurrec- 
tion of the Just. But whenever he pleases 
to continue them, after that attainment, 
much longer above ground, that time seems 
to them an interval of perfect leisure, till at 
last espying Death itself, they fall upon it as 
an enemy that must be conquered, one time 
or other, through faith in Christ. This is the 
reason why it seems intended that a respite 
of time should be allotted to believers after 
the first Resurrection and before the disso- 
lution of the World, for perfecting that faith 
which they began before their death but 
could not attain to in the first reach of life : 
for Death being but a discontinuance of 
Life, wherever men leave off at their death, 
they must begin at their resurrection. Nor 
shall they ascend after their resurrection, till 
they have attained to this faith of translation, 
and by that very faith they shall be then 
convinced that they need not have died. 

" When Elijah courted death under the 
juniper tree in the wilderness, and ' said — 
now, Lord, take away my life, for I am not 
better than my fathers,' that request shews 
that he was not educated in this faith of trans- 
lation, but attained it afterwards by study. 
Paul tells ' we shall not all die but we shall 



450 



THE DOCTOR. 



all be changed;' yet though he delivered 
this to be his faith in general, he did not 
attain to such a particular knowledge of the 
way and manner of it as to prevent his own 
death: he tells us he had not yet attained 
the Resurrection of the dead, but was 
pressing after it. He had but a late con- 
version, and was detained in the study of 
another part of divinity, the confirming the 
ISTew Testament by the Old and making 
them answer one another, — a point previous 
to the faith of translation, and which must 
be learned before it — in order to it. But 
this his pressing (though he did not attain) 
hath much encouraged me," says Asgill, " to 
make this enquiry, being well assured that 
he would not have thus pursued it, had he 
not apprehended more in it than the vulgar 
opinion. 

" We don't think ourselves fit to deal with 
one another in human affairs till our age of 
one and twenty. But to deal with our 
offended Maker, to counterplot the malice 
of fallen Angels, and to rescue ourselves 
from "eternal ruin, we are generally as well 
qualified before we can speak plain, as all 
our life-time after. Children can say over 
their religion at four or five years old, and 
their parents that taught them can do no 
more at four or five and fifty. The common 
Creed of the Christian religion may be 
learned in an hour : and one day's philosophy 
will teach a man to die. But to know the 
virtue of the Death and Power of the 
Resurrection of Christ, is a science calcu- 
lated for the study of Men and Angels for 
ever. 

"But if man may be thus changed with- 
out death, and that it is of no use to him in 
order to Eternal Life ; what then is Death ? 
Or, whereunto serveth it ? What is it ? 
Why 'tis a misfortune fallen upon man from 
the beginning, and from which he has not 
yet dared to attempt his recovery : and it 
serves as a spectre to fright us into a little 
better life (perhaps) than we should lead 
without it. Though God hath formed this 
Covenant of Eternal Life, Men have made an 
agreement with Death and Hell, by way of 
composition to submit to Death, in hope of 



escaping Hell by that obedience ; and under 
this allegiance we think ourselves bound 
never to rebel against it! The study of 
Philosophy is to teach men to die, from the 
observations of Nature ; the profession of 
Divinity is to enforce the doctrine from 
Revelation : and the science of the Law is 
to settle our civil affairs pursuant to these 
resolutions. The old men are making their 
last Wills and Testaments ; and the young 
are expecting the execution of them by the 
death of the testators ; and thus 

Mortis ad exemplum lotus componitur orbis. 

I was under this Law of Death once ; and 
while I lay under it, I felt the terror of it, 
till I had delivered myself from it by those 
thoughts which must convince them that 
have them. And in this thing only, I wish, 
for their sakes, that all men were as I am. 
The reason why I believe that this doctrine 
is true, is, because God hath said it : yet I 
could not thus assert it by argument, if I 
did not conceive it with more self-conviction 
than I have from any maxims or positions in 
human science. The Covenant of Eternal 
Life is a Law of itself and a science of itself, 
which can never be known by the study of 
any other science. It is a science out of 
Man's way, being a pure invention of God. 
Man knows no more how to save himself 
than he did to create himself; but to raise 
his ambition for learning this, God graduates 
him upon his degree of knowledge in it, and 
gives him badges of honour as belonging to 
that degree, upon the attainment whereof a 
man gains the title of a Child of the Resur- 
rection : to which title belongs this badge of 
honour, to die no more but make our exit 
by translation, as Christ, who was the first 
of this Order, did before us. And this world 
being the academy to educate Man for 
Heaven, none shall ever enter there till they 
have taken this degree here. 

" Let the Dead bury the Dead ! and the 
Dead lie with the Dead ! And the rest of 
the Living go lie with them ! Til follow 
him that was dead, and is alive, and living 
for ever. And though I am now single, yet 
I believe that this belief will be general 
before the general change, of which Paul 



THE DOCTOR. 



451 



speaks, shall come ; and that then, and not 
before, shall be the Resurrection of the 
Just, which is called the first Resurrection ; 
and after that the Dead so arisen, with the 
Living, then alive, shall have learned this 
faith, which shall qualify them to be caught 
up together in the air, then shall be the 
General Resurrection, after which Time 
shall be no more. 

" The beginning of this faith, like all 
other parts of the Kingdom of Heaven, will 
be like a grain of mustard seed, spreading 
itself by degrees till it overshadow the whole 
earth. And since ' the things concerning 
Him must have an end,' in order to this 
they must have a beginning. But whoever 
leads the van will make the world start, and 
must expect for himself to walk up and 
down, like Cain, with a mark on his forehead, 
and run the gauntlet for an Ishmaelite, 
having every man's hand against him because 
his hand is against every man ; than which 
nothing is more averse to my temper. This 
makes me think of publishing with as much 
regret as he that ran away from his errand 
when sent to Nineveh : but being just going 
to cross the water — " (he was going to Ire- 
land, — ) "I dared not leave this behind me 
undone, lest a Tempest send me back again 
to do it. And to shelter myself a little, 
(though I knew my speech would betray 
me,) I left the Title page anonymous. Nor 
do I think that any thing would now extort 
my name from me but the dread of the 
sentence, ' he that is ashamed of me and of 
my words, of him will I be ashamed before 
my Father and his Angels : ' for fear of 
which I dare not but subscribe my argument, 
though with a trembling hand ; having felt 
two powers within me all the while I have 
been about it, one bids me write, and the 
other bobs my elbow. But since I have 
wrote this, as Pilate did his inscription, 
without consulting any one, I'll be absolute 
as he was ; ' what I have written, I have 
written.' 

" Having pursued that command, ' Seek 
first the Kingdom of God,' I yet expect the 
performance of that promise, to receive in 
this life an hundred fold, and in the world 



to come life everlasting.' I have a great 
deal of business yet in this world, without 
doing of which Heaven itself would be 
uneasy to me : but when that is done I 
know no business I have with the dead, and 
therefore do depend that I shall not go 
hence by ' returning to the dust,' which is 
the sentence of that law from which I claim 
a discharge : but that I shall make my exit 
by way of translation, which I claim as a 
dignity belonging to that Degree in the 
Science of Eternal Life of which I profess 
myself a graduate. And if after this I die 
like other men, I declare myself to die of no 
religion. Let no one be concerned for me 
as a desperade : I am not going to renounce 
the other part of our religion, but to add 
another article of faith to it, without which 
I cannot understand the rest. And if it be 
possible to believe too much in God, I 
desire to be guilty of that sin. 

" Behold ye despisers and wonder ! 
Wonder to see Paradise lost, with the Tree 
of Life in the midst of it ! Wonder and 
curse at Adam for an original fool, who in 
the length of one day never so much as 
thought to put forth his hand, for him and 
us, and pull and eat and live for ever! 
Wonder at and damn ourselves for fools of 
the last impression, that in the space of 
seventeen hundred years never so much as 
thought to put forth our hands, every one 
for himself, and seal and execute the Co- 
venant of Eternal Life. 

" To be even with the World at once, he 
that wonders at my faith, I wonder at his 
unbelief. The Blood of Christ hath an in- 
cident quality which cleaneth from sin ; and 
he that understands this never makes any 
use of his own personal virtues as an argu- 
ment for his own salvation, lest God should 
overbalance against him with his sins ; nor 
doth God ever object a man's sins to him in 
the day of his faith ; therefore till I am more 
sinful than He was holy, my sins are no ob- 
jection against my faith. And because in 
Him is all my hope, I care not (almost) 
what I am myself. 

" It is observed in the mathematics that 
the practice doth not always answer the 



452 



THE DOCTOR. 



theory ; and that therefore there is no de- 
pendence upon the mere notions of it as they 
lie in the brain, without putting them to- 
gether in the form of a tool or instrument, 
to see how all things fit. This made me dis- 
trust my own thoughts till I had put them 
together, to see how they would look in the 
form of an argument. But in doing this. I 
thank God I have found every joint and 
article to come into its own place, and fall 
in with and suit one another to a hair's 
breadth, beyond my expectation : or else I 
could not have had the confidence to pro- 
duce this as an engine in Divinity to convey 
man from Earth to Heaven. I am not 
making myself wings to fiy to Heaven with, 
but only making myself ready for that con- 
veyance which shall be sent me. And if I 
should lose myself in this untrodden path of 
Life, I can still find out the beaten Road of 
Death blindfold. If therefore, after this. ' I 
go the way of my fathers." I freely waive that 
haughty epitaph, Moguls tamen ercidit amis, 
and instead knock under table that Satan 
hath beguiled me to play the fool with my- 
self, in which however he hath shewed his 
master-piece ; for I defy the whole clan of 
Hell to produce another lye so like to truth 
as this is. But if I act my motto, and go the 
way of an Eagle in the air, then have I played 
a trump upon Death, and shewn myself a 
match for the Devil. 

" And while I am thus fighting with Death 
and Hell, it looks a little like foul play for 
Flesh and Blood to interpose themselves 
against me. But if any one hath spite enough 
to give me a polt, thinking to falsify my faith 
by taking away my life, I only desire them 
first to qualify themselves for my execu- 
tioners, by taking this short test in their own 
consciences : whoever thinks that any thing 
herein contained is not fair dealing with 
God and Man, let hini — or her — burn this 
book, and cast a stone at him that wrote it." 



CHAPTER CLXXHI. 

MORE COXCERXLNG ASGILX. HIS EErEXCE IX 
THE HOESE OF COMMONS. HIS EXPILSIOX. 
FARTHER SPECULATIONS AXD DEATH. 

Let not that ugly Skeleton appear I 
Sure Destiny mistakes ; this Death's not mine ! 

Dhyden. 

The substance of AsgiLVs argument has been 
given in his own words, but by thus ab- 
stracting and condensing it his peculiar 
manner is lost. This, though it consisted 
more perhaps in appearance than in reality, 
is characteristic of the author, and may be 
well exemplified in the concluding passage 
of one of his political pamphlets : 

" But I shall raise more choler by this way of writing. 
For writing and reading are in themselves commendable 

things. 
But 'tis the way of writing at which offence is taken, 
And this is the misfortune of an Author, 
That unless some are angry with him, none are pleased. 
Which puts him under this dilemma. 
That he must either ruin himself or his Printer. 

But to prevent either, as far as I can, I 
would rather turn Trimmer and compound 
too. And to end all quarrels with my readers 
(if they please to accept the proposal, 

And to shew withal that I am no dogmatical Author,) 

I now say to them all, in print, what I once 
did to one of them, by word of mouth. 
"Whoever meets with any thing in what I 
publish, which they don't like, 

Let 'em strike it out. 
But to take off part of the Odium from me, 
They say others write like me, 
In short paragraphs : 
(An easy part of a mirrick,) 
But with all my heart ! 
I don't care who writes like me, 
So 1 don't write like them." 

Many a book has originated in the misfor- 
tunes of its Author. Want, imprisonment, 
and disablement by bodily infirmity from 
active occupation, have produced almost as 
many works in prose or rhyme, as leisure, 
voluntary exertion, and strong desire. As- 
gill's harmless heresy began in an involun- 
tary confinement to which he was reduced 
in consequence of an unsuccessful specula- 



THE DOCTOR. 



453 



turn. He had engaged in this adventure (by 
Which better word our forefathers designated 
what the Americans call a spec,) with the | 
hope of increasing his fortune, instead of ; 
which he incurred so great a loss, that he I 
found it necessary to keep his chamber in ! 
the Temple for some years. There he fell [ 
to examining that " Book of Law and I 
Gospel," both which we call the Bible ; and 
examining it as he would have perused an 
old deed, with the hope of discovering in it 
some clause upon which to ground a claim 
at law, this thought, he says, first came into 
his head : but it was a great while coming 
out. He was afraid of his own thoughts, 
lest they were his own only, and as such a 
delusion. And when he had tried them with 
pen. ink and paper, and they seemed to him 
plainer and plainer every time he went over 
them, and he had formed them into an 
Argument, "to see how they would bear 
upon the proof," even then he had no inten- 
tion of making them public. 

"But writing an ill hand," says he, "I 
resolved to see how it would look in print. 
On this I gave the Printer my Copy, with 
money for his own labour, to print off some 
few for myself, and keep the press secret. 
But I remember before he got half way 
through, he told me his men fancied I was 
a little crazed, in which I also fancied he 
spoke one word for them and two for him- 
self. However I bid him go on : and at last 
it had so raised his fancy, that he desired 
mv leave to print off one edition at the 
risque of his own charge, saying he thought 
some of the Anabaptists would believe it 
first. I being just then going for Ireland, 
admitted him. with this injunction, he should 
I not publish them 'till I was got clear out 
! of Middlesex ; which I believe he might ob- 
1 serve ; though by what I heard afterwards, 
they were all about town by that time I got 
to St. Albans : and the book was in Ireland 
almost as soon as I was, (for a man's works 
will follow him.) with a noise after me that 
I was gone away mad." 

Asgill was told in Ireland that the cry 
which followed him would prevent his prac- 
tice ; it had a contrary effect, for " people 



went into Court to see him as a Monster 
and heard him talk like a man." In the 
course of two years he gained enough by his 
profession to purchase Lord Kenmure's for- 
feited estate, and to procure a seat in the 
Irish House of Commons. The purchase 
made him enemies ; as he was on the way to 
Dublin he met the news that his book had 
been burnt by Order of the House. He 
proceeded however, took the oaths and his 
seat, and the Book having been condemned 
and executed without hearing the author in 
its defence, nothing more was necessary than 
to prove him the Author and expel him 
forthwith, and this was done in the course of 
four days. After this he returned to England 
and obtained a seat for Bramber, apparently 
for the mere sake of securing himself against 
his creditors. This borough he represented 
for two years ; but in the first Parliament 
after the Union some of the Scotch Members 
are said to have looked upon it as a disgrace 
to the House of Commons, that a man who 
enjoyed his liberty only under privilege 
should sit there, and instead of attempt- 
ing to remedy a scandal by straightforward 
means, they took the easier course of moving 
for a Committee to examine his book. Their 
report was that it was profane and blasphe- 
mous, highly reflecting upon the Christian 
Religion. He was allowed, however, to make 
his defence, which he thus began. 

" Mr. Speaker, this day calls me to some- 
thing I am both unapt and averse to — 
Preaching. For though, as you see, I have 
vented some of my thoughts in religion, yet 
I appeal to my conversation, whether I use 
to make that the subject of my discourse. 
However that I may not let this accusation 
go against me by a Nihil elicit, I stand up to 
make my defence. I have heard it from 
without doors that I intended to withdraw 
myself from this day's test and be gone ; 
which would have given them that said it 
an opportunity to boast that they had once 
spoken truth. But quo me fata trahunt, I'll 
give no man occasion to write fugam fecit 
upon my grave- stone." 

He then gave the history of his book and 
of his expulsion in Ireland, and thanked the 



454 



THE DOCTOR. 



House for admitting him to a defence before 
they proceeded to judgment. " I find," said 
he, " the Report of the Committee is not 
levelled at the argument itself which I have 
advanced, nor yet against the treatise I have 
published to prove it, but against some ex- 
pressions in that proof, and which I intend 
to give particular answers to. But there is 
something else laid to my charge as my de- 
sign in publishing that argument, of higher 
concern to me than any expressions in the 
treatise, or any censure that can fall on me 
for it ; as if I had wrote it with a malicious 
intention to expose the Scriptures as false, 
because they seemed to contain what I 
asserted ; and that therefore if that asser- 
tion did not hold true, the Scripture must 
be false. Now whether this was my inten- 
tion or no, there is but one "Witness in 
Heaven or Earth can prove, and that is He 
that made me, and in whose presence I now 
stand, and Who is able to strike me dead in 
my place ; and to Him I now appeal for the 
truth of what I protest against : that I never 
did write or publish that argument with any 
intention to expose the Scriptures ; but on 
the contrary, (though I was aware that I 
might be liable to that censure, which I knew 
not how to avoid,) I did both write and pub- 
lish it, under a firm belief of the truth of 
the Scriptures : and with a belief (under that) 
that what I have asserted in that argument 
is within that truth. And if it be not, then 
I am mistaken in my argument, and the 
Scripture remains true. Let God be true 
and every man a lyar. And having made 
this protestation, I am not much concerned 
whether I am believed in it or not ; I had 
rather tell a truth than be believed in a lie 
at any time." 

He then justified the particular passage 
which had been selected for condemnation, 
resting his defence upon this ground, that 
he had used familiar expressions with the 
intent of being sooner read and more readily 
understood. There was indeed but a single 
word which savoured of irreverence, and 
certainly no irreverence was intended in its 
use ; no one who fairly perused his argu- 
ment but must have perceived that the levity 



of his manner in no degree detracted from 
the seriousness of his belief. " Yet," said 
he, " if by any of those expressions I have 
really given offence to any well-meaning 
Christian, I am sorry for it, though I had 
no ill intention in it: but if any man be 
captious to take exceptions for exception 
sake, I am not concerned. I esteem my 
own case plain and short. I was expelled 
one House for having too much land ; and 
I am going to be expelled another for having 
too little money. But if I may yet ask one 
question more ; pray what is this blasphe- 
mous crime I here stand charged with ? A 
belief of what we all profess, or at least what 
no one can deny. If the death of the body 
be included in the Fall, why is not the life 
of the body included in the Resurrection ? 
And what if I have a firmer belief of this 
than some others have ? Am I therefore a 
blasphemer ? Or would they that believe 
less take it well of me to call them so ? Our 
Saviour in his day took notice of some of 
little faith and some of great faith, without 
stigmatizing either of them with blasphemy 
for it. But I do not know how 'tis, we are 
fallen into such a sort of uniformity that wc 
would fain have Religion into a Tyrant's 
bed, torturing one another into our own size 
of it only. But it grows late, and I ask but 
one saying more to take leave of my friends 
with. I do believe that had I turned this 
Defence into a Recantation, I had prevented 
my Expulsion : but I have reserved my last 
words as my ultimate reason against that 
Recantation. He that durst write that book, 
dares not deny it ! " 

"And what then?" said this eccentric 
writer, when five years afterwards he pub- 
lished his Defence. " Why then they called 
for candles ; and I went away by the light 
of 'em : and after the previous question and 
other usual ceremonies, (as I suppose) I was 
expelled the House. And from thence I 
retired to a Chamber I once had in the 
Temple ; and from thence I afterwards sur- 
rendered myself in discharge of my bail, 
and have since continued under confinement. 
And under that confinement God hath been 
pleased to take away ' the Desire of mine 



THE DOCTOR. 



455 



Eyes with a stroke,' which hath, however, 
drowned all my other troubles at once ; for 
the less are merged in the greater ; 

Qui venit hie fluctus,fluctus supereminet omnes. 

And since I have mentioned her, I'll relate 
this of her. She having been educated a 
Protestant of the Church of England, by 
a Lady her Grandmother, her immediate 
parents and other relations being Roman 
Catholics, an honest Gentleman of the Romish 
persuasion, who knew her family, presented 
her, while she was my fellow-prisoner, with 
a large folio volume, being the history of 
the Saints canonised in that Church, for her 
reading ; with intention, as I found, to in- 
cline her that way. With which, delighting 
in reading, she entertained herself 'till she 
had gone through it ; and some time after 
that she told me that she had before some 
thoughts towards that religion, but that the 
reading that history had confirmed her 
against it. 

" And yet she would never read the book 
I was expelled for 'till after my last expul- 
sion ; but then reading it through, told me 
she was reconciled to the reasons of it, though 
she could not say she believed it. How- 
ever she said something of her own thoughts 
with it, that hath given me the satisfaction 
that she is ' dead in Christ,' and thereby 
sure of her part in the first Resurrection : 
the Dead in Christ shall arise first. And 
this pars decessa mei leaving me half dead 
while she remains in the grave, hath since 
drawn me, in diving after her, into a nearer 
view and more familiar though more unusual 
thoughts of that first Resurrection than ever 
I had before. From whence I now find 
that nothing less than this fluctus decamanus 
would have cast me upon, or qualified me 
for, this theme, if yet I am so qualified. 
And from hence I am advancing that com- 
mon Article in our Creed, the Resurrection 
of the Dead, into a professed study ; from 
the result of which study I have already 
advanced an assertion, which (should I vent 
alone) perhaps would find no better quarter 
in the world than what I have advanced 
already. And yet, though I say it that per- 



haps should not, it hath one quality we are 
all fond of, — it is News; and another we 
all should be fond of, it is good Isews : or, 
at least, good to them that are so, ' for to 
the froward all things are froward.' 

" Having made this Discovery, or rather 
collected it from the Word of Life ; I am 
advancing it into a Treatise whereby to 
prove it in special form, not by arguments 
of wit or sophistry, but from the evidence 
and demonstration of the truth as it is in 
Jesus : which should I accomplish I would 
not be prevented from publishing that edi- 
tion to gain more than I lost by my former ; 
nor for more than Balak ever intended to 
give, or than Balaam could expect to receive, 
for cursing the people of Israel, if God had 
not spoilt that bargain. I find it as old as 
the New Testament, ' if by any means I may ' 
attain the Resurrection of the Dead.' And 
though Paul did not then so attain, (not as 
if I had already attained), yet he died in his 
calling, and will stand so much nearer that 
mark at his Resurrection. But if Paul, 
with that effusion of the Spirit upon him 
in common with the other Apostles, and that 
superabundant revelation given him above 
them all, by that rapture unto things un- 
utterable, did not so attain in that his day; 
whence should I, a mere Lay, (and that 
none of the best neither,) without any func- 
tion upon me, expect to perfect what he left 
so undone ? — In pursuit of this study I have 
found, (what I had not before observed,) that 
there are some means since left us towards 
this attainment, which Paul had not in his 
day ; for there now remain extant unto the 
world, bound up with that now one entire 
record of the Bible, two famous Records of 
the Resurrection that never came to Paul's 
hands ; and for want whereof, perhaps, he 
might not then so attain. But having now 
this intelligence of them, and fearing that in 
the day of Account I may have a special sur- 
charge made upon me for these additional 
Talents and further Revelations ; and bear- 
ins in mind the dreadful fate of that cautious 
insuring servant who took so much care to 
redeliver what he had received in statu quo 
as he had it, that it might not be said to be 



456 



THE DOCTOR. 



the worse for his keeping, I have rather 
adventured to defile those Sacred Records 
with my own study and thoughts upon them, 
than to think of returning them wrapt up 
in a napkin clean and untouched. 

" Whether ever I shall accomplish to my 
own satisfaction what I am now so engaged 
in, I do not yet know ; but 'till I do, I'll 
please myself to be laughed at by this 
cautious insuring world, as tainted with a 
frenzy of dealing in Reversions of Con- 
tingencies. However in the mean time I 
would not be thought to be spending this 
interval of my days by myself in beating 
the air, under a dry expectancy only of a 
thing so seemingly remote as the Resur- 
rection of the Dead : like Courtiers-Ex- 
traordinary fretting out their soles with 
attendances in ante-rooms for things or 
places no more intended to be given them 
than perhaps they are fit to have them. For 
though I should fall short of the attainment 
I am attempting, the attempt itself hath 
translated my Prison into a Paradise ; 
treating me with food and enamouring me 
with pleasures that man knows not of : from 
whence, I hope, I may without vanity say, 

Deus nobis hcec otia fecit." 

What the farther reversion might be to 
which Asgill fancied he had discovered a 
title in the Gospels, is not known. Perhaps 
he failed in satisfying himself when he 
attempted to arrange his notions in logical 
and legal form, and possibly that failure may 
have weakened his persuasion of the former 
heresy : for though he lived twenty years 
after the publication of his Defence and the 
announcement of this second discovery in 
the Scriptures, the promised argument never 
appeared. His subsequent writings consist 
of a few pamphlets in favour of the Hano- 
verian succession. They were too incon- 
siderable to contribute much towards eking 
out his means of support, for which he was 
probably chiefly indebted to his professional 
knowledge. The remainder of his life was 
passed within the Rules of the King's Bench 
Prison, where he died in 1738 at a very 
advanced age, retaining his vivacity and his 



remarkable powers of conversation to the 
last. If it be true that he nearly attained 
the age of an hundred, (as one statement 
represents,) and with these happy faculties 
unimpaired, he may have been tempted to 
imagine that he was giving the best and 
only convincing proof of his own argument. 
Death undeceived him, and Time has done 
him justice at last. For though it stands 
recorded that he was expelled the House of 
Commons as being the Author of a Book in 
which are contained many profane and 
blasphemous expressions, highly reflecting 
upon the Christian Religion ! nothing can 
be more certain than that this censure was 
undeserved, and that his expulsion upon that 
ground was as indefensible as it would have 
been becoming, if, in pursuance of the real 
motives by which the House was actuated, 
an Act had been passed disqualifying from 
that time forward any person in a state of 
insolvency from taking or retaining a seat 
there. 

In the year 1760 I find him mentioned as 
" the celebrated gentleman commonly called 
"translated Asgill." His name is now seen 
only in catalogues, and his history known 
only to the curious: — Mais, c'est assez 
parle de luy, et encore trop, ce diront aucuns, 
qui pourront rrien blasmer, et dire que festois 
bien de loisir quand fescrivis cecy; mais Us 
seront bien plus de loisir de la lire, pour me 
reprendre. * 



CHAPTER CLXXIV. 

THE DOCTOR INDULGES IN THE WAY OF 
FANTASTIC AND TYPICAL SPECULATION ON 
HIS OWN NAME, AND ON THE POWERS OF 
THE LETTER D., WHETHER AS REGARDS 
DEGREES AND DISTINCTIONS, GODS AND 
DEMIGODS, PRINCES AND KINGS, PHILO- 
SOPHERS, GENERALS, OR TRAVELLERS. 

My mouth's no dictionary ; it only serves as the needful 
interpreter of my heart. — Quarles. 

There were few things in the way of 
fantastic and typical speculation which de- 



* Brawtome. 



THE DOCTOR. 



457 



lighted the Doctor so much as the contem- 
plation of his own name : 

Daniel Dove. 
D. D. it was upon his linen and his seal. 
D. D., he used to say, designated the highest 
degree in the highest of the sciences, and he 
was D. D. not by the forms of a University, 
but by Nature or Destiny. 

Besides, he maintained, that the letter D 
was the richest, the most powerful, the most 
fortunate letter in the alphabet, and con- 
tained in its form and origin more mysteries 
than any other. 

It was a potential letter under which all 
powerful things were arranged ; Dictators, 
Despots, Dynasties, Diplomas, Doctors, Do- 
minations ; Deeds and Donations and De- 
crees ; Dioptrics and Dynamics ; Dialectics 
and Demonstrations. 

Diaphragm, Diathesis, Diet, Digestion, 
Disorder, Disease, Diagnosis ; Diabrosis, 
Diaphragmatis, Diaphthora, Desudation, De- 
fluxions, Dejection, Delirium, Delivery, 
Dyspepsy, Dysmenorrhea, Dysorcexia, Dys- 
pnoea, Dysuria, Dentition, Dropsy, Diabetes, 
Diarrhoea, Dysentery ; then passing almost 
in unconscious but beautiful order from 
diseases to remedies and their consequences, 
he proceeded with Dispensation, Diluents, 
Discutients, Deobstruents, Demulcents, De- 
tergents, Desiccatives, Depurantia, Diapho- 
retics, Dietetics, Diachylon, Diacodium, 
Diagrydium, Deligations, Decoctions, Doses, 
Draughts, Drops, Dressings, Drastics, Dis- 
solution, Dissection. What indeed he would 
say, should we do in our profession without 
the Ds ? 

Or what would the Divines do without it 
— Danger, Despair, Dea h, Devil, Doomsday, 
Damnation; look to the brighter side, there 
is the Doxology, and you ascend to Aibc, 
and Deus and Deity. 

What would become of the farmer with- 
out Dung, or of the Musician without the 
Diapason ? Think also of Duets in music 
and Doublets at Backgammon. And the 
soldiers toast in the old Play, " the two Ds 
Drink and your Duty." * 



Shiuley, Honoria and Mammon. 



Look at the moral evils which are ranged 
under its banners, Distentions, Discord, 
Duels, Dissimulation, Deceit. Dissipation, 
Demands, Debts, Damages, Divorce, Dis- 
tress, Drunkenness, Dram-drinking, Dis- 
traction, Destruction. 

When the Poet would describe things 
mournful and calamitous, whither doth he 
go for epithets of alliterative significance ? 
where but to the letter D ? there he hath 
Dim, Dusky, Drear, Dark, Damp, Dank. 
Dismal, Doleful, Dolorous, Disastrous, 
Dreadful, Desperate, Deplorable. 

Would we sum up the virtues and praise 
of a perfect Woman, how should we do it 
but by saying that she was devout in 
religion, decorous in conduct, domestic in 
habits, dextrous in business, dutiful as a 
wife, diligent as a mother, discreet as a 
mistress, in manner debonnaire, in mind 
delicate, in person delicious, in disposition 
docile, in all things delightful. Then he 
would smile at Mrs. Dove and say, I love my 
love with a D. and her name is Deborah. 

For degrees and distinctions, omitting 
those which have before been incidentally 
enumerated, are there not Dauphin and 
Dey, Dux, Duke, Doge. Dominus, with 
its derivatives Don, the Dom of the French 
and Portugueze. and the Dan of our own 
early language : Dame, Damsel, and Da- 
moisel in the untranslated masculine. Dea- 
cons and Deans, those of the Christian 
Church, and of Madagascar, whose title 
the French write Dian, and we should 
write Deen not to confound them with the 
dignitaries of our Establishment. Druids 
and Dervises, Dryads, Demigods, and Di- 
vinities. 

Regard the Mappa Mundi. You have 
Denmark and Dalecarlia, Dalmatia and the 
fertile Delta, Damascus, Delos, Delphi and 
Dodona, the Isles of Domingo and Do- 
minica, Dublin and Durham and Dorchester 
and Dumfries, the shires of Devon. Dorset 
and Derby and the adjoining Bishoprick. 
Dantzic and Drontheim, the Dutchy of 
Deux Ponts; Delhi the seat of the Great 
Mogul, and that great city yet unspoiled, 
which 



458 



THE DOCTOR. 



Geryon's sons 
Call El Dorado, — 

the Lakes Dembea and Derwentwater, the 
rivers Dwina, Danube and Delawar, Duero 
or Douro call it which you will, the Doubs 
and all the Dons, and our own wizard Dee, 
— which may be said to belong wholly to 
this letter, the vowels being rather for ap- 
pearance than use. 

Think also, he would say of the worthies, 
heroes and sages in D. David, and his 
namesake of Wales. Diogenes, Dasdalus, 
Diomede, and Queen Dido, Decebalus the 
Dacian King, Deucalion, Datames the Carian 
whom Nepos hath immortalised, and Marshal 
Daun who so often kept the King of Prussia 
in check, and sometimes defeated him. Nay 
if I speak of men eminent for the rank which 
they held, or for their exploits in war, might 
I not name the Kings of Persia who bore the 
name of Darius, Demaratus of Sparta, whom 
the author of Leonidas hath well pourtrayed 
as retaining in exile a reverential feeling 
toward the country which had wronged him : 
and Deodatus, a name assumed by, or given 
to Louis the 14th, the greatest actor of 
greatness that ever existed. Dion who lives 
for ever in the page of Plutarch; the 
Demetrii, the Roman Decii, Diocletian, and 
Devereux Earl of Essex, he by whom Cadiz 
was taken, and whose execution occasioned 
the death of the repentant Elizabeth by 
whom it was decreed. If of those who have 
triumphed upon the ocean shall we not find 
Dragat the far-famed corsair, and our own 
more famous and more dreadful Drake. 
Dandolo the Doge who at the age of * 

triumphed over the perfidious Greeks, and 
was first chosen by the victorious Latins to 
be the Emperor of Constantinople : Doria of 
whom the Genoese still boast. Davis who 
has left his name so near the Arctic Pole. 
Dampier of all travellers the most observant 
and most faithful.f Diaz who first attained 

* The blank is in the original MS. Quaere, ninety-five f 
t " One of the most faithful, as well as exact and ex- 
cellent of all voyage writers." Vindicice Eccl. Angl. 
p. 115. Unhappily Southey's wish to continue this work 
was not responded to. The continuation would have 
proved invaluable now ; for who, so well as he, knew the 
wiles of the Romish Church, and the subtilties of the 
Jesuit ? 



that Stormy Cape, to which from his time 
the happier name of Good Hope hath been 
given ; and Van Diemen the Dutchman. If 
we look to the learned, are there not Duns 
Scotus and Descartes ? Madame Dacier and 
her husband. Damo the not- degenerate 
daughter of Pythagoras, and though a woman 
renowned for secrecy and silence; Dante 
and Davila, Dugdale and Dupin; Demo- 
sthenes, Doctor Dee, (he also like the wizard 
stream all our own,) and Bishop Duppa to 
whom the Euewv Bao-i/W?}, whether truly or 
not, hath been ascribed : Sir Kenelm Digby, 
by whom it hath been proved that Dogs 
make syllogisms ; and Daniel Defoe. Here 
the Doctor always pronounced the christian 
name with peculiar emphasis, and here I 
think it necessary to stop, that the Reader 
may take breath. 



CHAPTER CLXXV. 

THE DOCTOR FOLLOWS UP HIS MEDITATIONS 
ON THE LETTER D., AND EXPECTS THAT 
THE READER WILL BE CONVINCED THAT 
IT IS A DYNAMIC LETTER, AND THAT THE 
HEBREWS DID NOT WITHOUT REASON CALL 

IT DALETH THE DOOR AS THOUGH IT 

WERE THE DOOR OF SPEECH. THE MYS- 
TIC TRIANGLE. 

More authority, dear boy, name more ; and sweet my 
child, let them be men of good repute and carriage. 

Love's Labour Lost. 

The Doctor, as I have said in the last Chap- 
ter, pronounced with peculiar emphasis the 
christian name of Daniel Defoe. Then 
taking up the auspicious word. — Is there 
not Daniel the prophet, in honour of whom 
my baptismal name was given, Daniel, if not 
the greatest of the prophets, yet for the matter 
of his prophecies the most important. Daniel 
the French historian, and Daniel the Eng- 
lish poet ; who reminds me of other poets 
in D, not less eminent. Donne, Dodsley, 
Drayton, Drummond, Douglas the Bishop 
of Dunkeld, Dunbar, Denham, Davenant, 
Dyer, Durfey, Dryden, and Stephen Duck : 
Democritus the wise Abderite, whom I espe- 
cially honour for finding matter of jest, even 



THE DOCTOK. 



459 



in the profoundest thought, extracting mirth 
from philosophy, and joining in delightful 
matrimony wit with wisdom. Is there not 
Dollond the Optician? Dalembert and 
Diderot among those Encyclopedists with 
whose renown 

— all Europe rings from side to side, 

Derham the Astro-Physico — and Christo — 
Theologian, Dillenius the botanist, Dion 
who for his eloquence was called the golden- 
mouthed; Diagoras who boldly despising 
the false Gods of Greece, blindly and auda- 
ciously denied the God of Nature. Diodes 
who invented the cissoid, Deodati, Diodorus, 
and Dion Cassius. Thus rich was the letter 
D, even before the birth of Sir Humphrey 
Davy, and the catastrophe of Doctor Dodd: 
before Daniel Mendoza triumphed over 
Humphreys in the ring, and before Diony- 

sius Lardner, Professor at the St 'ni- 

versity of London, projected the Cabinet 
Cyclopaedia, Daniel O'Conneli fought Mr. 
Peel, triumphed over the Duke of Welling- 
ton, bullied the British Government, and 
changed the British Constitution. 

If we look to the fine arts, he pursued, 
the names of Douw, and Durer, Dolce and 
Dominichino instantly occur. In my own 
profession, among the ancients Dioscorides; 
among the moderns Dippel, whose marvel- 
lous oil is not more exquisitely curious in 
preparation than powerful in its use ; Dover 
of the powder ; Dalby of the Carminative ; 
Daffy of the Elixir; Deventer by whom 
the important art of bringing men into the 
world has been so greatly improved; Douglas, 
who has rendered lithotomy so beautiful an 
operation, that he asserteth in his motto it 
may be done speedily, safely, and pleasantly; 
Dessault, now rising into fame among the 
Continental surgeons, and Dimsdale who is 
extending the blessings of inoculation. Of 
persons eminent for virtue or sanctity, who 
ever in friendship exceeded Damon, the 
friend of Pythias ? Is there not St. John 
Damascenus, Dr. Doddridge, Deborah the 
Nurse of Rebekah, who was buried beneath 
Beth-el under an Oak, which was called Allon- 
bachuth, the Oak of "Weeping, and Deborah 



the wife of Lapidoth, who dwelt und.er her 
palm-trees between Ramah and Beth-el in 
Mount Ephraim, where the children of Israel 
came up to her for judgment, for she was a 
mother in Israel ; Demas for whom St. Paul 
greets the Colossians, and whom he calleth 
his fellow labourer ; and Dorcas which being 
interpreted is in Hebrew Tabitha and in 
English Doe, who was full of good works 
and alms-deeds, whom therefore Peter raised 
from the dead, and whom the Greeks might 
indeed truly have placed among the Aevre- 
po7ro7{j.oi; Daniel already named, but never 
to be remembered too often, and Dan the 
father of his tribe. Grave writers there are, 
the Doctor would say, who hesitate not to 
affirm that Dan was the first King of Den- 
mark, more properly called Danmark from 
his name, and that he instituted there the 
military order of Dannebrog. With the 
pretensions of these Danish Antiquaries, 
he pursued, I meddle not. There is surer 
authority for the merits of this my first 
namesake. " Dan shall judge his people, as 
one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a 
serpent by the way, an adder in the path, 
that biteth the horse's heels, so that his rider 
shall fall backward." Daniel, quoth the 
Doctor, is commonly abbreviated into Dan, 
from whence doubtless it taketh its root ; 
and the Daniel therefore who is not wise as 
a serpent, falsifieth the promise of the patri- 
arch Jacob. 

That this should have been the Dan who 
founded the kingdom of Denmark he deemed 
an idle fancy. King Dans in that country, 
however, there have been, and among them 
was King Dan called Mykelati or the Mag- 
nificent, with whom the Bruna Olid, or age 
of Combustion, ended in the North, and the 
Houghs Olid or age of barrows began, for 
he it was who introduced the custom of in- 
terment. But he considered it as indeed nn 
honour to the name, that Death should have 
been called Advog by the Macedonians, not 
as a dialectic or provincial form of Odi'arog 
but from the Hebrew Dan, which signifies, 
says Jeremy Taylor, a Judge, as intimating 
that Judges are appointed to give sentence 
upon criminals in life and death. 



460 



THE DOCTOR. 



Even if we look at the black side of the 
shield we still find that the D preserves its 
power : there is Dathan, who with Korah 
and Abiram went down alive into the pit, 
and the earth closed upon them ; Dalila by 
whom Sampson was betrayed ; Dionysius 
the acoustical tyrant ; Domitian who like a 
true vice-gerent of Beelzebub tormented 
flies as well as men ; Decius the fiercest of 
the persecutors ; the inhuman Dunstan, and 
the devilish Dominic, after whom it seems all 
but an anticlimax to name the ipsissimus 
Diabolus, the Devil himself. And here let 
us remark through how many languages the 
name of the author of evil retains its charac- 
teristic initial, Aia/3oXoc, Diabolus, Diavolo, 
Diablo, Diabo, Diable, in Dutch Duival, in 
Welsh Diawl, and though the Germans write 
him Teufel, it is because in their coarser 
articulation the D passes into the cognate 
sound of T, without offending their obtuser 
organs of hearing. Even in the appellations 
given him by familiar or vulgar irreverence, 
the same pregnant initial prevails, he is the 
Deuce, and Old Davy and Davy Jones. 
And it may be noted that in the various 
systems of false religion to which he hath 
given birth, the Delta is still a dominant 
inchoative. Witness Dagon of the Philis- 
tines, witness the Daggial of the Mahom- 
medans, and the forgotten root from whence 
the Aidg of the Greeks is derived. Why 
should I mention the Roman Diespiter, the 
Syrian Dirceto, Delius with his sister Delia, 
known also as Dictynna and the great Diana 
of the Ephesians. The Sicyonian Dia, 
Dione of whom Venus was born, Deiphobe 
the Cumsean Sybil who conducted iEneas in 
his descent to the infernal regions. Doris 
the mother of the Nereids, and Dorus father 
of the race of Pygmies. Why should I 
name the Dioscuri, Dice and Dionysus, the 
Earth, Mother Demeter, the Demiourgos, 
gloomy Dis, Demogorgon dread and Daphne 
whom the Gods converted into a Laurel to 
decorate the brows of Heroes and Poets. 

Truly, he would say, it may be called a 
dynamic letter ; and not without mystery 
did the Hebrews call it Daleth, the door, as 
though it were the door of speech. Then 



its form ! how full of mysteries ! The wise 
Egyptians represented it by three stars dis- 
posed in a triangle : it was their hieroglyphic 
of the Deity. In Greek it is the Delta. 



In this form were the stupendous Pyra- 
mids built, when the sage Egyptians are 
thought to have emblematised the soul of 
man, which the Divine Plato supposed to be 
of this shape. This is the mysterious tri- 
angle, which the Pythagoreans called Pallas, 
because they said it sprang from the brain 
of Jupiter, and Tritogeneia, because if three 
right lines were drawn from its angles to 
meet in the centre, a triple birth of triangles 
was produced, each equal to the other. 




I pass reverently the diviner mysteries 
which have been illustrated from hence, and 
may perhaps be typified herein. Nor will I 
do more than touch upon the mechanical 
powers which we derive from a knowledge 
of the properties of the figures, and upon 
the science of Trigonometry. In its Roman 
and more familiar form, the Letter hath 
also sublime resemblances or prototypes. 
The Rainbow resting upon the earth de- 
scribes its form. Yea, the Sky and the 
Earth represent a grand and immeasurable 
D ; for when you stand upon a boundless 
plain, the space behind you and before in 
infinite longitude is the straight line, and 
the circle of the firmament which bends 
from infinite altitude to meet it, forms the 
bow. 

For himself, he said, it was a never failing 
source of satisfaction when he reflected how 



THE DOCTOR. 



461 



richly his own destiny was endowed with 
Ds. The D was the star of his ascendant. 
There was in the accident of his life, — and 
he desired it to be understood as using the 
word accident in its scholastic acceptations, 
— a concatenation, a concentration. Yea 
he might venture to call it a constellation of 
Ds. Dove he was born ; Daniel he was 
baptized ; Daniel was the name of his father ; 
Dinah of his mother, Deborah of his wife ; 
Doctor was his title, Doncaster his dwelling- 
place ; in the year of his marriage, which 
next to that of his birth was the most im- 
portant of his life, D was the Dominical 
letter ; and in the amorous and pastoral 
strains wherein he had made his passion 
known in the magazines, he had called him- 
self Damon and his mistress Delia. 



CHAPTER CLXXVI. 

the doctor discovers the antiquity of 
the name of dove from perusing 
jacob bryant's analysis of ancient 
mythology. christopher and ferdi- 
nand columbus. something about 

pigeon-pie, and the reason why the 
doctor was inclined to think favour- 
ably of the samaritans. 

An I take the humour of a thing once, 1 am like your 
tailor's needle ; I go through. Ben Jonson. 

Dove also was a name which abounded with 
mystical significations, and which derived 
peculiar significance from its mysterious 
conjunction with Daniel. Had it not been 
said, " Be ye wise as serpents and harmless 
as Doves ? " To him the text was person- 
ally applicable in both parts. Dove he was 
by birth. Daniel by baptism or the second 
birth, and Daniel was Dan, and Dan shall 
be a serpent by the way. 

But who can express his delight when in 
perusing Jacob Bryant's Analysis of ancient 
Mythology, he found that so many of the 
most illustrious personages of antiquity 
proved to be Doves, when their names were 
truly interpreted or properly understood ! 
That erudite interpreter of hidden things 



taught him that the name of the Dove was 
Ion and Ionah, whence in immediate de- 
scent the Oan and Oannes of Berosus and 
Abydenus, and in longer but lineal deduc - 
tion iEneas, Hannes, Hanno, Ionah, 'lodwrjc, 
Johannes, Janus, Eanus among the elder 
Romans, Giovanni among the later Italians, 
Juan, Joam, Jean, John, Jan, Iwain, Ivan, 
Ewan, Owen, Evan, Hans, Ann, Hannah, 
Nannette, Jane, Jeannette, Jeanne, Joanna 
and Joan ; all who had ever borne these 
names, or any name derived from the same 
radical, as doubtless many there were in 
those languages of which he had no know- 
ledge, nor any means of acquiring it, being 
virtually Doves. Did not Bryant expressly 
say that the prophet Jonah was probably 
so named as a messenger of the Deity, the 
mystic Dove having been from the days of 
Jonah regarded as a sacred symbol among 
all nations where any remembrance of the 
destruction and renovation of mankind was 
preserved! It followed therefore that the 
prophet Jonah, Hannibal, St. John, Owen 
Glendower, Joan of Arc, Queen Anne, Miss 
Hannah More, and Sir Watkin Williams 
Wynn, were all of them his namesakes, to 
pretermit or pass over Pope Joan, Little 
John, and Jack the Giantkiller. And this 
followed, not like the derivation of King 
Pepin from "Ocnrtp, by a jump in the pro- 
cess, such as that from AidirEp to Napkin ; 
nor like the equally well known identification 
of a Pigeon with an Eel Pye, in the logic of 
which the Doctor would have detected a 
fallacy, but in lawful etymology, and ac- 
cording to the strict interpretation of words. 
If he looked for the names through the 
thinner disguise of language there was Semi- 
ramis, who having been fed by Doves was 
named after them. What was Zurita the 
greatest historian of Arragon, but a young 
stock Dove? What were the three Palo- 
minos so properly enumerated in the Bib- 
liotheca of Nicolas Antonio? Pedro the 
Benedictine in whose sermons a more than 
ordinary breathing of the spirit might not 
unreasonably be expected from his name ; 
Francisco, who translated into Castillian the 
Psychomachia of the Christian poet Aurelius 



462 



THE DOCTOR. 



Prudentius, and Diego the Prior of Xodar, 
whose Liber de mutatione aeris, in quo assi- 
dua, et mirabilis mutationis temporum historia, 
cum suis causis, enarratur, he so greatly re- 
gretted that he had never been able to pro- 
cure ; what were these Palominos ? what 
but Doves ? — Father Colombiere who 
framed the service for the Heart of Jesus, 
which was now so fashionable in Catholic 
countries, was clearly of the Dove genus. 
St. Columba was a decided Dove ; three 
there were certainly, the Senonian, the Cor- 
dovan and the Cornish : and there is reason 
to believe that there was a fourth also, a 
female Dove, who held a high rank in 
St. Ursula's great army of virgins. Co- 
lumbo the Anatomist, deservedly eminent 
as one of those who by their researches led 
the way for Harvey, he also was a Dove. 
Lastly, — and the Doctor in fine taste 
always reserved the greatest glory of the 
Dove name, for the conclusion of his dis- 
course — lastly, there was Christopher Co- 
lumbus, whom he used to call his famous 
namesake. And he never failed to commend 
Ferdinand Columbus for the wisdom and 
piety with which he had commented upon 
the mystery of the name, to remark that his 
father had conveyed the grace of the Holy 
Ghost to the New World, shewing to the 
people who knew him not who was God's be- 
loved son, as the Holy Ghost had done in the 
figure of a Dove at the baptism of St. John, 
and bearing like Noah's Dove the Olive 
Branch, and the Oil of Baptism over the 
waters of the ocean. 

And what would our onomatologist have 
said if he had learned to read these words 
in that curious book of the &c. family, the 
Oriental fragments of Major Edward Moor : 
" In respect to St. Columba, or Colomb, 
and other superstitious names and things in 
close relationship, I shall have in another 
place something to say. I shall try to con- 
nect Col-omb, with Kal-O'm, — those infi- 
nitely mysterious words of Hindu mythology: 
and with these, divers Mytlie, converging 
into or diverging from O'M — A U M, — 
the Irish Ogham, — I A M, — Amen, JACO 
— Il-Kolmkill, &c. &c. &c." Surely had 



the onomatologist lived to read this passage, 
he would forthwith have opened and cor- 
responded with the benevolent and erudite 
etcseterarist of Bealings. 

These things were said in 4iis deeper 
moods. In the days of courtship he had 
said in song that Venus's car was drawn by 
Doves, regretting at the time that an allu- 
sion which came with such peculiar felicity 
from him, should appear to common readers 
to mean nothing more than what rhymers 
from time immemorial had said before him. 
After marriage he often called Mrs. Dove 
his Turtle, and in his playful humours, when 
the gracefulness of youth had gradually 
been superseded by a certain rotundity of 
form, he sometimes named her (pdrra, his 
ring-dove. Then he would regret that she 
had not proved a stock-dove, — and if she 
frowned at him, or looked grave, she was 
his pouting pigeon. 

One inconvenience, however, Mrs. Dove 
felt from his reverence for the name. He 
never suffered a pigeon-pie at his table. 
And when he read that the Samaritans were 
reproached with retaining a trace of Assy- 
rian superstition because they held it un- 
lawful to eat this bird, he was from that 
time inclined to think favourably of the 
schismatics of Mount Gerizim. 



CHAPTER CLXXVII. 

SOMETHING ON THE SCIENCE AND MYSTERY 
OF NUMBERS WHICH IS NOT ACCORDING TO 
COCKER. REVERIES OF JEAN d'eSPAGNE, 
MINISTER OF THE TRENCH - REFORMED 
CHURCH IN WESTMINSTER, AND OF MR. 
JOHN BELLAMY. A PITHY REMARK OF 
FULLER'S AND AN EXTRACT FROM HIS 
PISGAH SIGHT OF PALESTINE, TO RE- 
CREATE THE READER. 

None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd, 
As wit turn'd fool: folly, in wisdom hatch'd, 
Hath wisdom's warrant, and the help of school, 
And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool. 

Love's Labour Lost. 

It may easily be supposed that the Doctor 
was versed in the science of numbers : not 



THE DOCTOR. 



463 



merely that common science which is taught 
at schools and may be learnt from Cocker's 
Arithmetic, but the more recondite mysteries 
which have in all ages delighted minds like 
his ; and of which the richest specimens may 
be seen in the writings of the Hugonot 
Minister Jean de l'Espagne, and in those of 
our contemporary Mr. John Bellamy, author 
of the Ophion, of various papers in the 
Classical Journal, and defender of the Old 
and 'New Testament. 

Cet uuteur est assez digne d'etre lu, says 
Bayle of Jean de l'Espagne, and he says it 
in some unaccountable humour, too gravely 
for a jest. The writer who is thus recom- 
mended was Minister of the Reformed 
French Church in Westminster, which met 
at that time in Somerset Chapel, and his 
friend Dr. De Garencieres, who wrote com- 
mendatory verses upon him in French, Latin 
and Greek, calls him 

Belle lumiere des Pasteurs, 
Ornement du Steele ou nous sommes, 
Qtri trouve des admirateurs 
Par tout ou il y a des hommes. 

He was one of those men to whom the 
Bible comes as a book of problems and 
riddles, a mine in which they are always at 
work, thinking that whatever they can throw 
up must needs be gold. Among the various 
observations which he gave the world with- 
out any other order, as he says, than that in 
which they presented themselves to his me- 
mory, there may be found good, bad and 
indifferent. He thought the English Church 
had improperly appointed a Clerk to say 
Amen for the people. Amen being intended, 
among other reasons, as a mark whereby to 
distinguish those who believed with the 
officiating Priest from Idolaters and Heretics. 
He thought it was not expedient that Jews 
should be allowed to reside in England, for 
a Jew would perceive in the number of our 
tolerated sects, a confusion worse than that 
of Babel ; and as the multitude here are 
always susceptible of every folly which is 
offered, and the more monstrous the faith, 
to them the better mystery, it was to be 
feared, he said, that for the sake of con- 
verting two or three Jews we were exposing 



a million Christians to the danger of Ju- 
daising ; or at least that we should see new 
religions start up, compounded of Judaism 
with Christianity. He was of opinion, in 
opposition to what was then generally 
thought in England, that one might in- 
nocently say God bless you, to a person who 
sneezed, though he candidly admitted that 
there was no example either in the Old or 
New Testament, and that in all the Scrip- 
tures only one person is mentioned as having 
sneezed, to wit the Shunamite's son. He 
thought it more probable from certain texts 
that the Soul at death departs by way of the 
nostrils, than by way of the mouth according 
to the vulgar notion: — had he previously 
ascertained which way it came in, he would 
have had no difficulty in deciding which way 
it went out. And he propounded and re- 
solved a question concerning Jephtha which 
no person but himself ever thought of 
asking : Pourquoy Dieu voulant delivrer les 
Israelites, leur donna pour liber ateur, voire 
pour Chef et Gouverneur perpetuel, un Jils 
dune paillarde f " O Jephtha, Judge of 
Israel," that a Frenchman should call thee 
in filthy French Jils dune putain ! 

But the peculiar talent of the Belle 
Lumiere des Pasteurs was for cabalistic 
researches concerning numbers, or what he 
calls L 1 Harmonie du Temps. Numbers, he 
held, (and every generation, every family, 
every individual was marked with one,) 
were not the causes of what came to pass, 
but they were marks or impresses which 
God set upon his works, distinguishing them 
by the difference of these their cyphers. 
And he laid it down as a rule that in doubt- 
ful points of computation, the one wherein 
some mystery could be discovered was 
always to be preferred. Quoy ? — (think 
how triumphantly his mouth opened and his 
nose was erected and his nostrils were dilated, 
when he pronounced that interrogation) — 
Quoy? la variete de nos opinions qui provient 
d imperfection, aneantira-t-elle les merveilles 
de Dieu f In the course of his Scriptural 
computations he discovered that when the 
Sun stood still at the command of Joshua, it 
was precisely 2555 years after the Creation, 



464 



THE DOCTOR. 



that is seven years of years, a solar week, 
after which it had been preordained that the 
Sun should thus have its sabbath of rest : 
Ceci riest-il pas admirable ? It was on the 
tenth year of the tenth year of the years 
that the Sun went back ten degrees, which 
was done to show the chronology : ou est le 
stupide qui ne soit ravi en admiration a"une si 
celeste harmonie ? With equal sagacity and 
equal triumph he discovered how the ge- 
nerations from Adam to Christ went by 
twenty -twos ; and the generations of Christ 
by sevens, being 77 in all, and that from the 
time the promise of the Seed was given till 
its fulfilment there elapsed a week of years, 
seven times seventy years, seventy weeks of 
years, and seven times seventy weeks of 
years, by which beautiful geometry, if he 
might be permitted to use so inadequate a 
term, the fullness of time was made up. 

What wonderful significations also hath 
Mr. Bellamy in his kindred pursuits dis- 
covered and darkly pointed out ! Doth he 
not tell us of seven steps, seven days, seven 
priests, seven rams, seven bullocks, seven 
trumpets, seven shepherds, seven stars, seven 
spirits, seven eyes, seven lamps, seven pipes, 
seven heads, four wings, four beasts, four 
kings, four kingdoms, four carpenters ; the 
number three he has left unimproved, — but 
for two, — 

which number Nature framed 
In the most useful faculties of man, 
To strengthen mutually and relieve each other, 
Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs and feet, 
That where one failed the other might supply, 

for this number Mr. Bellamy has two cheru- 
bims, two calves, two turtles, two birds alive, 
two *, two baskets of figs, 

two olive trees, two women grinding, two 
men in the fields, two woes, two witnesses, 
two candlesticks ; and when he descends to 
the unit, he tells us of one tree, one heart, 
one stick, one fold, one pearl, — to which we 
must add one Mr. John Bellamy the Pearl of 
Commentators. 

But what is this to the exquisite manner 
in which he elucidates the polytheism of the 

* The blank is in the MS. 



Greeks and Romans, showing us that the 
inferior Gods of their mythology were in 
their origin only men who had exercised 
certain departments in the state, a discovery 
which he illustrates in a manner the most 
familiar, and at the same time the most 
striking for its originality. Thus, he says, 
if the Greeks and Romans had been Eng- 
lishmen, or if we Englishmen of the present 
day were Greeks and Romans, we should 
call our Secretary at War, Lord Bathurst 
for instance, Mars ; the Lord Chancellor 
(Lord Eldon to wit) Mercury, — as being at 
the head of the department for eloquence. — 
(But as Mercury is also the God of thieves 
may not Mr. Bellamy, grave as he is, be 
suspected of insinuating here that the Gen- 
tlemen of the Long Robe are the most 
dextrous of pickpockets ?) — The first Lord 
of the Admiralty, Neptune. The President 
of the College of Physicians, Apollo. The 
President of the Board of Agriculture, 
Janus. Because with one face he looked 
forward to the new year, while at the same 
time he looked back with the other on the 
good or bad management of the agriculture 
of the last, wherefore he was symbolically 
represented with a second face at the back 
of his head. Again Mr. Bellamy seems to 
be malicious, in thus typifying or seeming to 
typify Sir John Sinclair between two ad- 
ministrations with a face for both. The 
ranger of the forests, he proceeds, would be 
denominated Diana. The Archbishop of 
Canterbury, Minerva ; — Minerva in a 
Bishop's wig ! The first Lord of the Trea- 
sury, Juno ; and the Society of Suppression 
of Vice, — Reader, lay thy watch upon the 
table, and guess for three whole minutes 
what the Society for the Suppression of Vice 
would be called upon this ingenious scheme, 
if the Greeks and Romans were Englishmen 
of the present generation, or if we of the 
present generation were heathen Greeks and 
Romans. I leave a carte blanche before this, 
lest thine eye outrunning thy judgment, 
should deprive thee of that proper satisfac- 
tion which thou wilt feel if thou shouldst 
guess aright. But exceed not the time which 
I have affixed for thee, for if thou dost not 



THE DOCTOR. 



465 



guess aright in three minutes, thou wouldest 
not in as many years. 



Yenus. Yes, Reader. By Cyprus and 
Paphos and the Groves of Idalia, — by the 
little God Cupid, — by all the Loves and 
Doves, — and by the lobbies of the London 
theatres — he calls the Society for the Sup- 
pression of Yice, Yenus ! 

Fancy, says Fuller, runs riot when 
spurred with superstition. This is his 
marginal remark upon a characteristic para- 
graph concerning the Chambers about 
Solomon's Temple, with which I will here 
recreate the reader. " As for the mystical 
meaning of these chambers, Bede no doubt, 
thought he hit the very mark — when finding 
therein the three conditions of life, all be- 
longing to God's Church : in the ground 
chamber, such as live in marriage ; in the 
middle chamber such as contract ; but in 
the excelsis or third story, such as have 
attained to the sublimity of perpetual 
virginity. Rupertus in the lowest chamber 
lodgeth those of practical lives with Noah ; 
in the middle — those of mixed lives with 
Job ; and in the highest — such as spend 
their days with Daniel in holy speculations. 
But is not this rather lusus, than allusio, 
sporting with, than expounding of scrip- 
tures ? Thus when the gates of the Oracle 
j are made five square, Ribera therein reads 
! our conquest over the five senses, and when 
j those of the door of the Temple are said to 
be four square, therein saith he is denoted 
' the quaternion of Evangelists. After this 
[ rate, Hiram (though no doubt dexterous in 
his art) could not so soon fit a pillar with a 
fashion as a Friar can fit that fashion with a 
mystery. If made three square, then the 
Trinity of Persons: four square, the cardinal 
virtues : five square, the Pentateuch of 



3Ioses : six square, the Petitions or the 
Lord's Prayer : seven square, their Sacra- 
ments : eight square, the Beatitudes: nine 
square, the Orders of Angels : ten square, 
the Commandments : eleven square, the 
moral virtues : twelve square, the articles of 
the creed are therein contained. In a word 
— for matter of numbers — fancy is never 
at a loss — like a beggar, never out of her 
way, but hath some haunts where to repose 
itself. But such as in expounding scriptures 
reap more than God did sow there, never 
eat what they reap themselves, because such 
grainless husks, when seriously thrashed out, 
vanish all into chaff.* 



CHAPTER CLXXYHI. 

THE MYSTERY OF NUMBERS PURSUED, AKD 
CERTAIN CAECULATIONS GIVEN WHICH 
MAY REMIND THE READER OF OTHER CAL- 
CULATIONS EQUALLY CORRECT. ANAGRAM- 
MATISING OF NAMES, AND THE DOCTOR'S 
SUCCESS THEREIN. 

" There is no efficacy in numbers, said the wiser Phi- 
losophers ; and very truly," — saith Bishop Hacket in re- 
peating this sentence ; but he continues — " some numbers 
are apt to enforce a reverent esteem towards them, by 
considering miraculous occurrences which fell out in holy 
Scripture on such and such a number. — Non potest for- 
tuito fieri, quod tarn scepe fit. says Maldonatus, whom I 
never find superstitious in this matter. It falls out too 
often to ba called contingent ; and the oftener it falls out, 
the more to be attended." f 

This choice morsel hath led us from the 
science of numbers. Great account hath 
been made of that science in old times. 
There was an epigrammatist who discovering 
that the name of his enemy Damagoras 
amounted in numerical letters to the same 
sum as Aoi/.iog the plague, inferred from 
thence that Damagoras and the Plague were 
one and the same thing ; a stingless jest 
serving, like many satires of the present age, 
to show the malice and not the wit of the 



* Pisgah Sight of Palestine, Book iii. c. vii. 
t On referring to Bishop Hacket's Sermons I find this 
Motto is not copied out Verbatim. See p. 215. 



466 



THE DOCTOR. 



satirist. But there were those among the 
ancients who believed that stronger influen- 
ces existed in the -number of a name, and 
that because of their arithmetical inferiority 
in this point, Patroclus was slain by Hector, 
and Hector by Achilles. Diviners grounded 
upon this a science which they called Ono- 
mantia or Arithmomantia. When Maurice 
of Saxony, to the great fear of those who 
were most attached to him, engaged in war 
against Charles V., some one encouraged 
his desponding friends by this augury, and 
said that if the initials of the two names 
were considered, it would be seen that the 
fortunes of Maurice preponderated over those 
of Charles in the proportion of a thousand 
to a hundred. 

A science like this could not be without 
attractions for the Doctor ; and it was with 
no little satisfaction that he discovered in 
the three Ds with which his spoons and his 
house linen were marked, by considering 
them as so many capital Deltas, the figures 
444, combining the complex virtues of the 
four thrice told. But he discovered greater 
secrets in the names of himself and his wife 
when taken at full length. He tried them 
in Latin, and could obtain no satisfactory re- 
sult ; nor had he any better success in Greek 
when he observed the proper orthography 
of AavujX and Aej3j3<Spa.* But anagram- 
matists are above the rules of orthography, 
just as Kings, Divines and Lawyers are 
privileged, if it pleases them, to dispense 
with the rules of grammar. Taking these 
words therefore letter by letter according 
to the common pronunciation (for who said 
he pronounces them Danieel and Deboarah?) 
and writing the surname in Greek letters 
instead of translating it, the sum which it 
thus produced was equal to his most sanguine 
wishes, for thus it proved 

Daniel and Deborah Dove. 



AavuX 



Aej36pa Aove. 



* A'cfioppa, Gen. xxxv. 8., At^jiu^tx, Judges iv. 4. The 
double p will not affect the mystery ! 



AavieX. 



4 

1 

50 

10 

5 

30 



Daniel 100 



Aefiopa 



A 


4 


£ 


5 


P 


2 


O 


70 


9 


100 


a 


1 



Deborah 182 



Aove 



A 


4 





70 


V 


400 


e 


5 



Dove 



479 



The whole being added together gave the 
following product 

Daniel 100 
Deborah 182 
Dove 479 

761 

Here was the number 761 found in fair 
addition, without any arbitrary change of 
letters, or licentious innovation in orthogra- 
phy. And herein was mystery. The num- 
ber 761 is a prime number; from hence 
the Doctor inferred that, as the number was 
indivisible, there could be no division be- 
tween himself and Mrs. Dove ; an inference 
which the harmony of their lives fully war- 
ranted. And this alone would have amply 
rewarded his researches. But a richer dis- 



THE DOCTOR. 



467 



covery flashed upon Mm. The year 1761 
was the year of his marriage, and to make 
up the deficient thousand there was M for 
marriage and matrimony. These things, he 
■would say, must never be too explicit ; their 
mysterious character would be lost if they 
lay upon the surface ; like precious metals 
and precious stones you must dig to find 
them. 

He had bestowed equal attention and 
even more diligence in anagrammatising the 
names. His own indeed furnished him at 
first with a startling and by no means agree- 
able result ; for, upon transposing the com- 
ponent letters of Daniel Dove, there appeared 
the words Leaden void! Xor was he more 
fortunate in a Latin attempt, which gave 
him Dan vile Deo. Vel dona Dei, as far as 
it bore a semblance of meaning, was better ; 
but when, after repeated dislocations and 
juxta-positions, there came forth the words 
Dead in love, Joshua Sylvester was not 
more delighted at finding that Jacobus Stu- 
art made justa scrutabo, and James Stuart 
A just Master, than the Doctor, — for it was 
in the May days of his courtship. In the 
course of these anagrammatical experiments 
he had a glimpse of success, which made 
him feel for a moment like a man whose 
lottery ticket is next in number to the 
^20,000 prize. Dove failed only in one 
letter of being Ovid. In old times they did 
not stand upon trifles in these things, and 
I John Banyan was perfectly satisfied with 
extracting from his name the words Nu hony 
in a B, — a sentence of which the ortho- 
graphy and the import are worthy of each 
other. But although the Doctor was con- 
tented with a very small sufficit of meaning, 
he could not depart so violently from the let- 
ters here. The disappointment was severe, 
though momentary : it was, as we before 
observed, in the days of his courtship ; and 
could he thus have made out his claim to 
be called Ovid, he had as clear a right to 
add Xaso as the poet of Sulmo himself, or 
any of the Xasonic race, for he had been 
at the promontory, " and why indeed Naso," 
as Holofernes has said? — Why not merely 
for that reason " looking toward Damascus," 



which may be found in the second volume 
of this work, in the sixty-third chapter 
and at the two hundred and thirtieth page *, 
but also " for smelling out the odoriferous 
flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention ?"f 

Thus much for his own name. After mar- 
riage he added his wife's with the conjunc- 
tion coptdative, and then came out Dear 
Delia had hound one : nothing could be more 
felicitous, Delia, as has already been noticed, 
having been the poetical name by which 
he addressed the object of his affections. 
Another result was, / hadden a dear bond- 
love, but having some doubts as to the syn- 
tax of the verb, and some secret dislike to 
its obsolete appearance, he altered it into 
Ned, I had a dear bond-love, as though he 
was addressing his friend Dr. Miller the 
organist, whose name was Edward. 



CHAPTER CLXXIX. 

THE SUBJECT OF ANAGRAMS CONTINUED ; A 
TRUE OBSERVATION WHICH MANY TOR 
WANT OF OBSERVATION WILL NOT DIS- 
COVER TO BE SUCH, VIZ., THAT THERE 
IS A LATENT SUPERSTITION IN THE 
MOST RATIONAL OF MEN. LUCKY AND 

UNLUCKY FITTING AND UNFITTING 

ANAGRAMS, AND HOW THE DOCTOR'S 
TASTE IN THIS LINE WAS DERIVED FROM 
OUR OLD ACQUAINTANCE JOSHUA SYL- 
VESTER. 

Ha gran forza una vecchia opinione ; 
E bisogria grand' arte, e gran faiica, 
A cavaria del capo alle persone. 

Bronzing Pittore. 

Anagrams are not likely ever again to hold 
so high a place among the prevalent pursuits 
of literature as they did in the seventeenth 
century, when Louis XIII. appointed the 
Provencal Thomas Billen to be his Royal 
Anagrammatist, and granted him a salary of 
1200 livres. But no person will ever hit 
upon an apt one without feeling that degree 
of pleasure and surprise with which any odd 



* This refers to the 8vo. Edition. Sec page 134. of 
this Edition, 
t Love's Labour Lost, Act iv. Sc. ii. 



468 



THE DOCTOR. 



coincidence is remarked. Has any one who 
knows Johnny the Bear heard his name thus 
anagrammatised without a smile ? We may 
be sure he smiled and growled at the same 
time when he first heard it himself. 

Might not Father Salvator Mile, and 
Father Louis Almerat, who were both 
musicians, have supposed themselves as 
clearly predestinated to be musical, as ever 
seventh son of a Septimus thought himself 
born for the medical profession, if they had 
remarked what Penrose discovered for them, 
that their respective names, with the F for 
Friar prefixed, each contained the letters of 
the six musical notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, 
and not a letter more or less ? 

There is, and always hath been, and ever 
will be, a latent superstition in the most 
rational of men. It belongs to the weakness 
and dependence of human nature. Believing, 
as the Scriptures teach us to believe, that signs 
and tokens have been vouchsafed in many 
cases, is it to be wondered at that we seek 
for them sometimes in our moods of fancy, 
or that they suggest themselves to us in 
our fears and our distress ? Men may cast 
off religion and extinguish their conscience 
without ridding themselves of this innate 
and inherent tendency. 

Proper names have all in their origin been 
significant in all languages. It was easy for 
men who brooded over their own imagina- 
tions, to conceive that they might contain in 
their elements a more recondite, and perhaps, 
fatidical signification ; and the same turn or 
twist of mind which led the Cabbalists to 
their extravagant speculations have taken 
this direction, when confined within the 
limits of languages which have no super- 
natural pretensions. But no serious im- 
portance was attached to such things, except 
by persons whose intellects were in some 
degree deranged. They were sought for 
chiefly as an acceptable form of compliment, 
sometimes in self-complacency of the most 
inoffensive kind, and sometimes for the sting 
which they might carry with them. Lyco- 
phron is said to have been the inventor of 
this trifling. 

The Rules for the true discovery of 



perfect anagrams, as laid down by Mrs. 
Mary Fage*, allowed as convenient a licence 
in orthography as the Doctor availed himself 
of in Greek. 

E may most-what conclude an English word, 

And so a letter at a need afford. 

H is an aspiration and no letter; 

It may be had or left which we think better. 

1 may be I or Y as need require ; 

Q ever after doth a U desire ; 

Two Vs may be a double U ; and then 

A double U may be two Vs again. 

X may divided be, and S and C 

May by that letter comprehended be. 

Z a double S may comprehend : 

And lastly an apostrophe may ease 

Sometimes a letter when it doth not please. 

Two of the luckiest hits which anagram- 
matists have made were on the Attorney 
General William Noy, I moyl in law ; and 
Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, I find murdered 
by rogues. Before Felton's execution it was 
observed that his anagram was No,fiie not. 

A less fortunate one made the Lady 
Davies mad, or rather fixed the character of 
her madness. She was the widow of Sir 
John Davies, the statesman and poet, and 
having anagrammatised Eleanor Davies into 
Reveal O Daniel, she was crazy enough to 
fancy that the spirit of the Prophet Daniel 
was incorporated in her, The Doctor men- 
tioned the case with tenderness and a kind 
of sympathy. " Though the anagram, says 
Dr. Heylyn, had too much by an L and too 
little by an S, yet she found Daniel and 
Reveal in it, and that served her turn." 
Setting up for a Prophetess upon this con- 
ceit, and venturing upon political predictions 
in sore times, she was brought before the 
Court of High Commission, where serious 
pains were preposterously bestowed in en- 
deavouring to reason her out of an opinion 
founded on insanity. All, as might have 
been expected, and ought to have been 
foreseen, would not do, " till Lamb, then 
Dean of the Arches, shot her through and 
through with an arrow borrowed from her 
own quiver." For while the Divines were 
reasoning the point with her out of Scripture, 



* In her Fames Roule, or the names of King Charles, 
his Queen and his most hopeful posterity; together with 
the names of the Dukes, Marquisses, &j;., anagramma- 
tized, and expressed by acrostick lines on their lives. 
London, 1G37. — R. S. 



THE DOCTOR. 



469 



he took a pen into his hand, and presently 
finding that the letters of her name might 
be assorted to her purpose, said to her, 
Madam, I see that you build much on ana- 
grams, and I have found out one which I 
hope will fit you : Dame Eleanor Davies, — 
Never so mad a Ladie ! He then put it into 
her hands in writing, " which happy fancy 
brought that grave Court into such a 
laughter, and the poor woman thereupon 
into such a confusion, that afterwards she 
either grew wiser, or was less regarded." — 
This is a case in which it may be admitted 
that ridicule was a fair test of truth. 

When Henri IV. sent for Marshal Biron 
to court, with an assurance of full pardon if 
he would reveal without reserve the whole 
of his negociations and practices, that rash 
and guilty man resolved to go and brave all 
dangers, because certain Astrologers had 
assured him that his ascendant commanded 
that of the King, and in confirmation of this 
some flattering friend discovered in his name 
Henri de Bourbon this anagram, De Biron 
Bonlieur. Comme ainsi fust, says one of his 
contemporaries, qutil en fist gloire, quelque 
Gentilhomme Men advise Id present — dit 
tout has a Voreille oVun sien amy, s'il le pense 
ainsi il nest pas sage, et trouvera quHl y a du 
Robin dedans Biron. Robin was a name 
used at that time by the French as syno- 
nymous with simpleton. But of unfitting 
anagrams none were ever more curiously 
unfit than those which were discovered in 
Marguerite de Yalois, the profligate Queen 
of Navarre ; Salve, Virgo Mater Dei ; ou, 
de vertu royal image ! The Doctor derived 
his taste for anagrams from the poet with 
whose rhymes and fancies he had been so 
well embued in his boyhood, old Joshua 
Sylvester, who, as the translator of Du 
Bartas, signed himself to the King in ana- 
grammatical French Voy Sire Saluste, and 
was himself addressed in anagrammatical 
Latin as Vere Os Salustii. 

" Except Eteostiques," says Drummond of 
Hawthornden, " I think the Anagram the 
most idle study in the world of learning. 
Their maker must be homo miserrima pa- 
tientice, and when he is done, what is it but 



magno conatu nugas magnas agere ! you may 
of one and the same name make both good 
and evil. So did my Uncle find in Anna 
Regina, Tngannare, as well as of Anna Bri- 
tannorum Regina, Anna Begnantium Arbor: 
as he who in Charles de Valois found 
Chasse la dure loy, and after the massacre 
found Chasseur desloyal. Often they are 
most false, as Henri de Bourbon, Bonheur 
de Biron. Of all the anagrammatists and 
with least pain, he was the best who, out of 
his own name, being Jacques de la Chamber, 
found La Chamber de Jacques, and rested 
there : and next to him, here at home, a 
Gentleman whose mistress's name being 
Anna Grame, he found it an Anagrame 
already." 



CHAPTER CLXXX. 

THE DOCTOR'S IDEAS OF DECK, CHANCE, 
ACCIDENT, FORTUNE, AND MISFORTUNE. 
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE'S DISTINC- 
TION BETWEEN CHANCE AND FORTUNE, 
WHEREIN NO-MEANING IS MISTAKEN FOR 
MEANING. AGREEMENT IN OPINION BE- 
TWEEN THE PHILOSOPHER OF DONCASTER 
AND THE PHILOSOPHER OF NORWICH. 
DISTINCTION BETWEEN UNFORTUNATELY 
UGLY, AND WICKEDLY UGLY. DANGER OF 
PERSONAL CHARMS. 

"EiTt; ya.g u; otXriSSig hritpdtyfx.ci to ocvto/jcoctov, ocvG^jtuv 
ii; iTvxz y*<zi a.Xoyio-Ttos Qgovovvrav, acct rov ju.lv Xoyov kvtoJv 
f/,')l zccra,Xccu(3a.iiovT<iiv, hik hi r/ t v a. cr 8ivt torn T'/ii xocrotXr^au; , 
ocXoyai; oio/Lcivav SioiTtTKxOcii rccurcc, Zv rov Xoyov zItiHv ovx. 
'ixovo-tv. Constant. Orat. ad Sanct. Cmt. c. mi. 

" Deformity is either natural, voluntary, or adventi- 
tious, being either caused by God's unseen Providence, 
{by men nick-named, chance,) or by men's cruelty." 

Fuller's Holy State, B. iii c. 15. 

It may readily be inferred from what has 
already been said of our Philosopher's way 
of thinking, that he was not likely to use the 
words luck, chance, accident, fortune or 
misfortune, with as little reflection as is 
ordinarily shown in applying them. The 
distinction which that fantastic — and vet 
most likeable person — Margaret Duchess 
of Newcastle, makes between Chance and 
Fortune Avas far from satisfying him. "For- 
tune," says her Grace (she might have been 



470 



THE DOCTOR. 



called her Beauty too), " is only various 
corporeal motions of several creatures — de- 
signed to one creature, or more creatures ; 
either to that creature, or those creatures' 
advantage, or disadvantage ; if advantage, 
man names it Good Fortune ; if disadvan- 
tage, man names it 111 Fortune. As for 
Chance, it is the visible effects of some hidden 
cause, and Fortune, a sufficient cause to 
produce such effects; for the conjunction of 
sufficient causes, doth produce such or such 
effects, which effects could not be produced 
— if any of those causes were wanting : so 
that Chances are but the effects of Fortune." 

The Duchess had just thought enough 
about this to fancy that she had a meaning, 
and if she had thought a little more she 
might have discovered that she had none. 

The Doctor looked more accurately both 
to his meaning and his words ; but keeping 
as he did, in my poor judgment, the golden 
mean between superstition and impiety, 
there was nothing in this that savoured of 
preciseness or weakness, nor of that scru- 
pulosity which is a compound of both. He 
did not suppose that trifles and floccinauci- 
ties of which neither the causes nor con- 
sequences are of the slightest import, were 
predestined ; as, for example — whether he 
had beef or mutton for dinner, wore a blue 
coat or a brown — or took off his wig with 
his right hand or with his left. He knew 
that all things are under the direction of 
almighty and omniscient Goodness ; but as 
he never was unmindful of that Providence 
in its dispensations of mercy and of justice, 
so he never disparaged it. 

Herein the Philosopher of Doncaster 
agreed with the Philosopher of Norwich 
who saith, " let not fortune — which hath no 
name in Scripture, have any in thy divinity. 
Let providence, not chance, have the honour 
of thy acknowledgements, and be thy 
(Edipus on contingences. Mark well the 
paths and winding ways thereof; but be not 
too wise in the construction, or sudden in 
the application. The hand of Providence 
writes often by abbreviatures, hieroglyphics 
or short characters, which, like the laconism 
on the wall, are not to be made out but by a 



hint or key from that spirit which indicted 
them. 1 ' * 

Some ill, he thought, was produced in 
human affairs by applying the term unfor- 
tunate to circumstances which were brought 
about by imprudence. A man was unfor- 
tunate, if being thrown from his horse on a 
journey, he broke arm or leg, but not if he 
broke his neck in steeple-hunting, or when 
in full cry after a fox ; if he were impo- 
verished by the misconduct of others, not if 
he were ruined by his' own folly and extra- 
vagance ; if he suffered in any way by the 
villainy of another, not if he were trans- 
ported, or hanged for his own. 

Neither would he allow that either man 
or woman could with propriety be called, 
as we not unfrequently hear in common 
speech, unfortunately ugly. Wichedly ugly, 
he said, they might be, and too often were ; 
and in such cases the greater their preten- 
sions to beauty, the uglier they were. But 
goodness has a beauty of its own, which is 
not dependent upon form and features, and 
which makes itself felt and acknowledged, 
however otherwise ill-favoured the face may 
be in which it is set. He might have said 
with Seneca, errare mihi visus est qui dixit 

Gratior est pulchro veniens e corpore virtus j 

nullo enim honestamento eget ; ipsa et magnum 
sui decus est, et corpus suum consecret. None, 
he would say with great earnestness, ap- 
peared so ugly to his instinctive perception 
as some of those persons whom the world 
accounted handsome, but upon whom pride, 
or haughtiness, or conceit had set its stamp, 
or who bore in their countenances what no 
countenance can conceal, the habitual ex- 
pression of any reigning vice, whether it 
were sensuality and selfishness, or envy, 
hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Nor 
could he regard with any satisfaction a fine 



* The Readers of Jeremy Taylor will not fail to re- 
member the passage following from his Great Exemplar. 

" God's Judgments are like the writing upon the wall, 
which was a missive of anger from God upon Belshazzar. 
It came upon an errand of revenge, and yet was writ in 
so dark characters that none could read it but a prophet." 
— Disc, xviii. Of the Causes and Manner of the Divine 
Judgments. 



THE DOCTOR. 



471 



face which had no ill expression, if it wanted 
a good one : he had no pleasure in behold- 
ing mere formal and superficial beauty, that 
which lies no deeper than the skin, and 
depends wholly upon " a set of features and 
complexion." He had more delight, he said, 
in looking at one of the statues in Mr. TY r ed- 
del's collection, than at a beautiful woman 
if he read in her face that she was as little 
susceptible of any virtuous emotion as the 
marble. While, therefore, he would not 
allow that any person could be unfortunately 
ugly, he thought that many were unfor- 
tunately handsome, and that no wise parent 
would wish his daughter to be eminently 
beautiful, lest what in her childhood was 
naturally and allowably the pride of his eye — 
should, when she grew up, become the grief 
of his heart. It requires no wide range of 
observation to discover that the woman who 
is married for her beauty has little better 
chance of happiness than she who is married 
for her fortune. " I have known very few 
women in my life," said Mrs. Montagu, 
" whom extraordinary charms and accom- 
plishments did not make unhappy." 



CHAPTER CLXXXI. 

no degree of ugliness really unfor- 
tunate, fidus cornelius compared 
to a plucked ostrich. wilkes' claim 
to ugliness considered and negatived 
by doctor johnson, notwithstanding 
hogarth's portrait. cast of the 
eye a la montmorency. st. evremond 
and turenne. william blake the 
painter, and the welsh triads. curi- 
ous extract from that very curious 
and rare book, the descriptive cata- 
logue of his own pictures, and a 

painful one from his poetical 
sketches. 

" If thou becst not so handsome as thou wovldst have 
been, thank God thou art not more unhandsome than thou 
art. 'Tis His mercy thou art not the mark for passen- 
ger's fingers to point at, an Heteroclite in nature, with 
some member defective or redundant. Be glad that thy 
clay cottage hath all the necessary forms thereto belong- 
ing, though the outside be not so fairly plaistered as some 
others." Fuller's Holy State, iii; c. 15. 

I asked him once if there was not a degree 
of ugliness which might be deemed unfor- 



tunate, because a consciousness of it affected 
the ill-favoured individual so as to excite in 
him discontent and envy, and other evil 
feelings. He admitted that in an evil dis- 
position it might have this tendency ; but 
he said a disposition which was injuriously 
affected by such a cause, would have had 
other propensities quite as injurious in them- 
selves and in their direction, evolved and 
brought into full action by an opposite cause. 
To exemplify this he instanced the two 
brothers Edward IV. and Richard III. 

Fidus Cornelius burst into tears in the 
Roman Senate, because Corbulo called him 
a plucked ostrich : Adversus alia maledicta 
mores etvitam convulnerantia, frontis Mi fir- 
mitas constitit ; adversus hoc tarn absurdum 
lacrimal prociderunt ; tarda animorum imbe- 
cillitas est libi ratio discessit. But instances 
of such weakness, the Doctor said, are as 
rare as they are ridiculous. Most people 
see themselves in the most favourable light. 
" Ugly ! " a very ugly, but a very conceited 
fellow, exclaimed one day when he con- 
templated himself in a looking-glass ; " ugly ! 
and yet there's something genteel in the 
face ! " There are more coxcombs in the 
world than there are vain women ; in the one 
sex there is a weakness for which time soon 
brings a certain cure, in the other it deserves 
a harsher appellation. 

As to ugliness, not only in this respect do 
we make large allowances for ourselves, but 
our friends make large allowances for us also. 
Some one praised Palisson to Madame de 
Sevigne for the elegance of his manners, the 
magnanimity, the rectitude, and other vir- 
tues which he ought to have possessed ; he 
bien, she replied, pour moi je ne connois que sa 
laideur ; qiion me le dedouble done. Wilkes, 
who pretended as little to beauty, as he did 
to public virtue, when he was off the stage 
used to say, that in winning the good graces 
of a lady there was not more than three 
days' difference between himself and the 
handsomest man in England. One of his 
female partisans praised him for his agree- 
able person, and being reminded of his 
squinting, she replied indignantly, that it 
was not more than a gentleman ought to 



472 



THE DOCTOR. 



squint. So rightly has Madame de Villedieu 

observed that 

En mille occasions V amour a sgeu prouver 
Que tout devientpour luy, matiere a sympathie, 
Quand ilfait tant que d'en vouloir trouver. 

She no doubt spoke sincerely, according to 
the light wherein, in the obliquity of her 
intellectual eyesight, she beheld him. Just 
as that prince of republican and unbelieving 
bigots, Thomas Holies, said of the same per- 
son, " I am sorry for the irregularities of 
Wilkes ; they are, however, only as spots in 
the sun ! " " It is the weakness of the 
many," says a once noted Journalist, " that 
when they have taken a fancy to a man, or 
to the name of a man, they take a fancy even 
to his failings." But there must have been 
no ordinary charm in the manners of John 
Wilkes, who in one interview overcame 
Johnson's well-founded and vehement dis- 
like. The good nature of his countenance, 
and its vivacity and cleverness, made its 
physical ugliness be overlooked ; and pro- 
bably his cast of the eye, which was a squint 
of the first water, seemed only a peculiarity 
which gave effect to the sallies of his wit. 

Hogarth's portrait of him he treated with 
characteristic good humour, and allowed it " to 
be an excellent compound caricature, or a ca- 
ricature of what Nature had already carica- 
tured. I know but one short apology, said he, 
to be made for this gentleman, or, to speak 
more properly, for the person of Mr. Wilkes ; 
it is, that he did not make himself; and that 
he never was solicitous about the case (as 
Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to keep 
it clean and in health. I never heard that 
he ever hung over the glassy stream, like 
another Narcissus, admiring the image in it ; 
nor that he ever stole an amorous look at 
his counterfeit in a side mirror. His form, 
such as it is, ought to give him no pain, 
while it is capable of giving so much plea- 
sure to others. I believe he finds himself 
tolerably happy in the clay cottage to which 
he is tenant for life, because he has learned 
to keep it in pretty good order. While the 
share of health and animal spirits which 
heaven has given out should hold out, I 
can scarcely imagine he will be one moment 



peevish about the outside of so precarious, 
so temporary a habitation ; or will ever be 
brought to our Ingenium Galbce male habi- 
tat : — Monsieur, est mal loge." This was 
part of a note for his intended edition of 
Churchill. 

Squinting, according to a French writer, 
is not unpleasing, when it is not in excess. 
He is probably right in this observation. 
A slight obliquity of vision sometimes gives 
an archness of expression, and always adds 
to the countenance a peculiarity, which, when 
the countenance has once become agreeable 
to the beholder, renders it more so. But 
when the eye-balls recede from each other 
to the outer verge of their orbits, or ap- 
proach so closely that nothing but the in- 
tervention of the nose seems to prevent their 
meeting, a sense of distortion is produced, 
and consequently of pain. II y a des gens, 
says Yigneul Marville, qui ne sauroient 
regarder des louches sans en sentir quelque 
douleur aux yeux. Je suis des ceux-la. This 
is because the deformity is catching, which 
it is well known to be in children ; the 
tendency to imitation is easily excited in a 
highly sensitive frame — as in them ; and 
the pain felt in the eyes gives warning that 
this action, which is safe only while it is un- 
conscious and unobserved, is in danger of 
being deranged. 

A cast of the eye a la Montmorency was 
much admired at the Court of Louis XIII., 
where the representative of that illustrious 
family had rendered it fashionable by his 
example. Descartes is said to have liked all 
persons who squinted for his nurse's sake, 
and the anecdote tells equally in favour of 
her and of him. 

St. Evremond says in writing the Eulogy 
of Turenne, Je ne mamuserai point a de- 
peindre tous les traits de son visage. Les 
caracteres des Grands Hommes n'ont rien de 
commun avec les portraits des belles femmes. 
Mais je puis dire en gros qiiil avoit quelque 
chose d'auguste et d'agreable ; quelque chose 
en sa physionomie qui faisoit concevoir je ne 
sai quoi de grand en son ame, et en son esprit. 
On pouvoit juger a le voir, que par un 
disposition particulierc la Nature V avoit pre- 



THE DOCTOR. 



473 



pare a f aire tout ce qitil a fait. If Turenne 
had not been an ill-looking man, the skilful 
eulogist would not thus have excused him- 
self from giving any description of his 
countenance ; a countenance from which 
indeed, if portraits belie it not, it might be 
inferred that nature had prepared him to 
change his party during the civil wars, as 
lightly as he would have changed his seat at 
a card-table, — to renounce the Protestant 
faith, and to ravage the Palatinate. Ne 
souvenez-vous pas de la physionomie funeste 
de ce grand homme, says Bussy Rabutin 
to Madame de Sevigne. An Italian bravo 
said, chenon teneva specchio in camera, perche 
quando si crucciava diveniva tanto terribile 
nelT aspetto, che veggendosi Jiaria fatto troppo 
gran paura a se stesso* 

Queen Elizabeth could not endure the 
sight of deformity ; when she went into 
public her guards, it is said, removed all 
misshapen and hideous persons out of her 
way. 

Extreme ugliness has once proved as ad- 
vantageous to its possessor as extreme 
beauty, if there be truth in those Triads 
wherein the Three Men are recorded who 
escaped from the battle of Camlan. They 
were Morvran ab Teged, in consequence of 
being so ugly, that every body thinking him 
to be a Demon out of Hell fled from him : 
Sandde Bryd-Angel, or Angel-aspect, in 
consequence of being so fine of form, so 
beautiful and fair, that no one raised a hand 
against him — for he was thought to be an 
Angel from Heaven : and Glewlwyd Ga- 
vaelvawr, or Great-grasp, (King Arthur's 
porter,) from his size and strength, so that 
none stood in his way, and every body ran 
before him ; excepting these three, none es- 
caped from Camlan, — that fatal field where 
King Arthur fell with all his chivalry. 

That painter of great but insane genius, 
William Blake, of whom Allan Cunningham 
has written so interesting a memoir, took 
this Triad for the subject of a picture, which 
he called the Ancient Britons. It was one 
of his worst pictures, — which is saying 



• II Coutegiano, 27. 



much ; and he has illustrated it with one of 
the most curious commentaries, in his very 
curious and very rare descriptive Catalogue 
of his own Pictures. 

It begins with a translation from the 
Welsh, supplied to him, no doubt, by that 
good simple-hearted, Welsh-headed man, 
William Owen, whose memory is the great 
store-house of all Cymric tradition and lore 
of every kind. 

" In the last battle of King Arthur only 
Three Britons escaped ; these were the 
Strongest Man, the Beautifullest Man, and 
the Ugliest Man. These Three marched 
through the field unsubdued as Gods ; and 
the Sun of Britain set, but shall arise again 
with tenfold splendour, when Arthur shall 
awake from sleep, and resume his dominion 
over earth and ocean. 

" The three general classes of men," says 
the painter, " who are represented by the 
most Beautiful, the most Strong, and the 
most Ugly, could not be represented by any 
historical facts but those of our own coun- 
trymen, the Ancient Britons, without violat- 
ing costumes. The Britons (say historians) 
were naked civilised men, learned, studious, 
abstruse in thought and contemplation ; 
naked, simple, plain in their acts and man- 
ners ; wiser than after ages. They were 
overwhelmed by brutal arms, all but a 
small remnant. Strength, Beauty, and 
Ugliness escaped the wreck, and remain for 
ever unsubdued, age after a^e. 

" The British Antiquities are now in the 
Artist's hands ; all his visionary contempla- 
tions relating to his own country and its 
ancient glory, when it was, as it again shall 
be, the source of learning and inspiration. 
He has in his hands poems of the highest 
antiquity. Adam was a Druid, and Noah. 
Also Abraham was called to succeed the 
Druidical age, which began to turn allegoric 
and mental signification into corporeal 
command ; whereby human sacrifice would 
have depopulated the earth. All these things 
are written in Eden. The artist is an in- 
habitant of that happy country ; and if 
everything goes on as it has begun, the 
work of vegetation and generation may 



474 



THE DOCTOR. 



expect to be opened again to Heaven, 
through Eden, as it was in the beginning. 

" The Strong Man represents the human 
sublime. The Beautiful Man represents the 
human pathetic, which was in the ban of 
Eden divided into male and female. The 
Ugly Man represents the human reason. 
They were originally one man, who was 
fourfold : he was self-divided and his real 
humanity drawn on the stems of generation : 
and the form of the fourth was like the Son 
of God. How he became divided is a sub- 
ject of great sublimity and pathos. The 
Artist has written it under inspiration, and 
will, if God please, publish it. It is volu- 
minous, and contains the ancient history of 
Britain, and the world of Satan and of 
Adam. 

" In the mean time he has painted this 
picture, which supposes that in the reign of 
that British Prince, who lived in the fifth 
century, there were remains of those naked 
heroes in the Welsh mountains. They are 
now. Gray saw them in the person of his 
Bard on Snowdon ; there they dwell in 
naked simplicity ; happy is he who can see 
and converse with them, above the shadows 
of generation and death. In this picture, 
believing with Milton the ancient British 
history, Mr. Blake has done as all the an- 
cients did, and as all the moderns who are 
worthy of fame, given the historical fact in 
its poetical vigour ; so as it always happens; 
and not in that dull way that some his- 
torians pretend, who being weakly organised 
themselves, cannot see either miracle or 
prodigy. All is to them a dull round of 
probabilities and possibilities ; but the his- 
tory of all times and places is nothing else 
but improbabilities and impossibilities, — 
what we should say was impossible, if we 
did not see it always before our eyes. 

" The antiquities of every nation under 
Heaven are no less sacred than those of the 
Jews ; they are the same thing, as Jacob 
Bryant and all antiquaries have proved. 
How other antiquities came to be neglected 
and disbelieved, while those of the Jews are 
collected and arranged, is an enquiry worthy 
of both the Antiquarian and the Divine. 



All had originally one language, and one 
religion. This was the religion of Jesus, the 
everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preached the 
Gospel of Jesus. The reasoning historian, 
turner and twister of courses and con- 
sequences, such as Hume, Gibbon, and 
Voltaire, cannot, with all their artifice, turn 
or twist one fact, or disarrange self-evident 
action and reality. Reasons and opinions 
concerning acts are not history. Acts them- 
selves alone are history, and they are neither 
the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon, 
and Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor 
Herodotus. Tell me the acts, O historian, 
and leave me to reason upon them as I 
please ; away with your reasoning and your 
rubbish. All that is not action is not worth 
reading. Tell me the What ; I do not want 
you to tell me the Why, and the How ; I can 
find that out myself, as well as you can, and 
I will not be fooled by you into opinions, 
that you please to impose, to disbelieve what 
you think improbable, or impossible. His 
opinion, who does not see spiritual agency, 
is not worth any man's reading; he who 
rejects a fact because it is improbable, must 
reject all History, and retain doubts only. 

" It has been said to the Artist, take the 
Apollo for the model of your beautiful man, 
and the Hercules for your strong man, and 
the Dancing Fawn for your ugly man. Now 
he comes to his trial. He knows that what 
he does is not inferior to the grandest an- 
tiques. Superior they cannot be, for human 
power cannot go beyond either what he 
does, or what they have done. It is the gift 
of God ; it is inspiration and vision. He had 
resolved to emulate those precious remains 
of antiquity. He has done so, and the 
result you behold. His ideas of strength 
and beauty have not been greatly different. 
Poetry as it exists now on earth in the 
various remains of ancient authors, Music 
as it exists in old tunes or melodies, Painting 
and Sculpture as it exists in the remains of 
antiquity and in the works of more modern 
genius, is Inspiration, and cannot be sur- 
passed ; it is perfect and eternal : Milton, 
Shakspeare, Michael Angelo, Rafael, the 
finest specimens of ancient Sculpture and 



THE DOCTOR. 



475 



Painting, and Architecture, Gothic, Grecian, 
Hindoo, and Egyptian are the extent of the 
human mind. The human mind cannot go 
beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. 
To suppose that Art can go beyond the 
finest specimens of Art that are now in the 
world, is not knowing what Art is ; it is 
being blind to the gifts of the Spirit. 

" It will be necessary for the Painter to 
say something concerning his ideas of Beauty, 
Strength, and Ugliness. 

"The beauty that is annexed and ap- 
pended to folly, is a lamentable accident and 
error of the mortal and perishing life ; it does 
but seldom happen ; but with this unnatural 
mixture the sublime Artist can have nothing 
to do ; it is fit for the burlesque. The 
beauty proper for sublime Art, is linea- 
ments, or forms and features that are capable 
of being the receptacle of intellect ; accord- 
ingly the Painter has given in his beautiful 
man, his own idea of intellectual Beauty. 
The face and limbs (?) that deviates or alters 
least, from infancy to old age, is the face 
and limbs (?) of greatest Beauty and Per- 
fection. 

" The Ugly likewise, when accompanied 
and annexed to imbecillity and disease, is a 
subject for burlesque and not for historical 
grandeur ; the artist has imagined the Ugly 
man ; one approaching to the beast in fea- 
tures and form, his forehead small, without 
frontals ; his nose high on the ridge, and 
narrow ; his chest and the stamina of his 
make, comparatively little, and his joints and 
his extremities large ; his eyes with scarce 
any whites, narrow and cunning, and every- 
thing tending toward what is truly ugly ; 
the incapability of intellect. 

" The Artist has considered his strong 
man as a receptacle of Wisdom, a sublime 
energizer ; his features and limbs do not 
spindle out into length, without strength, 
nor are they too large and unwieldy for his 
brain and bosom. Strength consists in ac- 
cumulation of power to the principal seat, 
and from thence a regular gradation and 
subordination ; strength in compactness, not 
extent nor bulk. 

" The strong man acts from conscious su- 



periority, and marches on in fearless de- 
pendence on the divine decrees, raging with 
the inspirations of a prophetic mind. The 
Beautiful man acts from duty, and anxious 
solicitude for the fates of those for whom he 
combats. The Ugly man acts from love of 
carnage, and delight in the savage barbari- 
ties of war, rushing with sportive precipita- 
tion into the very teeth of the affrighted 
enemy. 

" The Roman Soldiers rolled together in 
a heap before them : ' like the rolling thing 
before the whirlwind : ' each shew a differ- 
ent character, and a different expression of 
fear, or revenge, or ercvj, or blank horror, 
or amazement, or devout wonder and un- 
resisting awe. 

" The dead and the dying, Britons naked, 
mingled with armed Romans, strew the field 
beneath. Amongst these, the last of the 
Bards who were^apable of attending warlike 
deeds, is seen falling, outstretched among 
the dead and the dying ; singing to his harp 
in the pains of death. 

" Distant among the mountains are Druid 
Temples, similar to Stone Henge. The sun 
sets behind the mountains, bloody with the 
day of battle. 

" The flush of health in flesh, exposed to 
the open "air, nourished by the spirits of 
forests and floods, in that ancient happy 
period, which history has recorded, cannot 
be like the sickly daubs of Titian or Rubens. 
Where will the copier of nature, as it now 
is, find a civilized man, who has been accus- 
tomed to go naked ? Imagination only can 
furnish us with colouring appropriate, such 
as is found in the frescoes of Rafael and 
Michael Angelo : the disposition of forms 
always directs colouring in works of true art. 
As to a modern man, stripped from his load 
of clothing, he is like a dead corpse. Hence 
Rubens, Titian, Correggio, and all of that 
class, are like leather and chalk ; their men 
are like leather, and their women like chalk, 
for the disposition of their forms will not 
admit of grand colouring; in Mr. B.'s Britons, 
the blood is seen to circulate in their limbs ; 
he defies competition in colouring." 

My regard for thee, dear Reader, would 



476 



THE DOCTOR. 



not permit me to leave untranscribed this 
very curious and original piece of composi- 
tion. Probably thou hast never seen, and 
art never likely to see either the " Descrip- 
tive Catalogue " or the " Poetical Sketches" 
of this insane and erratic genius, I will 
therefore end the chapter with the Mad 
Song from the latter, — premising only 
Dificultosa provincia es la que emprendo, y a 
machos parecerd escusada ; mas para la ente- 
reza desta historia, ha parecido no omitir 
aquesta parte.* 

The wild winds weep, 

And the night is a-cold ; 
Come hither, Sleep, 

And my griefs unfold : 
But lo ! the morning peeps 

Over the eastern steep ; 
And the rustling birds of dawn 

The earth do scorn. 

Lo ! to the vault 

Of paved heaven, 
With sorrow fraught 

My notes are driven : 
They strike the ear of night, 

Make weep the eyes of day ; 
They make mad the roaring winds, 

And with tempests play. 

Like a fiend in a cloud 

With howling woe, 
After night I do croud 

And with night will go ; 
I turn my back to the east, 

From whence comforts have increas'd ; 
For light doth seize my brain 

With frantic pain. 



CHAPTER CLXXXII. 

AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE FORM OF THE 
HUMAN LEG SUGGESTED BY A PHYSICIAN. 
THE DOCTOR'S CURE OF A BROKEN SHIN 
AND INVENTION OF A SHIN-SHIELD. 

Eesfisci est, ubicunqiie nalat. Whatsoever swims upon 
any water, belongs to this exchequer. 

Jekkmy Tayloii. Preface to the Duct. Dub. 

Some Dr. Moreton is said to have advanced 
this extraordinary opinion in a treatise upon 
the beauty of the human structure, that had 
the calf of the leg been providentially set 

* LUIS MUNOZ, VlDA DEL F. L. DE GRANADA. 



before, instead of being preposterously placed 
behind, it would have been evidently better, 
for as much as the shin-bone could not then 
have been so easily broken. 

I have no better authority for this than a 
magazine extract. But there have been men 
of science silly enough to entertain opinions 
quite as absurd, and presumptuous enough 
to think themselves wiser than their Maker. 

Supposing the said Dr. Moreton has not 
been unfairly dealt with in this statement, it 
would have been a most appropriate reward 
for his sagacity, if some one of the thousand 
and one wonder-working Saints of the Pope's 
Calendar had reversed his own calves for 
him, placed them in front, conformably to 
his own notion of the fitness of things, and 
then left him to regulate their motions as 
well as he could. The Gastrocnemius and 
the Solceus would have found themselves in 
a new and curious relation to the Rectus 
femoris and the two Vasti, and the anato- 
mical reformer would have learned feelingly 
to understand the term of antagonising 
muscles in a manner peculiar to himself. 

The use to which this notable philosopher 
would have made the calf of the leg serve, 
reminds me of a circumstance that occurred 
in our friend's practice. An old man hard 
upon threescore and ten broke his shin one 
day by stumbling over a chair ; and although 
a hale person who seemed likely to attain a 
great age by virtue of a vigorous constitu- 
tion, which had never been impaired through 
ill habits or excesses of any kind, the hurt 
that had been thought little of at first became 
so serious in its consequences, that a morti- 
fication was feared. Daniel Dove was not 
one of those practitioners who would let a 
patient die under their superintendence 
secundum arte?n, rather than incur the risque 
of being censured for trying in desperate 
cases any method not in the regular course 
of practice : and recollecting what he had 
heard when a boy, that a man whose leg 
and life were in danger from just such an 
accident had been saved by applying yeast 
to the wound, he tried the application. The 
dangerous symptoms were presently re- 
moved by it ; a kindly process was induced, 



THE DOCTOR. 



the wound healed, and the man became whole 
again. 

Dove was then a young man ; and so 
many years have elapsed since old Joseph 
Todhunter was gathered to his fathers, that 
it would now require an antiquarian's 
patience to make out the letters of his name 
upon his mouldering headstone. All re- 
membrance of him (except among his de- 
scendants, if any there now be) will doubtless 
have passed away, unless he should be recol- 
lected in Doncaster by the means which Dr. 
Dove devised for securing him against an- 
other such accident. 

The Doctor knew that the same remedy 
was not to be relied on a second time, when 
there would be less ability left in the system 
: : sec Mid its effect. He knew that in old 
age the tendency of Xature is to dissolution, 
and that accidents which are trifling in 
youth, or middle age, become fatal at a time 
when Death is ready to enter at any breach, 
and Life to steal out through the first flaw 
in its poor crazy tenement. So, having 
warned Todhunter of this, and told him that 
he was likely to enjoy many years of life, if 
he kept a whole skin on his shins, he per- 
suaded him to wear spatterdashes, quilted 
in front and protected there with whalebone, 
charging him to look upon them as the most 
necessary part of his clothing, and to let 
them be the last things which he doffed at 
night, and the first which he donned in the 
morning. 

The old man followed this advice ; lived 
to the great age of eighty-five, enjoyed his 
faculties to the last : and then died so easily. 
that it might truly be said he fell asleep. 

My friend loved to talk of this case ; for 
Joseph Todhunter had borne so excellent a 
character through life, and was so cheerful 
and so happy, as well as so venerable an old 
man. that it was a satisfaction for the Doctor 
to think he had been the means of prolong- 
ing his days, 



CHAPTER CLXXXIII. 

VIEWS OP OLD AGE. MOXTAIGXE, DAXEEL 
CORXEIELE. LAXGTTET, PASQTJIEB, DR. JOHX- 
SOX. LOBD CHESTERELELD, ST. EVREMOXD. 

What is age 
But the holy place of life, the chapel of ease 
For all men's wearied miseries ? 

Massinger. 

Moxtaigxe takes an uncomfortable view of 
old age. H me semble, he says, qiteu la 
vieillesse, nos ames sont subjectes a des mala- 
dies et imperfections plus importunes qiien la 
jeunesse. Je le disois estantjeune, lors on me 
donnoit de mon menton par le nez ; je le dis 
encore a cette heure, que mon poil gris me 
donne le credit. Nous appellons sagesse la 
difficidtede noshumeurs, le desgoust des choses 
presentes : mais a la verite, nous ne quittons 
pas taut les vices, comme jious les changeons ,• 
et, a mon opinion, en pis. Outre une sotte et 
caduque fierte, un babil ennuyeux, ces hu- 
meures espineuses et inassociables, et la super- 
stition, et un soin ridicule des richesses, lors 
que T usage en est perdu, jy irouve plus denvie, 
a" injustice, et de malignite. Elle nous attache 
plus de rides en T esprit quau visage : et ne 
se void point oTames ou fort rares, qui en 
vieillissant ne sentent Vaigre, et le moisi. 

Take this extract, my worthy friends who 
are not skilled in French, or know no more 
of it than a Governess may have taught 
you, — in the English of John Florio, Reader 
of the Italian tongue unto the Sovereign 
Majesty of Anna, Queen of England, Scot- 
land. «Scc. and one of the gentlemen of her 
Royal privy chamber ; the same Florio whom 
some commentators, upon very insufficient 
grounds, have supposed to have been de- 
signed by Shakespeare in the Holofernes of 
Love's Labour's Lost. 

•• Methinks our souls in age are subject 
unto more importunate diseases and im- 
perfections than they are in youth. I said 
so being young, when my beardless chin was 
upbraided me, and I say it again, now that 
my gray beard gives me authority. We 
entitle wisdom, the frowardness of our hu- 
mours, and the distaste of present things ; 



478 



THE DOCTOR. 



but in truth we abandon not vices so much 
as we change them ; and in mine opinion 
for the worse. Besides a silly and ruinous 
pride, cumbersome tattle, wayward and un- 
sociable humours, superstition, and a ridi- 
culous carking for wealth, when the use of 
it is well nigh lost. I find the more envy, 
injustice, and malignity in it. It sets more 
wrinkles in our minds than in our foreheads ; 
nor are there any spirits, or very rare ones, 
which in growing old taste not sourly and 
niustily." 

In the same spirit, recollecting perhaps 
this very passage of the delightful old Gas- 
con, one of our own poets says, 

Old age doth give by too long space, 
Our souls as many wrinkles as our face ; 

and the same thing, no doubt in imitation of 
Montaigne, has been said by Corneille in a 
poem of thanks addressed to Louis XIV., 
when that King had ordered some of his 
plays to be represented during the winter 
of 1685, though he had ceased to be a popu- 
lar writer, 

Je vieillis, ou du mains, ils se le persuadent j 
Pour bien ecrire encorfai trop lung terns ecrit, 
Et les rides du front passent jusqu 1 a V esprit. 

The opinion proceeded not in the poet 
•Daniel from perverted philosophy, or sour- 
ness of natural disposition, for ail his affec- 
tions were kindly, and he was a tender- 
hearted, wise, good man. But he wrote this 
in the evening of his days, when he had 

out lived the date 
Of former grace, acceptance and delight ; 

when, 

those bright stars from whence 
He had his light, were set for evermore ; 

and when he complained that years had 
done to him 

this wrong, 
To make him write too much, and live too long ; 

so that this comfortless opinion may be 
ascribed in him rather to a dejected state 
of mind, than to a clear untroubled judg- 
ment. But Hubert Languet must have 
written more from observation and reflec- 
tion than from feeling, when he said, in one 
of his letters to Sir Philip Sidney, " you 
are mistaken if you believe that men are 



made better by age ; for it is very rarely 
so. They become indeed more cautious, 
and learn to conceal their faults and their 
evil inclinations ; so that if you have known 
any old man in whom you think some pro- 
bity were still remaining, be assured that 
he must have been excellently virtuous in 
his youth." Erras si credis homines fieri 
(State meliores ; id nam est rarissimum. Fi- 
unt quidem cautiores, et vitia animi, ac pravos 
suos qffectus occultare discunt : quod si quern 
senem novisti in quo aliquid probitatis supe- 
resse judices, crede eum in adolescentia fuisse 
optimum. 

Languet spoke of its effects upon others. 
Old Estienne Pasquier, in that uncomfort- 
able portion of his Jeux Poetiques which 
he entitles Vieillesse Rechignee, writes as a 
self- observer, and his picture is not more 
favourable. 

Je ne nourry dans moy qu'une humeur noire, 
Chagrin, fascheux, melancholic, hagard, 
Grongneux, despit, presomptueux, langard, 
Jefay V amour au bon vin et au boire. 

But the bottle seems not to have put him 
in good humour either with others or himself. 

Touie la monde me put ; je vy de telle sort, 
Queje nefay meshuy que tousser et cracker, 
Que defascher autruy, et d'autruy mejascher ; 

Je ne supporte nul, et nul ne me supporte. 

Un mal de corps je sens, un mal d'espritje porte ; 
Foible de corps je veux, maisje ne puis marcher ; 
Foible d 'esprit je n'oze a mon argent toucher, 

Voila les beaux effects que la vieillesse apporte / 
combicn est heureux celuy qui, de ses ans 
Jeune, ne passe point lafleur de son printans, 

Ou celuy qui venu s'en retourne aussi vite! 
Non : je m'abuze ; aincois ces maux ce sont appas 
Qui meferont unjour trouver doux mon trespas, 

Quand ilplaira a Dieu que ce ?nondeje quitte. 

The miserable life I lead is such, 

That now the world loathes me and I loathe it ; 

What do I do all day but cough and spit, 
Annoying others, and annoyed as much ! 
My limbs no longer serve me, and the wealth 

Which I have heap'd, I want the will to spend. 
So mind and body both are out of health, 

Behold the blessings that on age attend ! 
Happy whose fate is not to overlive 
The joys which youth, and only youth can give, 

But in his prims is taken, happy he ! 
Alas, that thought is of an erring heart, 
These evils make, me willing to depart 

When it shall please the Lord to summon me. 

The Ptustic, in Hammerlein's curious dia- 
logues de Nobilitate et Rusticitate, describes 
his old age in colours as dark as Pasquier' s : 
plenus dierum, he says, ymmo senex valde, id 



THE DOCTOK. 



479 



est, octogenarius, et senio confractus, et heri 
et nudiustercius, ymmo plerisque revolutionibus 
annorum temporibus, corporis statera recur- 
vatus, singulto, tussito, sterto, ossito, sternuto, 
balbutio, catharizo, mussico, paraleso, garga- 
riso, cretico, tremo, sudo, titillo, digitis scepe 
geliso, et insuper (quod deterius est) cor meum 
affligitur, et caput excutitur, languet spiritus, 
fetet anhelitus, caligant oculi et facillant* ar- 
ticuli, wires confiuurd, crines defiuunt, tremunt 
tactus et deperit actus, denies putrescunt et 
aures surdescunt ; de facili ad iram provocor, 
difficili revocor, cito credo, tarde discedo. 

The effects of age are described in lan- 
guage not less characteristic by the Conte 
Baldessar Castiglione in his Cortegiano. He 
is explaining wherefore the old man is always 
laudator temporis acti ; and thus he ac- 
counts for the universal propensity; — Gli 
anni fuggendo se ne portan seco molte com- 
rnoditd, e tra V altre levano dal sangue gran 
parte de gli spiriti vitali ; onde la complession 
si muta, e divengon debili gli organi, per i 
quali V aniina opera le sue virtu. Perb de i 
cori nostri in quel tempo, come alio autunno le 
fogli de gli arbori, caggiono i soavi fiori di 
contento ; e nel loco de i sereni et chiari pen- 
sieri, entra la nubilosa e turbida tristitia di 
mille calamitd compagnata, di modo che non 
solamente il corpo, ma V animo anchora e in- 
fermo ; ne de i passati piaceri reserva altro 
che una tenace memoria, e la imagine di quel 
caro tempo della tenera eta, nella quale quando 
ci troviamo, ci pare che sempre il cielo, e la 
terra, e ogni cosa faccia festa, e rida imtorno 
a gli occhi nostri e nel pensiero, come in un 
delitioso et vago giardino, jiorisca la dolce 
primavera d allegrezza : onde forse saria 
utile, quando gia nella fredda stagione comin- 
cia il sole della nostra vita, spogliandoci de 
quei piaceri, andarsene verso V occaso, per- 
dere insieme con essi anchor la lor memoria, 
e trovar (come disse Temistocle) uri arte, che 
a scordar insegnasse ; perche tanto sonofallaci 
i sensi del corpo nostro, che spesso ingannano 
anchora il giudicio della mente. Perb parmi 
che i vecchi siano alia condition di quelli, che 



* Facillant is here evidently the same as vacillant. 
For the real meaning of facillo the reader is referred to 
Du Cange in v. or to Martinius' Lexicon. 



partendosi dal porto, tengon gli occhi in ter- 
ra, e par loro che la nave stia ferma, e la 
riva si parta ; e pur e il contrario-, che il 
porto, e medesimamente il tempo, e i piaceri 
restano nel suo stato, e noi con la nave della 
mortalitd fuggendo n andiamo, V un dopo V 
altro, per quel procelloso mare che ogni cosa 
assorbe et devora ; ne mai piu pigliar terra 
ci e concesso ; anzi sempre da contrarii venti 
combattuti, al fine in qualche scoglio la nave 
rompemo. 

Take this passage, gentle reader, as Master 
Thomas Hoby has translated it to my hand. 

"Years wearing away carry also with 
them many commodities, and among others 
take away from the blood a great part of the 
lively spirits ; that altereth the complection, 
and the instruments wax feeble whereby the 
soul worketh his effects. Therefore the 
sweet flowers of delight vade * away in that 
season out of our hearts, as the leaves fall 
from the trees after harvest ; and instead of 
open and clear thoughts, there entereth 
cloudy and troublous heaviness, accompanied 
with a thousand heart griefs : so that not only 
the blood, but the mind is also feeble, neither 
of the former pleasures retaineth it any 
thing else but a fast memory, and the print 
of the beloved time of tender age, which 
when we have upon us, the heaven, the earth 
and each thing to our seeming rejoiceth 
and laugheth always about our eyes, and in 
thought (as in a savoury and pleasant gar- 
den) flourisheth the sweet spring time of 
mirth : So that, peradventure, it were not 
unprofitable when now, in the cold season, 
the sun of our life, taking away from us our 
delights,- beginneth to draw toward the West, 
to lose therewithal! the mindfulness of them, 
and to find out as Themistocles saith, an art 



t " Vade " is no doubt the true word here. The double 

sense of it, — that is, to fade, or to go away may be 

seen in Todd's Johnson and in Nares' Glossary. Neither 
of them quote the following- lines from the Earl of 
Surrey's Poems. They occur in his Ecclesiastes. 

We, that live on the earth, draw toward our decay, 

Our children fill our place awhile, and then they vade 
away. 
And again, 

New fancies daily spring, which vade, returning mo. 

Jewel commonly writes "vade." See vol. i. pp. 141. 
151. Ed. Jelf. 



4S0 



THE DOCTOR. 



to teach us to forget ; for the senses of our 
body are so deeeivable, that they beguile 
many times also the judgement of the mind. 
Therefore, methinks. old men be like unto 
them that sailing in a vessel out of an b 
behold the ground with their eyes, and the 
vessel to their seeming standeth still, and 
the shore goeth : and yet is it clean con- 
trary, for the haven, and likewise the time 
and pleasures, continue still in their estate. 
and we with the vessel of mortality flying 
away, go one after another through the tem- 
pestuous sea that swalloweth up and devour- 
eth all things, neither is it granted us at any 
time to come on shore again 5 but, always 
beaten with contrary winds, at the end we 
break our vessel at some rock." 

•■YThv Sir," said Dr. Johnson, {i a man 
grows better humoured as he grows older. 
He improves by experience. When young 
he thinks himself of great consequence, 
and every thing of importance. As he ad- 
vances in life, he learns to think himself 
of no consequence, and little things of little 
importance, and so he becomes more patient 
and better pleased," This was the obser- 
vation of a wise and good man. who felt 
in himself, as he grew old, the effect of Chris- 
tian principles upon a kind heart and a 
vigorous understanding. One of a very dif- 
ferent stamp came to the same conclusion 
before him ; Crescit estate pulcliritudo a 
ram. says Antonio Perez, quantum minuitur 
eorundem eo/\ . >stas. 

One more of these dark pictures. " The 
heart," says Lord Chesterfield, "never grows 
better by age ; I fear rather worse : aJ 
harder. A young liar will be an old one ; 
and a young knave will only be a greater 
knave as he grows older. But should a bad 
young heart, accompanied with a good head, 
(which by the way very seldom is the case) 
really reform, in a more advanced age, from 
a consciousness of its folly, as well as of its 
guilt, such a conversion would only be 
thought prudential and political, but never 
sincere." 

It is remarkable that Johnson, though, as 
has just been seen, he felt in himself and 
saw in other good men, that the natural 



j effect of time was to sear away asperities of 
I character, 

T:".l :h; 5m: ::':. tempe* ::" theii age should be 
Like the high leaTes upon the Holly Tree, 

yet he expressed an opinion closely agreeing 
with this of Lord Chesterfield. " A man," 
he said, i- commonly grew wicked as he grew 
cMs-r. at least Le but changed the vices of 
youth, head-strong passion and wild teme- 
rity, for treacherous caution and desire to 
encumvent." These he can only have meant 
of wicked men. But what follows seems to 
imply a mournful conviction that the ten- 
dency of society is to foster our evil propen- 
sities, and counteract our better ones ; '•• I am 
always." he said, ;- on the young people's side, 

. when there is a dispute between them and 
the old ones : for you have at least a charm 
for virtue, till age has withered its very 

j root." Alas, this is true of the irreligious 
and worldly minded, and it is generally true 
because they composed the majority of our 

; corrupt contemporaries. 

Bat Johnson knew that good men became 
I Jtter as they grew older, because his philo- 
sophy was that of the Gospel. Something 
of a philosopher Lord Chesterfield was, and 
Le lived in the days of Trajan or Ha- 

] drian, might have done honour to the school 
of Epicurus. But if he had not in the pride 

I of his poor philosophy, shut both h : s under- 
standing and hU L-s-art against the truths of 
revealed religion, in how different a light 
would the evening of his life have closed. 

Une ration essentielle. says the Epicurean 
Saint Evremond, qui nous oblige a nous re- 
tirer quand nous sommes vieux, cestquilfaut 
prevenir le ridicule ou Vage nous fait tomber 
presque toujours. And in another place he 
savs, certes le plus honnete-homme dont per- 
sunne ria besoin. a de la peine a s'exempter 
du ridicule en mefflissemt. This was the 
opinion of a courtier, a sensualist, and a 
Frenchman. 

I cannot more appositely conclude this 
chapter than by a quotation ascribed, whether 
truly or not, to St. Bernard. Maledictum 
caput canum et cor vamtm, caput tremulum et 
cor emulum. canities in vert ice et pemicies in 
mente : fades rugosa et lingua nugosa, cutis 



THE DOCTOR. 



481 



sicca et fides ficta ; visus caligans et caritas 
claudicans : labium pendens et dens detrahens ; 
virtus debilis et vita fiebilis ; dies uberes et 
fructus steriles, amici multi, et actus stulti. 



CHAPTER CLXXXIY. 

FURTHER OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING OLD 
AGE. BISHOP REYNOLDS. OPINION OF THE 
DOCTOR CONCERNING BEASTS AND MEN. 
M. DE CUSTINE. THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH 
WITH US. WORDSWORTH. SIR WALTER 
RALEIGH. 

In these reflections, which are of a serious, and some- 
what of a melancholy cast, it is best to indulge ; because 
it is always of use to be serious, and not unprofitable 
sometimes to be melancholy. Freeman's Sermons. 

" As usurers," says Bishop Reynolds, " be- 
fore the whole debt is paid, do fetch away 
some good parts of it for the loan, so before 
the debt of death be paid by the whole body, 
old age doth by little and little take away 
sometimes one sense, sometimes another; this 
year one limb, the next another ; and causeth 
a man as it were to die daily. No one can 
dispel the clouds and sorrows of old nge, but 
Christ, who is the sun of righteousness and 
the bright morning star." 

Yet our Lord and Saviour hath not left 
those who are in darkness and the shadow of 
death, without the light of a heavenly hope 
at their departure, if their ways have not 
wilfully been evil, — if they have done their 
duty according to that law of nature which 
is written in the heart of man. It is the 
pride of presumptuous wisdom (itself the 
worst of follies) that has robbed the natural 
man of his consolation in old age, and of his 
hope in death, and exacts the forfeit of that 
hope from the infidel as the consequence 
and punishment of his sin. Thus it was in 
heathen times, as it now is in countries that 
are called christian. When Cicero speaks 
of those things which depend upon opinion, 
he says, hujusmodi sunt probabilia ; impiis 
apud inferos pcenas esse prceparatas; eos, qui 
philosophies dent operam, non arbitrari Deos 
esse. Hence it appears he regarded it as 
equally probable that there was an account 



to be rendered after death ; and that those 
who professed philosophy would disbelieve 
this as a vulgar delusion, live therefore 
without religion, and die without hope, like 
the beasts that 'perish ! 

" If they perish," the Doctor used always 
reverently to say when he talked upon this 
subject. O Reader, it would have done 
you good as it has done me, if you had heard 
him speak upon it, in his own beautiful old 
age! "If they perish," he would say. 
" That the beasts die without hope we may 
conclude ; death being to them like falling 
asleep, an act of which the mind is not cogni- 
sant ! But that they live without religion, 
he would not say, — that they might not 
have some sense of it according to their 
kind ; nor that all things animate, and seem- 
ingly inanimate, did not actually praise the 
Lord, as they are called upon to do by the 
Psalmist, and in the JBenedicite ! " 

It is a pious fancy of the good old lexi- 
cographist Adam Littleton that our Lord 
took up his first lodging in a stable amongst 
the cattle, as if he had come to be the Saviour 
of them as well as of men ; being, by one 
perfect oblation of himself, to put an end to 
all other sacrifices, as well as to take away 
sins. This, he adds, the Psalmist fears not 
to affirm, speaking of God's mercy. " Thou 
savest," says he, " both man and beast." 

The text may lead us further than Adam 
Littleton's interpretation. 

Quon ne me parte plus de nature 
morte, says M. de Custine, in his youth and 
enthusiasm, writing from Mont-Auvert ; on 
sent ici que la Divmite est jmrtout, et que les 
pierressontpenetre.es comme nous-memes d'une 
puissance creatricel Quand on me dit que 
les rochers sont insensibles, je crois entendre 
un enfant soutenir que Vaigirille (Tune montre 
ne marche pas, parce qiiil ne la voit pas se 
mouvoir. 

Do not, said our Philosopher, when he 
threw out a thought like this, do not ask me 
how this can be ! I guess at everything, 
and can account for nothing. It is more 
comprehensible to me that stocks and stones 
should have a sense of devotion, than that 
men should be without it. I could much 



482 



THE DOCTOR. 



more easily persuade myself that the birds 
in the air and the beasts in the field have 
souls to be saved, than I can believe that 
very many of my fellow bipeds have any 
more soul than, as some of our divines have 
said, serves to keep their bodies from putre- 
faction. " God forgive me, worm that I am ! 
for the sinful thought of which I am too often 
conscious, — that of the greater part of the 
human race, the souls are not worth saving ! " 
— I have not forgotten the look which ac- 
companied these words, and the tone in 
which he uttered them, dropping his voice 
toward the close. 

" We must of necessity," said he, " become 
better or worse as we advance in years. 
Unless we endeavour to spiritualise our- 
selves, and supplicate iii this endeavour for 
that Grace which is never withheld when it 
is sincerely and earnestly sought, age bodilises 
us more and more, and the older we grow 
the more we are embruted and debased : so 
manifestly is the awful text verified which 
warns us that 'unto every one which hath 
shall be given, and from him that hath not, 
even that he hath shall be taken away from 
him.' In some the soul seems gradually to 
be absorbed and extinguished in its crust of 
clay ; in others as if it purified and sublimed 
the vehicle to which it was united. Viget 
animus, et gaudet non multum sibi esse cum 
corpore ; magnam oneris partem sui posuit* 
Nothing therefore is more beautiful than a 
wise and religious old age; nothing so pitiable 
as the latter stages of mortal existence — 
when the World and the Flesh, and that 
false philosophy which is of the Devil, have 
secured the victory for the Grave ! " 

" He that hath led a holy life," says one 
of our old Bishops, " is like a man which 
hath travelled over a beautiful valley, and 
being on the top of a hill, turneth about 
with delight, to take a view of it again." 
The retrospect is delightful, and perhaps it 
is even more grateful if his journey has been 
by a rough and difficult way. But whatever 
may have been his fortune on the road, the 
Pilgrim who has reached the Delectable 

* Seneca. 



Mountains looks back with thankfulness and 
forward with delight. 

And wherefore is it not always thus ? 
Wherefore, but because, as Wordsworth has 
said, 

The World is too much with us, late and soon 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 

" Though our own eyes," says Sir Walter 
Raleigh, " do every where behold the sudden 
and resistless assaults of Death, and Nature 
assureth us by never failing experience, and 
Reason by infallible demonstration, that our 
times upon the earth have neither certainty 
nor durability, that our bodies are but the 
anvils of pain and diseases, and our minds 
the hives of unnumbered cares, sorrows and 
passions ; and that when we are most glori- 
fied, we are but those painted posts against 
which Envy and Fortune direct their darts ; 
yet such is the true unhappiness of our con- 
dition, and the dark ignorance which covereth 
the eyes of our understanding, that we only 
prize, pamper, and exalt this vassal and 
slave of death, and forget altogether, or only 
remember at our cast- away leisure, the im- 
prisoned immortal Soul, which can neither 
die with the reprobate, nor perish with the 
mortal parts of virtuous men ; seeing God's 
justice in the one, and his goodness in the 
other, is exercised for evermore, as the ever- 
living subjects of his reward and punish- 
ment. But when is it that we examine this 
great account ? Never, while we have one 
vanity left us to spend ! We plead for titles 
till our breath fail us ; dig for riches whilst 
our strength enableth us; exercise malice 
while we can revenge ; and then when time 
hath beaten from us both youth, pleasure 
and health, and that Nature itself hateth the 
house of Old Age, we remember with Job 
that ' we must go the way from whence we 
shall not return, and that our bed is made 
ready for us in the dark.' And then I say, 
looking over-late into the bottom of our 
conscience, which Pleasure and Ambition 
had locked up from us all our lives, we be- 
hold therein the fearful images of our actions 
past, and withal this terrible inscription that 
' God will bring every work into judgement 
that man hath done under the Sun.' 



THE DOCTOR. 



483 



" But what examples have ever moved 
us ? what persuasions reformed us ? or what 
threatenings made us afraid? We behold 
other men's tragedies played before us ; we 
hear what is promised and threatened ; but 
the world's bright glory hath put out the 
eyes of our minds ; and these betraying 
lights, with which we only see, do neither 
look up towards termless joys, nor down 
towards endless sorrows, till we neither 
know, nor can look for anything else at the 
world's hands. — But let us not flatter our 
immortal Souls herein ! For to neglect God 
all our lives, and know that we neglect Him ; 
to offend God voluntarily, and know that we 
offend Him, casting our hopes on the peace 
which we trust to make at parting, is no 
other than a rebellious presumption, and 
that which is the worst of all, even a con- 
temptuous laughing to scorn and deriding 
of God, his laws and precepts. Frustrd 
sperant qui sic de misericordid Dei sibi blan- 
diuntur ; they hope in vain, saith Bernard, 
which in this sort flatter themselves with 
God's mercy." 



CHAPTER CLXXXV. 

EVOLVEMENTS. ANALOGIES. ANTICIPATIONS. 

I have heard, how true 
I know not, most physicians as they grow 
Greater in skill, grow less in their religion; 
Attributing so much to natural causes, 
That they have little faith in that they cannot 
Deliver reason for : this Doctor steers 
Another course. Massinger. 

I forget what poet it is, who, speaking of 
old age, says that 

The Soul's dark mansion, battered and decayed, 
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made ; 

a strange conceit, imputing to the decay of 
our nature that which results from its ma- 
turation. * 

As the ancients found in the butterfly a 



There is more true philosophy in what Wordsworth 

— " The wiser mind 
Mourns less for what age takes away, 
Than what it leaves behind." 

The Fountain. 



beautiful emblem of the immortality of the 
Soul, my true philosopher and friend looked, 
in like manner, upon the chrysalis as a type 
of old age. The gradual impairment of the 
senses and of the bodily powers, and the 
diminution of the whole frame as it shrinks 
and contracts itself in age, afforded analogy 
enough for a mind like his to work on, which 
quickly apprehended remote similitudes 
and delighted in remarking them. The 
sense of flying in our sleep might probably, 
he thought, be the anticipation or forefeeling 
of an unevolved power, like an aurelia's 
dream of butterfly motion. 

The tadpole has no intermediate state of 
torpor. This merriest of all creatures, if 
mirth may be measured by motion, puts out 
legs before it discards its tail and commences 
frog. It was not in our outward frame that 
the Doctor could discern any resemblance 
to this process ; but he found it in that ex- 
pansion of the intellectual faculties, those 
aspirations of the spiritual part, wherein the 
Soul seems to feel its wings and to imp 
them for future flight. 

One has always something for which to 
look forward, some change for the better. 
The boy in petticoats longs to be dressed in 
the masculine gender. Little boys wish to 
be big ones. In youth we are eager to 
attain manhood, and in manhood matrimony 
becomes the next natural step of our desires* 
" Days then should speak, and multitude of 
years should teach wisdom ; " and teach it 
they will, if man will but learn ; for nature 
brings the heart into a state for receiving it. 

Jucnndissima est ceta.s devexa jam, non 
tamen pr&ceps ; et Mam quoque in extremd 
reguld staiitem, judico habere suas voluptates ; 
aut hoc ipsum succedit in locum voluptatum, 
nullis egere. Quam didce est cupiditatcs 
fatigasse ac reliquisse /f This was not Dr. 
Dove's philosophy : he thought the stage of 
senescence a happy one, not because we out- 
grow the desires and enjoyments of youth 
and manhood, but because wiser desires, 
more permanent enjoyments, and holier hopes 
succeed to them, — because time in its course 



t Seneca. 



484 



THE DOCTOR. 



brings us nearer to eternity, and as earth 
recedes Heaven opens upon our prospect. 

" It is the will of God and nature," says 
Franklin, " that these mortal bodies be laid 
aside, when the soul is to enter into real life. 
This is rather an embryo state, a preparation 
for living. A man is not completely born 
until he be dead. Why, then, should we 
grieve that a new child is born among the 
immortals, a new member added to their 
happy society ? We are spirits. That 
bodies should be lent us, while they can 
afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring 
knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow - 
creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of 
God. When they become unfit for these 
purposes, and afford us pain instead of 
pleasure, instead of an aid become an 
encumbrance, and answer none of the in- 
tentions for which they were given, it is 
equally kind and benevolent, that a way is 
provided by which we may get rid of them. 
Death is that way." 

" God," says Fuller, " sends his servants 
to bed when they have done their work." 

This is a subject upon which even Sir 
Richard Blackmore could write with a poet's 
feeling. 

Thou dost, O Death, a peaceful harbour lie 
Upon the margin of Eternity ; 
Where the rough waves of Time's impetuous tide 
Their motion lose, and quietly subside : 
Weary, they roll their drousy heads asleep 
At the dark entrance of Duration's deep. 
Hither our vessels in their turn retreat ; 
Here still they find a safe untroubled seat, 
When worn with adverse passions, furious strife, 
And the hard passage of tempestuous life. 

Thou dost to man unfeigned compassion show, 

Soothe all his grief, and solace all his woe. 

Thy spiceries with noble drugs abound, 

That every sickness cure and every wound. 

That which anoints the corpse will only prove 

The sovereign balm our anguish to remove. 

The cooling draught administered by thee, 

O Death ! from all our sufferings sets us free. 

Impetuous life is by thy force subdued, 

Life, the most lasting fever of the blood. 

The weary in thy arms lie down to rest, 

No more with breath's laborious task opprest. 

Hear, how the men that long life-ridden lie, 

In constant pain, for thy assistance cry, 

Hear how they beg and pray for leave to die. 

For vagabonds that o'er the country roam, 

Forlorn, unpitied and without a home, 

Thy friendly care provides a lodging-room. 

The comfortless, the naked, and the poor, 

Much pinch'd with cold, with grievous hunger more, 



Thy subterranean hospitals receive, 
Assuage their anguish and their wants relieve. 
Cripples with aches and with age opprest, 
Crawl on their crutches to the Grave for rest. 
Exhausted travellers that have undergone 
The scorching heats of life's intemperate zone, 
Haste for refreshment to their beds beneath, 
And stretch themselves in the cool shades of death. 
Poor labourers who their daily task repeat, 
Tired with their still returning toil and sweat, 
Lie down at last ; and at the wish'd for close 
Of life's long day, enjoy a sweet repose. 

Thy realms, indulgent Death, have still possest 
Profound tranquillity and unmolested rest. 
No raging tempests, which the living dread, 
Beat on the silent regions of the dead: 
Proud Princes ne'er excite with war's alarms 
Thy subterranean colonies to arms. 
They undisturbed their peaceful mansions keep, 
And earthquakes only rock them in their sleep. 

Much has been omitted which may be 
found in the original, and one couplet re- 
moved from its place ; but the whole is 
Blackmore's. 



CHAPTER CLXXXVI. 

LEONE HEBREO'S DIALOGI DE AMORE. THE 
ELIXIR OE LIFE NO OBSTACLE TO DEATH. 
PARACELSUS. VAN HELMONT AND JAN 
MASS. DR. DOVE'S OPINION OF A BIO- 
GRAPHER'S DUTIES. 

There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors ! 

Old Fortunatus. 

In Leone Hebreo's Dialogi de Amore, one 
of the interlocutors says, Vediamo che gli 
hnomini naturalmente desiano di mai non 
morire ; laqual cosa e impossibile, manifesto, 
e senza speranza. To which the other 
replies, Coloro chel desiano, non credeno 
interamente che sia impossibile, et hanno 
inteso per le historie legali, che Enoc, et Elia, 
et ancor Santo Giovanni Evangelista sono 
immortali in corpo, et anima : se ben veggono 
essere stato per miracolo : onde ciascuno pensa 
che a loro Dio potriafare simil miracolo. E 
perb con questa possibilita si gionta qualche 
remota speranza, laquale incita un lento de- 
siderio, massimamente per essere la morte 
horribile, e la corruttione propria odiosa a chi 
si vuole, et il desiderio non e d' acquistare cosa 
nuova, ma di non perdere la vita, che si truova; 
laquale havendosi di presente, e facil cosa 
insrannarsi V huomo a desiare che non si 



THE DOCTOR. 



485 



perda ; se ben naturalmente e impossibile : 
chel desiderio di cib e talmente lento, che pub 
essere di cosa impossibile et imaginabile, 
essendo di tanta importantia al desiderante. 
Et ancora ti dirb chel fondamento di questo 
desiderio non e vano in se, se bene e alquanto 
ingannoso, perb chel desiderio delV huomo 
d 1 essere immortale e veramente possibile ; 
perche P esentia delV huomo, (come rettamente 
Platon vuole,~) non e altro che la sua anima 
intellettiva, laquale per la virtu, sapientia, 
cognitione, et amore divino si fa gloriosa et 
immortale. 

Paracelsus used to boast that lie would 
not die till he thought proper so to do ; thus 
wishing it to be understood that he had 
discovered the Elixir of life. He died sud- 
denly, and at a time when he seemed to be 
in full health ; and hence arose a report, 
that he had made a compact with the Devil, 
who enabled him to perform all his cures, 
but came for him as soon as the term of 
their agreement was up. 

Wherefore indeed should he have died by 
any natural means who so well understood 
the mysteries of life and of death ? What, 
says he, is life ? Nihil mehercle vita est aliud, 
nisi Mumia qucedam Balsamita conservans 
mortale corpus a mortalibus vermibus, et 
eschara cum impressa liquoris solium com- 
misturd. What is Death ? Nihil certe aliud 
quam Salsami dominium, Mumia interiius, 
solium ultima materia. Do you understand 
this, Reader? If you do, I do not. 

But he is intelligible when he tells us 
that Life may be likened to Fire, and that 
all we want is to discover the fuel for keep- 
ing it up, — the true Lignum Vitas. " It is 
not against nature," he contends, " that we 
should live till the renovation of all things ; 
it is only against our knowledge, and beyond 
it. But there are medicaments for pro- 
longing life ; and none but the foolish or the 
ignorant would ask why then is it that 
Princes andKings who can afford to purchase 
them, die nevertheless like other people." 
" The reason," says the great Bombast 
von Hohenheim, " is, that their physicians 
know less about medicine than the very 
boors, and moreover that Princes and Kings 



lead dissolute lives." And if it be asked why 
no one, except Hermes Trismegistus, has used 
such medicaments; he replies that others 
have used them, but have not let it be known. 
Yan Helmont was once of opinion that no 
metallic preparation could contain in itself 
the blessing of the Tree of Life, though that 
the Philosopher's stone had been discovered 
was a fact that consisted with his own sure 
knowledge. This opinion, however, was in 
part changed, in consequence of some ex- 
periments made with an aurific powder, 
given him by a stranger after a single 
evening's acquaintance ; (vir peregrinus, 
unius vesperi amicus :) these experiments 
convinced him that the stone partook of 
what he calls Zoophyte life, as distinguished 
both from vegetative and sensitive. But 
the true secret, he thought, must be derived 
from the vegetable world, and he sought for 
it in the Cedar, induced, as it seems, by the 
frequent mention of that tree in the Old 
Testament. He says much concerning the 
cedar, — among other things, that when all 
other plants were destroyed by the Deluge, 
and their kinds preserved only in their seed, 
the Cedars of Lebanon remained uninjured 
under the waters. However, when he comes 
to the main point, he makes a full stop, 
saying, Ccetera autem quce de Cedro sunt 
mecum sepelientur : nam mundus non capax 
est. It is not unlikely that if his mysticism 
had been expressed in the language of in- 
telligible speculation, it might have been 
found to accord with some of Berkeley's 
theories in the Siris. But for his reticence 
upon this subject, as if the world were not 
worthy of his discoveries, he ought to have 
been deprived of his two remaining talents. 
Five, he tells us, he had received for his 
portion, but because instead of improving 
them he had shown himself unworthy of so 
large a trust, he by whom they were given 
had taken from him three. Ago Mi g?*atias, 
quod cum conhdisset in me quinque talenta, 
fecissemque me indignum, et hactenus repudium 
coram eo f actus essem, placuit divince bonitati, 
auferre a me tria, et relinquere adhuc bina, ut 
me sic ad meliorem frugem exspectaret. Ma- 
luit, inquam, me depauperare et tolerare, ut 



486 



THE DOCTOR. 



non essem utilis plurimis, modb me salvaret ah 
hujus mundi periculis. Sit ipsi ceterna sancti- 
jicatio. 

He has, however, informed posterity of the 
means by which he prolonged the life of a 
man to extreme old age. This person, whose 
name was Jan Mass, was in the service of 
Martin Ry thovius, the first Bishop of Ypres, 
when that prelate, by desire of the illustrious 
sufferers, assisted at the execution of Counts 
Egmond and Horn. Mass was then in the 
twenty-fifth year of his age. When he was 
fifty- eight, being poor, and having a large 
family of young children, he came to Van 
Helmont, and entreated him to prolong his 
life if he could, for the sake of these children, 
who would be left destitute in case of his 
death, and must have to beg their bread 
from door to door. Van Helmont, then a 
young man, was moved by such an applica- 
tion, and considering what might be the 
likeliest means of sustaining life in its decay, 
he called to mind the fact that wine is pre- 
served from corruption by the fumes of 
burnt brimstone; it then occurred to him 
that the acid liquor of sulphur, acidum 
sulfuris stagma, (it is better so to translate 
his words than to call it the sulphuric acid,) 
must of necessity contain the fumes and 
odour of sulphur, being, according to his 
chemistry, nothing but those fumes of 
sulphur, combined with, or imbibed in, its 
mercurial salt. The next step in his reason- 
ing was to regard the blood as the wine of 
life ; if this could be kept sound, though 
longevity might not be the necessary con- 
sequence, life would at least be preserved 
from the many maladies which arose from 
its corruption, and the sanity, and immunity 
from such diseases, and from the sufferings 
consequent thereon, must certainly tend to 
its prolongation. He gave Mass therefore a 
stone bottle of the distilled liquor of sulphur, 
and taught him also how to prepare this oil 
from burnt sulphur. And he ordered him 
at every meal to take two drops of it in his 
first draught of beer ; and not lightly to 
exceed that ; two drops, he thought, con- 
tained enough of the fumes for a sufficient 
dose. This was in the year 1G00 ; and now, 



says Helmont, in 1641, the old man still 
walks about the streets of Brussels. And 
what is still better, (quodque augustius est,) 
in all these forty years, he has never been 
confined by any illness, except that by a fall 
upon the ice he once broke his leg near the 
knee ; and he has constantly been free from 
fever, remaining a slender and lean man, and 
always poor. 

Jan Mass had nearly reached his hundredth 
year when this was written, and it is no 
wonder that Van Helmont, who upon a 
fantastic analogy had really prescribed an 
efficient tonic, should have accounted, by the 
virtue of his prescription, for the health and 
vigour which a strong constitution had 
retained to that extraordinary age. There 
is no reason for doubting the truth of his 
statement ; but if Van Helmont relied upon 
his theory he must have made further ex- 
periments ; it is probable therefore that he 
either distrusted his own hypothesis, or 
found, upon subsequent trials, that the 
result disappointed him. 

Van Helmont's works were collected and 
edited by his son Francis Mercurius, who 
styles himself Philosophies per TJnum in quo 
Omnia Eremita peregrinans, and who de- 
dicated the collection as a holocaust to the 
ineffable Hebrew Name. The Vita Authoris 
which he prefixed to it relates to his own 
life, not to his father's, and little can be 
learned from it, except that he is the more 
mystical and least intelligible of the two. 
The most curious circumstances concerning 
the father are what he has himself com- 
municated in the treatise entitled his Con- 
fession, into which the writer of his life in 
Aikin's Biograrjhy seems not to have looked, 
nor indeed into any of his works, the articles 
in that as in our other Biographies, being 
generally compiled from compilations, so as 
to present the most superficial information, 
with the least possible trouble to the writer, 
and the least possible profit to the reader, — 
skimming for him not the cream of know- 
ledge but the scum. 

Dr. Dove used to say that whoever wrote 
the life of an author without carefully pe- 
rusing bis works acted as iniquitously as a 



THE DOCTOR. 



487 



Judge who should pronounce sentence in a 
cause without hearing the evidence ; nay, he 
maintained, the case was even worse, because 
there was an even chance that the Judge 
might deliver a right sentence ; but it was 
impossible that a life so composed should be 
otherwise than grievously imperfect, if not 
grossly erroneous. For all the ordinary 
business of the medical profession he thought 
it sufficient that a practitioner should tho- 
roughly understand the practice of his art, 
and proceed empirically : God help the 
patients, he would say, if it were not so ! and 
indeed without God's help they would fare 
badly at the best. But he was of opinion 
that no one could take a lively and at the 
same time a worthy interest in any art or 
science without as it were identifying himself 
with it, and seeking to make himself well 
acquainted with its history : a Physician 
therefore, according to his way of thinking, 
ought to be as curious concerning the 
writings of his more eminent predecessors, 
and as well read in the most illustrious of 
them, as a general in the wars of Hannibal, 
Caesar, the Black Prince, the Prince of 
Parma, Gustavus Adolphus, and Marl- 
borough. How carefully he had perused 
Van Helmont was shown by the little land- 
marks whereby, after an interval of — alas 
how many years, — I have followed him 
through the volume, — haud passibas cequis. 



CHAPTER CLXXXVII. 

VAN HELMONT'S WORKS, AND CERTAIN 
SPECIALITIES IN HIS LIFE. 

Voild, men conte. — Je ne sgai/ s'il est way ; niai's, je 

Vaij ainsi ouy conter Possible que cela est faux, possible 

que mm. — Je m'en rapporte a ce qui en est. II ne sera 
pas damne qui le croira, ou decroira. Brantome. 

" The works of Van Helmont," Dr. Aikin 
says, " are now only consulted as curiosities ; 
but with much error and jargon, they con- 
tain many shrewd remarks, and curious spe- 
culations." 

How little would any reader suppose 
from this account of them, or indeed from 



anything which Dr. Aikin has said concern- 
ing this once celebrated person, that Van 
Helmont might as fitly be classed among 
enthusiasts as among physicians, and with 
philosophers as with either; and that, like 
most enthusiasts, it is sometimes not easy to 
determine whether he was deceived himself, 
or intended to deceive others. 

He was born at Brussels in the year 1577, 
and of noble family. In his Treatise entitled 
Tumulus Pestis (to which strange title a 
stranger* explanation is annexed) he gives 
a sketch of his own history, saying, imite- 
mini, si quid forte boni in ed occurrerit. He 
was a devourer of books, and digested into 
common places for his own use whatever he 
thought most remarkable in them, so that 
few exceeded him in diligence, but most, he 
says, in judgment. At the age of seventeen 
he was appointed by the Professors Thomas 
Fyenus, Gerard de Velleers, and Stornius, to 
read surgical lectures in the Medical College 
at Louvain. Eheu^ he exclaims, prcesumsi 
docere, qua ipse nescieoam! and his pre- 
sumption was increased because the Pro- 
fessors of their own accord appointed him to 
this Lectureship, attended to hear him, and 
were the Censors of what he delivered. The 
writers from whom he compiled his dis- 
courses were Holerius, Tagaultius, Guido, 
Vigo, JEgineta, and "the whole tribe of 
Arabian authors." But then he began, and 
in good time, to marvel at his own temerity 
and inconsiderateness in thinking that by 
mere reading he could be qualified to teach 
what could be learned only by seeing, and by 
operating, and by long practice, and by care- 
ful observation : and this distrust in himself 
was increased, when he discovered that the 



* Lector, titulusquemlegis,terrorlugubris, foribusaffixus, 

intus mortem, mortis genus, et hominum 

nunciat flagrum. Sta, et inquire, quid hoc ? 

Mirare. Quid sibi vult 

Tumuli Epigraphe Pestis ? 

Sub anatome abii, non obii ; quamdiu malesuada invidia 

Momi, ct hominum ignara cupido, 

me fovebunt. 

Ergo heic 

Non funus, non cadaver, non mors, non sceleton, 

non luctus, non contagium. 

iETERNO DA GLOItlAM 

Quod Pestis jam desiit, sub Anaton.es proprio supplicio. 



488 



THE DOCTOR. 



Professors could 2;ive him no further lisht 
than books had done. However, at the age 
of twenty-two he was created Doctor of 
Medicine in the same University. 

Very soon he began to repent that he, 
who was by birth noble, should have been 
the first of his family to choose the medical 
profession, and this against the will of his 
mother, and without the knowledge of his 
other relations. " I lamented," he says, 
'■ with tears the sin of my disobedience, and 
regretted the time and labour which had 
been thus vainly expended : and often with a 
sorrowful heart I intreated the Lord that he 
would be pleased to lead me to a vocation 
not of my own choice, but in which I might 
best perform his will ; and I made a vow 
that to whatever way of life he might call 
me I would follow it, and do my utmost en- 
deavour therein to serve him. Then, as if I 
had tasted of the forbidden fruit, I dis- 
covered my own nakedness. I saw that there 
was neither truth nor knowledge in my 
putative learning ; and thought it cruel to 
derive money from the sufferings of others ; 
and unfitting that an art, founded upon 
charity, and conferred upon the condition of 
exercising compassion, should be converted 
into a means of lucre." 

These reflections were promoted if not 
induced by his having caught a disorder 
which, as it is not mentionable in polite circles, 
may be described by intimating that the 
symptom from which it derives its name is 
alleviated by what Johnson defines tearing 
or rubbing with the nails. It was commu- 
nicated to him by a young lady's glove, into 
which, in an evil minute of sportive gallantly, 
he had insinuated his hand. The physicians 
treated him, secundum artem, in entire igno- 
rance of the disease ; they bled him to cool 
the liver, and they purged him to carry off 
the torrid choler and the salt phlegm ; they 
repeated this clearance again and again, till 
from a hale strong and active man they had 
reduced him to extreme leanness and debi- 
lity without in the slightest degree abating 
the cutaneous disease. He then persuaded 
himself that the humours which the Gale- 
nista were so triumphantly expelling from 



his poor carcase had not pre-existed there 
in that state, but were produced by the action 
of their drugs. Some one cured him easily 
by brimstone, and this is said to have made 
him feelingly perceive the inefficiency of the 
scholastic practice which he had hitherto 
pursued. 

In this state of mind he made over his in- 
heritance to a widowed sister, who stood in 
need of it, gave up his profession, and left 
his own country with an intention of never 
returning to it. The world was all before 
him, and he began his travels with as little 
fore-knowledge whither he was going, and 
as little fore-thought of what he should do, 
as Adam himself when the gate of Paradise . 
was closed upon him ; but he went with the 
hope that God would direct his course by 
His good pleasure to some good end. It so 
happened that he who had renounced the 
profession of medicine, as founded on delu- 
sion and imposture, was thrown into the way 
of practising it, by falling in company with 
a man who had no learning, but who un- 
derstood the practical part of chemistry, or 
pyrotechny, as he calls it. The new world 
which Columbus discovered did not open a 
wider or more alluring field to ambition and 
rapacity than this science presented to Yan 
Helmont's enthusiastic and inquiring mind. 
" Then," says he, " when by means of fire I 
beheld the penet?*ale, the inward or secret 
part of certain bodies, I comprehended the 
separations of many, which were not then 
taught in books, and some of which are still 
unknown." He pursued his experiments 
with increasing ardour, and in the course of 
two years acquired such reputation by the 
cures which he performed, that because of 
his reputation he was sent for by the Elector 
of Cologne. Then indeed he became more 
ashamed of his late and learned ignorance, 
and renouncing all books because they sung 
only the same cuckoo note, perceived that 
he profited more by fire, and by conceptions 
acquired in praying. "And then," says 
he, " I clearly knew that I had missed the 
entrance of true philosophy. On all sides 
obstacles and obscurities and difficulties ap- 
peared, which neither labour, nor time, nor 



THE DOCTOR. 



489 



vigils, nor expenditure of money could over- 
come and disperse, but only the mere good- 
ness of God. Neither women nor social 
meetings deprived me then of even a single 
hour, but continual labour and watching 
were the thieves of my time ; for I willingly 
cured the poor and those of mean estate, 
being more moved by human compassion, 
and a moral love of giving, than by pure 
universal charity reflected in the Fountain 
of Life." 



ESTERCHAPTER XX. 

ST. PAXTAT.EQy OP > T ICOMEDIA IN BITHY1SIA 

HIS HISTORY, AXD SOME FCBTHEE PAB- 

TICULABS SOT TO BE FOTJXD EESEWHEBE. 

Ko-n dicea le cose senza il quia ; 
Che il dritto distingueva dal mancino, 
E dicea pane al pane, e vino al vino. 

Bertoldo, 

This Interchapter is dedicated to St. Panta- 
leon, of Xicomedia in Bithynia, student in 
medicine and practitioner in miracles, whose 
martyrdom is commemorated by the Church 
of Rome on the 27th of July. 

SAHCTB PANTALEOy, ORA PRO NOBIS ! 

This I say to be on. the safe side ; though 
between ourselves, reader, Xicephorus, and 
Usuardus, and Yincentius, and St. Antoninus 
(notwithstanding his sanctity) have written 
so many lies concerning him, that it is very 
doubtful whether there ever was such a per- 
son, and still more doubtful whether there 
be such a Saint. However the body which 
is venerated under his name is just as vene- 
rable as if it had really belonged to him, and 
works miracles as well. 

It is a tradition in Corsica that when St. 
Pantaleon was beheaded the executioners 
sword was converted into a wax taper, and 
the weapons of all his attendants into snuners, 
and that the head rose from the block and 
sung. In honour of this miracle the Corsi- 
cans, as late as the year 1775, used to have 
their swords consecrated, or charmed, — by 
laying them on the altar while a mass was 
performed to St. Pantaleon. 



But what have I, who am writing in Janu- 
ary instead of July, and who am no papist, 
and who have the happiness of living in a 
protestant country, and was baptized more- 
over by a right old English name, — what 
have I to do with St. Pantaleon ? Simply this, 
— my new pantaloons are just come home, 
and that they derive their name from the 
aforesaid Saint is as certain, — as that it 
was high time I should have a new pair. 

St. Pantaleon, though the tutelary Saint 
of Oporto, (which city boasteth of his relics,) 
was in more especial fashion at Yenice : and 
so many of the grave Yenetians were in 
consequence named after him, that the other 
Italians called them generally Pantaloni in 
derision, — as an Irishman is called Pat, 
and as Sawney is with us synonymous with 
Scotchman, or Taffy for a son of Cadwallader 
and votary of St. David and his leek. Xow 
the Yenetians wore long small clothes ; these 
as being the national dress were called Pan- 
taloni also ; and when the trunk-hose of 
Elizabeth's days went out of fashion, we re- 
ceived them from France, with the name of 
pantaloons. 

Pantaloons then, as of Yenetian and Mag- 
nifico parentage, and under the patronage of 
an eminent Saint, are doubtless an honour- 
able garb. They are also of honourable 
extraction, being clearly of the Braecas 
family. For it is this part of our dress by 
which we are more particularly distinguished 
from the Oriental and inferior nations, and 
also from the abominable Romans, whom 
our ancestors, Heaven be praised ! subdued. 
Under the miserable reign of Honorius and 
Arcadius, these Lords of the World thought 
proper to expel the Bracearii, or breeches- 
makers, from their capitals, and to prohibit 
the use of this garment, thinking it a thing 
unworthy that the Romans should wear the 
habit of Barbarians : — and truly it was not 
fit that so effeminate a race should wear the 
breeches. 

The Pantaloons are of this good Gothic 

family. The fashion having been disused 

for more than a century was re-introduced 

I some five and twenty years ago. and still 

| prevails so much — that I who like to go 



490 



THE DOCTOR. 



■with the stream, and am therefore content 
to hare fashions thrust upon me, have just 
received a new pair from London. 

The coming of a box from the Great City 
is an event which is always looked to by the 
juveniles of this family with some degree of 
impatience. In the present case there was 
especial cause for such joyful expectation : 
for the package was to contain no less a trea- 
sure than the story of the Lioness and the 
Exeter Mail, with appropriate engravings 
representing the whole of that remarkable 
history, and those engravings emblazoned in 
appropriate colours. This adventure had 
excited an extraordinary degree of interest 
among us, when it was related in the news- 
papers : and no sooner had a book upon the 
subject been advertised, than the young ones, 
one and all, were in an uproar, and tumul- 
tuously petitioned that I would send for it, — 
to which, thinking the prayer of the petition- 
ers reasonable, I graciously assented. And 
moreover there was expected, among other 
things ejusdem generis, one of those very few 
perquisites which the all-annihilating hand 
of Modern Reform has not retrenched in 
our public offices, — an Almanac or Pocket- 
Book for the year, curiously bound and gilt, 
three only being made up in this magnificent 
manner for three magnificent personages, 
from one of whom this was a present to my 
lawful Governess. Poor Mr. Bankes ! the 
very hairs of his wig will stand erect, 

Like quills upon the fretful porcupine, 

when he reads of this flagrant misapplica- 
tion of public money ; and Mr. Whitbread 
would have founded a motion upon it, had 
he survived the battle of Waterloo. 

There are few things in which so many 
vexatious delays are continually occurring, 
and so many rascally frauds are systemati- 
cally practised, as in the carriage of parcels. 
It is indeed much to be wished that Govern- 
ment could take into its hands the convey- 
ance of goods as well as letters : for in this 
country whatever is done by Government 
is done punctually and honourably ; — what 
corruption there is lies among the people 
themselves, among whom honesty is certainly 



less general than it was half a century ago. 
Three or four days elapsed, on each of which 
the box ought to have arrived. M Will it 
come to-day, Papa?" was the morning ques- 
tion : ' ; why does not it come ? " was the com- 
plaint at noon : and ,; when will it come ? " 
was the query at night. But in childhood 
the delay of hope is only the prolongation of 
enjoyment : and through life indeed, hope. 
if it be of the right kind, is the best food 
of happiness. t; The House of Hope," says 
Hafiz, " is built upon a weak foundation." 
If it be so, I say, the fault is in the builder : 
Build it upon a Rock, and it will stand. 

Expeetata dies, — long looked for, at length 
it came. The box was brought into the 
parlour, the ripping-chisel was produced, 
the nails were easily forced, the cover was 
lifted, and the paper which lay beneath it was 
removed. ; - There's the pantaloons ! " was 
the first exclamation. The clothes being 
taken out, there appeared below a paper 
parcel, secured with a string. As I never 
encourage any undue impatience, the string 
was deliberately and carefully untied. Be- 
hold, the splendid Poeket-Book, and the 
historv of the Lioness and the Exeter Mail. 
— had been forgotten ! 

St. Peter! St. Peter! 

u Pray. Sir." says the Reader, " as I per- 
ceive you are a person who have a reason 
for everything you say, may I ask where- 
fore you call upon St. Peter on this oc- 
casion ? " 

Tou may, Sir. 

A reason there is, and a valid one. But 
what that reason is, I shall leave the com- 
mentators to discover; observing only, 
for the sake of lessening their difficulty, that 
the Peter upon whom I have called is not 
St. Peter of Verona, he having been an 
Inquisitor, one of the Devil's Saints, and 
therefore in no condition at this time to help 
anvbody who invokes him. 

•• "Well, Papa, you must write about them, 
and they must come in the next parcel," 
said the children. Job never behaved bet- 
ter, who • was a scriptural Epictetus : nor 
Epictetus, who was a heathen Job. 

1 kissed the little philosophers ; and gave 



THE DOCTOR. 



491 



them the Bellman's verses, which happened 
to come in the box, with horrific cuts of 
the Marriage at Cana, the Ascension, and 
other portions of gospel history, and the 
Bellman himself; — so it was not altogether 
a blank. We agreed that the disappoint- 
ment should be an adjourned pleasure, and 
then I turned to inspect the pantaloons. 

I cannot approve the colour. It hath too 
much of the purple ; not that imperial die 
by which ranks were discriminated at Con- 
stantinople, nor the more sober tint which 
Episcopacy affecteth. Nor is it the bloom 
of the plum; — still less can it be said to 
resemble the purple light of love. No ! it 
is rather a hue brushed from the raven's 
wing, a black purple ; not Night and Aurora 
meeting, which would make the darkness 
blush ; but Erebus and Ultramarine. 

Doubtless it hath been selected for me 
because of its alamodality, — a good and 
pregnant word, on the fitness of which 
some German, whose name appears to be 
erroneously as well as uncouthly written 
Geainoenus, is said to have composed a 
dissertation. Be pleased, Mr. Todd, to insert 
it in the interleaved copy of your dictionary ! 

Thankful I am that they are not like Jean 
de Bart's full-dress breeches ; for when that 
famous sailor went to court he is said to 
have worn breeches of cloth of gold, most 
uncomfortably as well as splendidly lined 
with cloth of silver. 

He would never have worn them, had he 
read Lampridius, and seen the opinion of 
the Emperor Alexander Severus, as by that 
historian recorded : in linea aatem aurum 
mitti etiam dementiam judicabat, cum asperi- 
tati adder etur rigor. 

The word breeches has, I am well aware, 
been deemed ineffable, and therefore not to 
be written — because not to be read. But 
I am encouraged to use it by the high and 
mighty authority of the Anti- Jacobin Re- 
view. Mr. Stephens having in his Memoirs 
of Home Tooke used the word small-clothes 
is thus reprehended for it by the indignant 
Censor. 

" His breeches he calls small-clothes ; — the 
first time we have seen this bastard term, 



the offspring of gross ideas and disgusting 
affectation in print, in anything like a book. 
It is scandalous to see men of education 
thus employing the most vulgar language, 
and corrupting their native tongue by the 
introduction of illegitimate words. But this 
is the age of affectation. Even our fish- 
women and milkmaids affect to blush at the 
only word which can express this part of a 
man's dress, and lisp small-clothes with as 
many airs as a would-be woman of fashion 
is accustomed to display. That this folly is 
indebted for its birth to grossness of imagi- 
nation in those who evince it, will not admit 
of a doubt. From the same source arises 
the ridiculous and too frequent use of a 
French word for a part of female dress ; as 
if the mere change of language could ope- 
rate a change either in the thing expressed, 
or in the idea annexed to the expression ! 
Surely, surely, English women, who are 
justly celebrated for good sense and decorous 
manners, should rise superior to such pitiful, 
such paltry, such low-minded affectation." 

Here I must observe that one of these 
redoubtable critics is thought to have a par- 
tiality for breeches of the Dutch make. It 
is said also that he likes to cut them out for 
himself, and to have pockets of capacious 
size, wide and deep ; and a large fob, and a 
large allowance of lining. 

The Critic who so very much dislikes the 
word small-clothes, and argues so vehemently 
in behalf of breeches, uses no doubt that 
edition of the scriptures that is known by 
the name of the Breeches Bible. * 

I ought to be grateful to the Anti- Jacobin 
Review. It assists in teaching me my duty 
to my neighbour, and enabling me to live in 
charity with all men. For I might perhaps 
think that nothing could be so wrong-headed 
as Leidi Hunt, so wrong-hearted as Cob- 



* The Bible here alluded to was the Genevan one. by 
Rowland Hall, a. d. 1560. It was for many years the most 
popular one in England, and the notes were great favourites 
with the religious public, insomuch so that they were 
attached to a copy of King James' Translation as late as 
1715. From the peculiar rendering of Genesis, iii. ".. the 
Editions of this translation have been commonly known 
by the name of " Breeches Bibles." — See Cotton's Va- 
rious Editions of the Bible, p. 14., and Ames and Herbert, 
Ed. Dibdiu, vol. iv. p. 410. 



492 



THE DOCTOR. 



bett, so foolish as one, so blackguard as the 
other, so impudently conceited as both, — if 
it were not for the Anti- Jacobin. I might 
believe that nothing could be so bad as the 
coarse, bloody and brutal spirit of the vul- 
gar Jacobin, — if it were not for the Anti- 
Jacobin. 

Blessings on the man for his love of pure 
English ! It is to be expected that he will 
make great progress in it, through his fami- 
liarity with fishwomen and milkmaids ; for 
it implies no common degree of familiarity 
with those interesting classes to talk to them 
about breeches, and discover that they pre- 
fer to call them small-clothes. 

But wherefore did he no.t instruct us by 
which monosyllable he would express the 
female garment, " which is indeed the sister 
to a shirt," — as an old poet says, and which 
he hath left unnamed, — for there are two 
by which it is denominated. Such a dis- 
cussion would be worthy both of his good 
sense and his decorous style. 

For my part, instead of expelling the word 
chemise from use I would have it fairly 
naturalised. 

Many plans have been proposed for re- 
ducing our orthography to some regular 
system, and improving our language in va- 
rious ways. Mr. Elphinstone, Mr. Pinkerton, 
and Mr. Spence, the founder of the Spencean 
Philanthropists, have distinguished them- 
selves in these useful and patriotic projects, 
and Mr. Pytches is at present in like manner 
laudably employed, — though that gentleman 
contents himself with reforming what these 
bolder spirits would revolutionise. I also 
would fain contribute to so desirable an end. 

We agree that in spelling words it is proper 
to discard all reference to their etymology. 
The political reformer would confine the 
attention of the Government exclusively to 
what are called truly British objects ; and 
the philological reformers in like manner 
are desirous of establishing a truly British 
language. 

Upon this principle, I would anglicise the 
orthography of chemise; and by improving 
upon the hint which the word would then 
offer in its English appearance, we might 



introduce into our language a distinction of 
genders — in which it has hitherto been de- 
fective. For example, 

Hemise and Shemise. 

Here, without the use of an article or any 
change of termination, we have the needful 
distinction made more perspicuously than 
by 6 and »/, hie and hcec, le and la, or other 
articles serving for no other purpose. 

Again. In letter-writing, every person 
knows that male and female letters have a 
distinct sexual character ; they should there- 
fore be generally distinguished thus, 

Hepistle and Shepistle. 
And as there is the same marked difference in 
the writing of the two sexes I would propose 

Penmanship and Penwomanship. 
Erroneous opinions in religion being pro- 
mulgated in this country by women as well 
as men, the teachers of such false doctrines 
may be divided into 

Heresiarchs and Sheresiarchs, 
so that we should speak of 

the Heresy of the Quakers, 

the Sheresy of Joanna Southcote's people. 

The troublesome affection of the diaphragm, 
which every person has experienced, is, 
upon the same principle, to be called accord- 
ing to the sex of the patient 

Hecups or Shecups, 

which, upon the principle of making our 
language truly British, is better than the 
more classical form of 

Hiccups and Hasccups. 
In its objective use the word becomes 
Hiscups or Hercups ; 

and in like manner Histerics should be 
altered into Herterics, the complaint never 
being masculine. 

So also instead of making such words as 
agreeable, comfortable, &c. adjectives of one 
termination, I would propose, 
Masculine agreeabeau, Feminine agreeabelle 

comfortabeau comfortabelle 

miserabeau miserabelle, 

&c. &c. 



THE DOCTOR. 



493 



These things are suggested as hints to Mr. 
Pytches, to be by him perpended in his im- 
provement of our Dictionary. I beg leave 
also to point out for his critical notice the 
remarkable difference in the meaning of the 
word misfortune, as applied to man, woman, 
or child : a peculiarity for which perhaps no 
parallel is to be found in any other language. 

But to return from these philological 
speculations to the Anti- Jacobin by whom 
we have been led to them, how is it that 
this critic, great master as he is of the vulgar 
tongue, should affirm that breeches is the 
only word by which this part of a mans 
dress can be expressed ? Had he forgotten 
that there was such a word as galligaskins ? 
— to say nothing of inexpressibles and dont- 
mention 'ems. Why also did he forget 
pantaloons ? — and thus the Chapter like a 
rondeau comes round to St. Pantaleon with 
whom it began, 

SANCTE PANTALEON, ORA. PRO NOBIS ! 



" Here is another Chapter without a head- 
ing," — the Compositor would have said, 
when he came to this part of the Manu- 
script, if he had not seen at a glance, that in 
my great' consideration I had said it for 
him. 

Yes, Mr. Compositor ! Because of the 
matter whereon it has to treat, we must, if 
you please, entitle this an 

Arch-Chapter. 

A Frenchman once, who was not ashamed 
of appearing ignorant on such a subject, 
asked another who with some reputation for 
classical attainments had not the same rare 
virtue, what was the difference between 
Dryads and Hamadryads ; and the man of 
erudition gravely replied that it was much 
the same as that between Bishops and 
Archbishops. 

I have dignified this Arch-Chapter in its 
designation, because it relates to the King. 



Dr. Gooch, you are hereby requested to 
order this book for his Majesty's library, 

Cest une rare piece, et digne sur mafoi, 
Qu'on enfasse present au cabinet d'un rot.* 

Dr. Gooch, I have a great respect for you. 
At the time when there was an intention of 
bringing a bill into Parliament for eman- 
cipating the Plague from the Quarantine 
Laws, and allowing to the people of Great 
Britain their long withheld right of having 
this disease as freely as the small pox, 
"measles and any other infectious malady, 
you wrote a paper, and published it in the 
Quarterly Review, against that insane in- 
tention ; proving its insanity so fully by 
matter of fact, and so conclusively by force 
of reasoning, that your arguments carried 
conviction with them, and put an end, for 
the time, to that part of the emancipating 
and free trade system. 

Dr. Gooch, you have also written a 
volume of medical treatises of which I 
cannot speak more highly than by saying, 
sure I am that if the excellent subject of 
these my reminiscences were living, he 
would, for his admiration of those treatises 
have solicited the pleasure and honour of 
your acquaintance. 

Dr. Gooch, comply with this humble 
request of a sincere, though unknown ad- 
mirer, for the sake of your departed brother- 
in-physic, who, like yourself, brought to the 
study of the healing art a fertile mind, a 
searching intellect, and a benevolent heart. 
More, Dr. G., I might say, and more I would 
say, but — 

Should I say more, you well might censure me 
(What yet I never was) a flatterer.f 

When the King (God bless his Majesty!) 
shall peruse this book, and be well-pleased 
therewith, if it should enter into his royal 
mind to call for his Librarian, and ask of 
him what honour and dignity hath been 
done to the author of it, for having delighted 
the heart of the King, and of so many of his 



* M0L1ERE. 

t Beaumont and Fletcher. 



494 



THE DOCTOR. 



liege subjects, and you shall have replied 
unto his Majesty, "there is nothing done for 
him ; " then Dr. Gooch when the King shall 
take it into consideration how to testify his 
satisfaction with the book and to manifest 
his bounty toward the author, you are re- 
quested to bear in mind my thoughts upon 
this weighty matter, of which I shall now 
proceed to put you in possession. 

Should he generously think of conferring 
upon me the honour of knighthood, or a 
baronetcy, or a peerage, (Lord Doncaster 
the title,) or a step in the peerage, according 
to my station in life, of which you, Dr. 
Gooch, can give him no information ; or 
should he meditate the institution of an 
Order of Merit for men of letters, with an 
intention of nominating me among the 
original members, worthy as such intentions 
would be of his royal goodness, I should 
nevertheless, for reasons which it is not 
necessary to explain, deem it prudent to 
decline any of these honours. 

Far be it from me, Dr. Gooch, to wish 
that the royal apparel should be brought 
which the King useth to wear, and the horse 
that the King rideth upon, and the crown 
royal which is set upon his head ; and that 
this apparel and horse should be delivered to 
the hand of one of the King's most noble 
princes, that he might array me withal ; and 
bring me on horseback through the streets 
of London, and proclaim before me, thus 
shall it be done to the man whom the King 
delighteth to honour ! Such an exhibition 
would neither accord with this age, nor with 
the manners of this nation, nor with my 
humility. 

As little should I desire that his Majesty 
should give orders for me to be clothed in 
purple, to drink in gold and to sleep upon 
gold, and to ride in a chariot with bridles of 
gold, and to have an head-tire of fine linen, 
and a chain about my neck, and to eat next 
the King, because of my wisdom, and to be 
called the King's cousin. For purple 
garments, Dr. Gooch, are not among the 
propria quce maribus in England at this 
time ; it is better to drink in glass than in 
gold, and to sleep upon a feather bed than 



upon a golden one; the only head-tire 
which I wear is my night-cap. I care not 
therefore for the fineness of its materials ; 
and I dislike for myself chains of any kind. 
That his Majesty should think of sending 
for me to sit next him because of my wisdom, 
is what he in his wisdom will not do ; and 
what, if he were to do, would not be agree- 
able to me, in mine. But should the King 
desire to have me called his Cousin, accom- 
panying that of course with such an ap- 
panage as would be seemly for its support, 
and should he notify that most gracious 
intention to you his Librarian, and give 
order that it should be by you inserted in 
the Gazette, — to the end that the secret 
which assuredly no sagacity can divine, and 
no indiscretion will betray, should incon- 
tinently thereupon be communicated through 
you to the royal ear ; and that in future 
editions of this work the name of the thus 
honoured author should appear with the 
illustrious designation, in golden letters, of 
" by special command of his Majesty, 

Cousin to the King." 

A gracious mandate of this nature, Dr. 
Gooch, would require a severe sacrifice from 
my loyal and dutiful obedience. Not that 
the respectful deference which is due to the 
royal and noble house of Gloucester should 
withhold me from accepting the proffered 
honour ; to that house it could be nothing 
derogatory ; the value of their consanguinity 
would rather be the more manifest, when 
the designation alone, unaccompanied with 
rank, was thus rendered by special command 
purely and singularly honourable. Still less 
should I be influenced by any apprehension 
of being confounded in cousinship with 
Olive, calling herself Princess of Cumber- 
land. Nevertheless let me say, Dr. Gooch, 
while I am free to say it, — while I am 
treating of it paulo-post-futuratively, as of 
a possible case, not as a question brought 
before me for my prompt and irrevocable 
answer, — let me humbly say that I prefer 
the incognito even to this title. It is not 
necessary, and would not be proper to enter 
into my reasons for that preference : suffice 



THE DOCTOR. 



495 



it that it is my humour (speaking be it 
observed respectfully, and using that word in 
its critical and finer sense,) that it is the 
idiosyncrasy of my disposition, the familiar 
way in which it pleases me innocently to 
exercise my privilege of free will. It is not 
a secret which every body knows, which 
nobody could help knowing and which was 
the more notoriously known, because of its 
presumed secresy. Incognito I am and wish 
to be, and incognoscible it is in my power to 
remain : 

He deserves small trust, 
Who is not privy councillor to himself ; 

but my secret, (being my own,) is like my 
life (if that were needed) at the King's 
service, and at his alone ; 

Tot; xvqiot; yx.o jj-avr* ^y t h'/jXovv Xoyoy.* 

Be pleased therefore, Dr. Gooch, if his 
Majesty most graciously and most consi- 
derately should ask, what may be done for 
the man ( — meaning me, — ) whom the King 
delighteth to honour ; — be pleased, good 
Dr. Gooch, to represent that the allowance 
which is usually granted to a retired Envoy, 
would content his wishes, make his fortunes 
easy, and gladden his heart ; — (Dr. Gooch 
you will forgive the liberty thus taken with 
you!) — that "where the word of a King 
is, there is power," — that an ostensible 
reason for granting it may easily be found, a 
sealed communication from the unknown 
being made through your hands; — that 
many Envoys have not deserved it better, 
and many secret services which have been 
as largely rewarded have not afforded to the 
King so much satisfaction ; — finally, that 
this instance of royal bounty will not have 
the effect of directing public suspicion 
toward the object of that bounty, nor be 
likely to be barked at by Joseph Hume, 
Colonel Davies, and Daniel Whittle Har- 
vey ! 



CHAPTER CLXXXVIH. 

FOLLY IN PRINT, REFERRED TO, BUT (n.B.) 
NOT EXEMPLIFIED. THE FAIR MAID OF 
DONCASTER. DOUBTS CONCERNING THE 
AUTHENTICITY OF HER STORY. THEVE- 
NARD, AND LOVE ON A NEW FOOTING. 
STARS AND GARTERS. A MONITORY ANEC- 
DOTE FOR OUR SEX, AND A WHOLESOME 
NOVELTY IN DRESS RECOMMENDED TO 
BOTH. 

They be at hand, Sir, with stick and fiddle, 
They can play a new dance, Sir, called hey, diddle, diddle. 

King Cambyses. 

You have in the earlier chapters of this 
Opus, gentle Reader, heard much of the 
musical history of Doncaster; not indeed as 
it would have been related by that tho- 
roughly good, fine-ear'd, kind-hearted, open- 
handed, happiest of musicians and men, Dr. 
Burney the first ; and yet I hope thou mayest 
have found something in this relation which 
has been to thy pleasure in reading, and 
which, if it should be little to thy profit in 
remembrance, will be nothing to thy hurt. 
From music to dancing is an easy transition ; 
but do not be afraid that I shall take thee 
to a Ball, — for I would rather go to the 
Treading Mill myself. 

What I have to say of Doncaster dancing 
relates to times long before those to which 
my reminiscences belong. 

In a collection of Poems entitled " Folly 
in Print" — (which title might be sufficiently 
appropriate for many such collections) — or 
a book of Rhymes, printed in 1667, there is 
a Ballad called the Northern Lass, or the 
Fair Maid of Doncaster. Neither book or 
ballad has ever fallen in my way, nor has 
that comedy of Richard Broome's, which 
from its name Oldys supposed to have been 
founded upon the same story. I learn, how- 
ever, in a recent and voluminous account of 
the English Stage from the Revolution, (by 
a gentleman profoundly learned in the most 
worthless of all literature, and for whom 
that literature seems to have been quite 
good enough,) that Broome's play has no 
connection with the ballad, or with Don- 
caster. But the note in which Oldys men- 



496 



THE DOCTOR. 



tions it has made me acquainted with this 
Fair Maid's propensity for dancing, and 
with the consequences that it brought upon 
her. Her name was Betty Maddox ; a 
modern ballad writer would call her Eli- 
zabeth, if he adopted the style of the Eliza- 
bethan age ; or Eliza, if his taste inclined to 
the refinements of modern euphony. When 
an hundred horsemen wooed her, says 
Oldys, she conditioned that she would marry 
the one of them who could dance her down ; 

You shall decide your quarrel by a dance,* 

but she wearied them all ; and they left her 
a maid for her pains. 

Legiadria suos fervebat tanta per artus, 
Ut qucecunque potest fieri saltalio per nos 
Humanos, agili motufiebat ab illa.\ 

At that dancing match they must have 
footed it till, as is said in an old Comedy, a 
good country lass's capermonger might have 
been able to copy the figure of the dance 
from the impressions on the pavement. 

For my own part I do not believe it to be 
a true story ; they who please may. Was 
there one of the horsemen but would have 
said on such occasion, with the dancing 
Peruvians in one of Davenant's operatic 
dramas, 

Still round and round and round, 

Let us compass the ground. 

What man is he who feels 

Any weight at his heels, 
Since our hearts are so light, that, all weigh'd together, 
Agree to a grain, and they weigh not a feather. 

I disbelieve it altogether, and not for its 
want of verisimilitude alone, but because 
when I was young there was no tradition of 
any such thing in the town where the venue 
of the action is laid ; and therefore I con- 
jecture that it is altogether a fictitious story, 
and may peradventure have been composed 
as a lesson for some young spinster whose 
indefatigable feet made her the terror of all 
partners. 

The Welsh have a saying that if a woman 
were as quick with her feet as her tongue, 
she would catch lightning enough to kindle 
the fire in the morning ; it is a fanciful 
saying, as many of the Welsh sayings are. 
But if Miss Maddox had been as quick with 



Dryden. 



t Macauonica. 



her tongue as her feet, instead of dancing an 
hundred horsemen .down, she might have 
talked their hundred horses to death. 

Why it was a greater feat than that of 
Kempe the actor, who in the age of odd 
performance danced from London to Nor- 
wich. He was nine days in dancing the 
journey, and published an account of it under 
the title of his " Nine Days Wonder." % It 
could have been no " light fantastic toe " 
that went through such work ; but one fit 
for the roughest game at football. At sight 
of the awful foot to which it belonged, Cupid 
would have fled with as much reason as the 
Dragon of Wantley had for turning tail when 
Moor of Moor Hall with his spiked shoe- 
armour pursued him. He would have fled 
before marriage, for fear of being kicked out 
of the house after it. They must have been 
feet that instead of gliding and swimming 
and treading the grass so trim, went, as the 
old Comedy says, lumperdee, clumperdee.§ 

The Northern Lass was in this respect no 
Cinderella. Nor would any one, short of an 
Irish Giant, have fallen in love with her 
slipper, as Thevenard the singer did with 
that which he saw by accident at a shoe- 
maker's, and inquiring for what enchanting 
person it was made, and judging of this 
earthly Venus as the proportions of Her- 
cules have been estimated ex pede, sought 
her out, for love of her foot, commenced his 
addresses to her, and obtained her hand in 
marriage. 

The story of Thevenard is true ; at least it 
has been related and received as such ; this 
of the Fair Maid of Doncaster is not even 
ben trovato. Who indeed shall persuade me, 
or who indeed will be persuaded, that if she 
had wished to drop the title of spinster, and 
take her matrimonial degree, she would not 
have found some good excuse for putting an 
end to the dance when she had found a 
partner to her liking ? A little of that wit 
which seldom fails a woman when it is 



X Webster's Westward Ho. Act. v. Sc. i Anno 1600. 

— R. S. Since this note was written by the lamented 
author, the Dancing Journey has been lepublished by 
Mr. Dyce. 

6 Ralph Roister Doister. 



THE DOCTOR. 



497 



needed, would have taught her how to do 
this with a grace, and make it appear that 
she was still an invincible dancer, though 
the Stars had decreed that in this instance 
she should lose the honour of the dance. 
Some accident might have been feigned like 
those by which the ancient epic poets and 
their imitators contrive in their Games to 
disappoint those who are on the point of 
gaining the prize which is contended for. 

If the Stars had favoured her, they might 
have predestined her to meet with such an 
accident as befel a young lady in the age of 
minuets. She was led out in a large assem- 
bly by her partner, the object of all eyes ; 
and when the music began and the dance 
should have began also, and he was in motion, 
she found herself unable to move from the 
spot, she remained motionless for a few 
seconds, her colour changed from rose to 
ruby, presently she seemed about to faint, 
fell into the arms of those who ran to sup- 
port her, and was carried out of the room. 
The fit may have been real, for though 
nothing ailed her, yet what had happened 
was enough to make any young woman faint 
in such a place. It was something far more 
embarrassing than the mishap against which 
Soame Jenyns cautions the ladies when he 
says, 

No waving lappets should the dancing fair, 
Nor ruffles edged with dangling fringes wear ; 
Oft will the cobweb ornaments catch hold 
On the approaching button, rough with gold ; 
Nor force nor art can then the bonds divide, 
When once the entangled Gordian knot is tied. 
So the unhappy pair, by Hymen's power 
Together joined in some ill-fated hour, 
The more they strive their freedom to regain, 
The faster binds the indissoluble chain. 

It was worse than this in the position in 
which she had placed herself according to 
rule; for beginning the minuet, she was 
fastened not by a spell, not by the influence 
of her malignant Stars, but by the hooks 
and eyes of her garters. The Countess of 
Salisbury's misfortune was as much less em- 
barrassing as it was more celebrated. 

No such misfortunes could have happened 
to that Countess who has been rendered 
illustrious thereby, nor to the once fair 
danceress, who would have dreaded nothing 



more than that her ridiculous distress should 
become publicly known, if they had worn 
genouilleres, that is to say, knee-pieces. A 
necessary part of a suit of armour was dis- 
tinguished by this name in the days of chi- 
valry ; and the article of dress which corre- 
sponds to it may be called kneelets, if for a 
new article we strike a new word in that 
mint of analogy, from which whatever is 
lawfully coined comes forth as the King's 
English. Dress and cookery are both great 
means of civilisation ; indeed they are among 
the greatest ; both in their abuse are made 
subservient to luxury and extravagance, and 
so become productive of great evils, moral 
and physical ; and with regard to both the 
physician may sometimes interfere with 
effect, when the moralist would fail. In diet 
the physician has more frequently to oppose 
the inclinations of his patient, than to gratify 
them ; and it is not often that his advice in 
matters of dress meets with willing ears, al- 
though in these things the maxim will gene- 
rally hold good, that whatever is wholesome 
is comfortable, and that whatever causes dis- 
comfort or uneasiness is more or less injurious 
to health. But he may recommend kneelets 
without having any objection raised on the 
score of fashion, or of vanity ; and old and 
young may be thankful for the recommenda- 
tion. Mr. Ileady-to-halt would have found 
that they supported his weak joints, and ren- 
dered him less liable to rheumatic attacks ; 
and his daughter Much -afraid, if she had 
worn them when she " footed it hand- 
somely," might have danced without any 
fear of such accidents as happened to the 
Countess of old, or the heroine of the minuet 
in later times. 

Begin therefore forthwith, dear Lady- 
readers, to knit genouilleres for yourselves, 
and for those whom you love. You will 
like them better, I know, by their French 
name, though English comes best from 
English lips ; but so you knit and wear them, 
call them what you will. 



498 



THE DOCTOK. 



CHAPTER CLXXXIX. 

THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF LATE HOURS. 
DANCING. FANATICAL OBJECTION OF THE 
ALBIGENSES ; INJURIOUS EFFECT OF THAT 
OPINION WHEN TRANSMITTED TO THE 
FRENCH PROTESTANTS. SIR JOHN DAVIES 
AND BURTON QUOTED TO SHOW THAT IT 
CAN BE NO DISPARAGEMENT TO SAY THAT 
ALE THE WORLD'S A STAGE, WHEN ALL 
THE SKY'S A BALL-ROOM. 

I could be pleased with any one 

Who entertained my sight with such gay shows, 

As men and women moving here and there, 

That coursing one another in their steps 

Have made their feet a tune. Dryden. 

The Doctor was no dancer. He had no 
inclination for this pastime even in what the 
song calls " our dancing days," partly be- 
cause his activity lay more in his head than 
in his heels, and partly perhaps from an ap- 
prehension of awkwardness, the consequence 
of his rustic breeding. In middle and later 
life he had strong professional objections, 
not to the act of dancing, but to the crowded 
and heated rooms wherein it was carried on, 
and to the late hours to which it was con- 
tinued. In such rooms and at such as- 
semblies, the Devil, as an old dramatist says, 
" takes delight to hang at a woman's girdle, 
like a rusty watch, that she cannot discern how 
the time passes." * Bishop Hall, in our friend's 
opinion, spake wisely when, drawing an ideal 
picture of the Christian, he said of him, " in 
a due season he betakes himself to his rest. 
He presumes not to alter the ordinance of 
day and night; nor dares confound, where 
distinctions are made by his Maker." 

Concerning late hours indeed he was much 
of the same opinion as the man in the old 
play, who thought that " if any thing was to 
be damned, it would be Twelve o'clock at 
night." 

These should be hours for necessities, 
Not for delights ; times to repair our nature 
With comforting repose, and not for us 
To waste these times. t 

He used to say that whenever he heard of a 



* Webster. 



t Shakesfeake. 



ball carried on far into the night, or more 
properly speaking, far into the morning, it 
reminded him, with too much reason, of the 
Dance of Death. 

Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed : 
The breath of night's destructive to the hue 
Of ev'ry rlow'r that blows. Go to the field, 
And ask the humble daisy why it sleeps 
Soon as the sun departs ? Why close the eyes 
Of blossoms infinite, long ere the moon 
Her oriental veil puts off? Think why, 
Nor let the sweetest blossom Nature boasts 
Be thus exposed to night's unkindly damp. 
Well may it droop, and all its freshness lose, 
Compell'd to taste the rank and pois'nous steam 
Of midnight theatre, and morning ball. 
Give to repose the solemn hour she claims, 
And from the forehead of the morning steal 
The sweet occasion. O there is a charm 
Which morning has, that gives the brow of age 
A smack of earth, and makes the lip of youth 
Shed perfume exquisite. Expect it not, 
Ye who till noon upon a down-bed lie, 
Indulging feverous sleep.J 

The reader need not be told that his ob- 
jections were not puritanical, but physical. 
The moralist who cautioned his friend to 
refrain from dancing, because it was owing 
to a dance that John the Baptist lost his 
head, talked, he said, like a fool. Nor 
would he have formed a much more favour- 
able opinion of the Missionary in South 
Africa, who told the Hottentots that dancing 
is a work of darkness, and that a fiddle is 
Satan's own instrument. At such an assertion 
he would have exclaimed — a fiddlestick ! § 

— Why and how that word has become an 
interjection of contempt, I must leave those 
to explain who can. The Albigenses and 
the Yaudois are said to have believed that 
a dance is the Devil's procession, in which 
they who dance break the promise and vow 
which their sponsors made for them at their 
baptism, that they should renounce the Devil 
and all his works, the pomps and vanities of 
this wicked world, — (not to proceed further,) 

— this being one of his works, and un- 
deniably one of the aforesaid vanities and 



% Hurdis' Village Curate. 
§ The explanation following is given in Grose's Clas- 
sical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Fiddlestick's 
End. Nothing : the ends of the ancient fiddlesticks end- 
ing in a point : hence metaphorically used to express a 
thing terminating in nothing. 



THE DOCTOR 



499 



pomps. They break, moreover, all the ten 
commandments, according to these fanatics ; 
for fanatics they must be deemed who said 
this ; and the manner in which they at- 
tempted to prove the assertion, by exempli- 
fying it through the decalogue, shows that 
the fermentation of their minds was in the 
acetous stage. 

Unfortunately for France, this opinion 
descended to the Huguenots ; and the pro- 
gress of the Reformation in that country was 
not so much promoted by Marot's psalms, 
as it was obstructed by this prejudice, — a 
prejudice directly opposed to the tempera- 
ment and habits of a mercurial people. 
" Dancing," says Peter Heylyn, " is a sport 
to which they are so generally affected, that 
were it not so much enveighed against by 
their straight-laced Ministers, it is thought 
that many more of the French Catholicks 
had been of the Reformed Religion. For 
so extremely are they bent upon this disport, 
that neither Age nor Sickness, no nor 
poverty itself, can make them keep their 
heels still, when they hear the Music. Such 
as can hardly walk abroad without their 
Crutches, or go as if they were troubled all 
day with a Sciatica, and perchance have 
their rags hang so loose about them, that 
one would think a swift Galliard might 
shake them into their nakedness, will to the 
Dancing Green howsoever, and be there as 
eager at the sport, as if they had left their 
several infirmities and wants behind them. 
What makes their Ministers (and indeed all 
that follow the Genevian Discipline) enveigh 
so bitterly against Dancing, and punish it 
with such severity when they find it used ? I 
am not able to determine, nor doth it any 
way belong unto this discourse. But being, 
as it is, a Recreation which this people are 
so given unto, and such a one as cannot be 
followed but in a great deal of company, 
and before many witnesses and spectators of 
their carriage in it : I must needs think the 
Ministers of the French Church more nice 
than wise, if they choose rather to deter men 
from their Congregations, by so strict a 
Stoicism, than indulge anything unto the 
jollity and natural gaiety of this people, 



in matters not offensive, but by accident 
only." * 

Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue, 
But moody and dull melancholy, 
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair ; 
And at their heels, a huge infectious troop 
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life.f 

It is a good-natured Roman Catholic who 
says, " that the obliging vices of some people 
are better than the sour and austere virtues 
of others." The fallacy is more in his lan- 
guage than in his morality ; for virtue is 
never sour, and in proportion as it is austere 
we may be sure that it is adulterated. Be- 
fore a certain monk of St. Gal, Iso by name, 
was born, his mother dreamed that she was 
delivered of a hedgehog; her dream was 
fulfilled in the character which he lived to 
obtain of being bristled with virtues like 
one. Methinks no one would like to come 
in contact with a person of this description. 
Yet among the qualities which pass with a 
part of the world for virtues, there are some 
of a soft and greasy kind, from which I 
should shrink with the same instinctive 
dislike. I remember to have met some- 
where with this eulogium passed upon one 
dissenting minister by another, that he was 
a lump of piety ! I prefer the hedgehog. 

A dance, according to that teacher of the 
Albigenses whose diatribe has been pre- 
served, is the service of the Devil, and the 
fiddler, whom Ben Jonson calls Tom Tick- 
lefoot, is the Devil's minister. If he had 
known what Plato had said he would have 
referred to it in confirmation of this opinion ; 
for Plato says that the Gods, compassionating 
the laborious life to which mankind were 
doomed, sent Apollo, Bacchus and the 
Muses to teach them to sing, to drink, and 
to dance. And the old Puritan would, to 
his own entire satisfaction, have identified 
Apollo with Apollyon. 

" But shall we make the welkin dance indeed ?"% 



* The Rector of a Parish once complained to Fenelon 
of the practice of the villagers in dancing on Sunday 
evenings. " My good friend," replied the prelate, " you 
and I should not dance ; but allowance must be made to 
the poor people, who have only one day in the week to 
forget their misfortunes." 

t SiiAKF.spEARn. % Ibid. 



tv 2 



500 



THE DOCTOR. 



Sir John Davies, who holds an honour- 
able and permanent station among English 
statesmen and poets, deduces Dancing, in a 
youthful poem of extraordinary merit, from 
the Creation, saying that it 

then began to be 
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring, 
The fire, air, earth, and water did agree, 
By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty king, 
To leave their first disordered combating ; 
And in a dance such measure to observe, 
As all the world their motion should preserve. 

He says that it with the world 

in point of time begun : 
Yea Time itself, (whose birth Jove never knew, 

And which indeed is elder than the Sun,) 

Had not one moment of his age outrun, 
When out leapt Dancing from the heap of things, 
And lightly rode upon his nimble wings. 
For that brave Sun, the father of the day, 

Doth love this Earth, the mother of the Night, 
And like a reveller in rich array, 

Doth dance his galliard in his leman's sight. 
* * * * 

Who doth not see the measures of the Moon, 

Which thirteen times she danceth every year ? 
And ends her pavin thirteen times as soon 

As doth her brother, of whose golden hair 

She borroweth part, and proudly doth it wear ; 
Then doth she coyly turn her face aside, 
That half her cheek is scarce sometimes descried. 
And lo ! the Sea that fleets about the land, 

And like a girdle clips her solid waist, 
Music and measure both doth understand : 

For his great crystal eye is always cast 

Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast ; 
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere, 
So danceth he about the centre here. 

This is lofty poetry, and one cannot but 
regret that the poet should have put it in 
the mouth of so unworthy a person as one of 
Penelope's suitors, though the best of them 
has been chosen. The moral application 
which he makes to matrimony conveys a 
wholesome lesson : 

If they whom sacred love hath link'd in one, 
Do, as they dance, in all their course of life ; 

Never shall burning grief, nor bitter moan, 
Nor factious difference, nor unkind strife, 
Arise betwixt the husband and the wife ; 

For whether forth, or back, or round he go, 

As the man doth, so must the woman do. 

What if, by often interchange of place 

Sometimes the woman gets the upper hand ? 

That is but done for more delightful grace ; 
For on that part she doth not ever stand ; 
But as the measure's law doth her command, 

She wheels about, and ere the dance doth end, 

Into her former place she doth transcend.* 

* It is remarkable that Sir John Davies should have 
written this Poem, which he entitled the Orchestra, and 



This poem of Sir John Davies could not 
have been unknown to Burton, for Burton 
read everything ; but it must have escaped 
his memory ; otherwise he who delighted in 
quotations and quoted so well, would have 
introduced some of his stanzas, when he 
himself was treating of the same subject, and 
illustrated it with some of the same simili- 
tudes. "The Sun and Moon, some say," 
(says he,) " dance about the earth ; the three 
upper planets about the Sun as their centre, 
now stationary, now direct, now retrograde, 
now in apogcso, then in perigceo, now swift, 
then slow ; occidental, oriental, they turn 
round, jump and trace $ and $ about the 
Sun, with those thirty-three Macules or Bur- 
bonian planets, circa Solem saltantes cytha- 
redum, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean 
stars dance about Jupiter, two Austrian 
about Saturn, &c, and all belike to the music 
of the spheres." 

Sir Thomas Browne had probably this 
passage in his mind, when he said " acquaint 
thyself with the choragium of the stars." 

" The whole matter of the Universe and 
all the parts thereof," says Henry More, 
" are ever upon motion, and in such a dance 
as whose traces backwards and forwards 
take a vast compass ; and what seems to have 
made the longest stand, must again move, 
according to the modulations and accents of 
that Music, that is indeed out of the hear- 
ing of the acutest ears, but yet perceptible 
by the purest minds, and the sharpest wits. 
The truth whereof none would dare to op- 
pose, if the breath of the gainsayer could 
but tell its own story, and declare through 
how many Stars and Yortices it has been 
strained, before the particles thereof met, 
to be abused to the framing of so rash a 
contradiction." 



that very remarkable and beautiful one on the Immor- 
tality of the Soul. 



THE DOCTOR. 



501 



CHAPTER CXC. 

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. 
ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELLS REMARKS ON 
THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. 
HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE COLUMBIAN 
PHILOSOPHY. 

Non vi par adunque eke habbiamo ragionato a bastanza 
di questo ? A bastanxa parmi, rispose il Signor Gaspare; 
pur desidero io d' inlendere qualche particolarita anchor. 

Il Cortegiano. 

The Methodist Preachers in the first Confer- 
ence (that is Convocation or Yearly Meeting) 
after Mr. Wesley's death, passed a law for 
the public over which their authority ex- 
tends, or, in their own language, made a rule, 
that " schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who 
received dancing-masters into their schools, 
and parents also who employed dancing- 
masters for their children, should be no 
longer members of the Methodist Society." 
Many arguments were urged against this 
rule, and therefore it was defended in the 
Magazine, which is the authorised organ of 
the Conference, by the most learned and the 
most judicious of their members, Adam 
Clarke. There was, however, a sad want of 
judgment in some of the arguments which 
he employed. He quoted the injunction of 
St. Paul, " whatsoever ye do in word or 
deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, 
giving thanks to God and the Father by him," 
and he applied the text thus. Can any 
person, can any Christian dance in the name 
of the Lord Jesus ? Or, through him, give 
thanks to God the Father for such an em- 
ployment ? 

Another text also appeared to him deci- 
sive against dancing and its inseparable con- 
comitants ; " woe unto them who chaunt 
unto the sound of the viol, and invent unto 
themselves instruments of music, as did 
David." The original word, which we trans- 
late chaunt, signifies, according to him, to 
quaver, to divide, to articulate, and may, he 
says, as well be applied to the management 
of the feet, as to the modulations of the 
voice. This interpretation is supported by 
the Septuagint, and by the Arabic version ; 



but suppose it be disputed, he says, " yet this 
much will not be denied, that the text is 
pointedly enough against that without which 
dancing cannot well be carried on, I mean, 
instrumental music." He might have read 
in Burton that " nothing was so familiar in 
France as for citizens' wives and maids to 
dance a round in the streets, and often too 
for want of better instruments to make good 
music of their own voices, and dance after it." 
Ben Jonson says truly " that measure is the 
soul of a dance, and Tune the tickle-foot 
thereof ;" but in case of need the mouth can 
supply its own music. 

It is true the Scripture says " there is a 
time to dance ; " but this he explains as 
simply meaning " that human life is a varie- 
gated scene." Simple readers must they be 
who can simply understand it thus, to the 
exclusion of the literal sense. Adam Clarke 
has not remembered here that the Psalms 
enjoin us to praise the Lord with tabret and 
harp and lute, the strings and the pipe, and 
the trumpet and the loud cymbals, and to 
praise his name in the dance, and that David 
danced before the Ark. And though he 
might argue that Jewish observances are 
no longer binding, and that some things 
which were permitted under the Jewish dis- 
pensation are no longer lawful, he certainly 
would not have maintained that anything 
which was enjoined among its religious solem- 
nities can now in itself be sinful. 

I grant, he says, " that a number of mo- 
tions and steps, circumscribed by a certain 
given space, and changed in certain quan- 
tities of time, may be destitute of physical 
and moral evil. But it is not against these 
things abstractedly that I speak. It is 
against their concomitant and consequent 
circumstances ; the undue, the improper 
mixture of the sexes ; the occasions and 
opportunities afforded of bringing forth 
those fruits of death which destroy their own 
souls, and bring the hoary heads of their 
too indulgent parents with sorrow to the 
grave. 

So good a man as Adam Clarke is not to 
be suspected of acting like an Advocate here, 
and adducing arguments which he knew to 



502 



THE DOCTOR. 



be fallacious, in support of a cause not te- 
nable by fair reasoning. And how so wise a 
man could have reasoned so weakly, is ex- 
plained by a passage in his most interesting 
and most valuable autobiography. " Mala 
ave, when about twelve or thirteen years 
of age, I learned to dance. I long resisted 
all solicitations to this employment ; but at 
last I suffered myself to be overcome ; and 
learnt, and profited beyond most of my fel- 
lows. I grew passionately fond of it, would 
scarcely walk but in measured time, and was 
continually tripping, moving, and shuffling 
in all times and places. I began now to 
value myself, which, as far as I can recollect, 
I had never thought of before. I grew im- 
patient of control, was fond of company, 
wished to mingle more than I had ever done 
with young people. I got also a passion for 
better clothing than that which fell to my 
lot in life, was discontented when I found a 
neighbour' s son dressed better than myself. 
I lost the spirit of subordination, and did not 
love work, imbibed a spirit of idleness, and, in 
short, drunk in all the brain-sickening efflu- 
via of pleasure. Dancing and company took 
the place of reading and study; and the 
authority of my parents was feared indeed, 
but not respected ; and few serious impres- 
sions could prevail in a mind imbued now 
with frivolity and the love of pleasure ; yet 
I entered into no disreputable assembly, and 
in no one case ever kept any improper com- 
pany. I formed no illegal connection, nor 
associated with any whose characters were 
either tarnished or suspicious. Nevertheless 
dancing was to me a perverting influence, an 
unmixed moral evil ; for although, by the 
mercy of God, it led me not to depravity of 
manners, it greatly weakened the moral prin- 
ciple, drowned the voice of a well instructed 
conscience, and was the first cause of im- 
pelling me to seek my happiness in this life. 
Everything yielded to the disposition it had 
produced, and everything was absorbed by 
it. I have it justly in abhorrence for the 
moral injury it did me ; and I can testify, 
(as far as my own observations have ex- 
tended, and they have had a pretty wide 
range,) I have known it to produce the same 



evil in others that it produced in me. I con- 
sider it therefore as a branch of that worldly 
education, which leads from heaven to earth, 
from things spiritual to things sensual, and 
from God to Satan. Let them plead for it 
who will ; I know it to be evil, and that only. 
They who bring up their children in this 
way, or send them to these schools where 
dancing is taught, are consecrating them to 
the service of Moloch, and cultivating the 
passions, so as to cause them to bring forth 
the weeds of a fallen nature, with an addi- 
tional rankness, deep-rooted inveteracy, and 
inexhaustible fertility. Nemo sobrius saltat, 
' no man in his senses will dance,' said Cicero, 
a heathen ; shame on those Christians who 
advocate a cause by which many sons have 
become profligate, and many daughters have 
been ruined." Such was the experience of 
Adam Clarke in dancing, and such was his 
opinion of the practice.* 

An opinion not less unfavourable is ex- 
pressed in homely old verse by the translator 
of the Ship of Fools, Alexander Barclay. 

Than it in the earth no game is more damnable ; 
It seemeth no peace, but battle openly, 

They that it use of minds seem unstable, 
As mad folk running with clamour, shout and cry 
What place is void of this furious folly ? 

None ; so that I doubt within a while 

These fools the holy Church shall defile. 

Of people what sort or order may we find, 

Rich or poor, high or low of name, 
But by their foolishness and wanton mind, 

Of each sort some are given unto the same. 

The priests and clerks to dance have no shame. 
The friar or monk, in his frock and cowl, 
Must dance in his dortour, leaping to play the fool. 

To it comes children, maids, and wives, 
And flattering young men to see to have their prey ; 

The hand-in-hand great falsehood oft contrives. 
The old quean also this madness will assay ; 
And the old dotard, though he scantly may 

For age and lameness stir either foot or hand, 

Yet playeth he the fool, with others in the band. 



* It is old Fuller's observation, that " people over 
strait-laced in one part will hardly fail to grow awry in 
another." Over against the observations of Adam Clarke 
may be set the following, from the life of that excellent 
man— Sir William Jones. " Nor was he so indifferent 
to slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the 
instructions of a celebrated dancing-master at Aix-la- 
Chapelle. He had before taken lessons from Gallini in 
that trifling art.' — Carey's Lives of English Poets. Sir 
William Jones, p. 359. 



THE DOCTOR. 



503 



Then leap they about as folk past their mind, 
With madness amazed running in compace ; 

He most is commended that can most lewdness find, 
Or can most quickly run about the place, 
There are all manners used that lack grace, 

Moving their bodies in signs full of shame, 

Which doth their hearts to sin right sore inflame. 

Do away your dances, ye people much unwise 1 

Desist your foolish pleasure of travayle ! 
It is methinks an unwise use and guise 

To take such labour and pain without avayle. 

And who that suspecteth his maid or wives tayle, 
Let him not suffer them in the dance to be ; 

For in that game though size or cinque them fayle, 
The dice oft runneth upon the chance of three. 

The principle upon which such reasoning 
rests is one against which the Doctor ex- 
pressed a strong opinion, whenever he heard 
it introduced. Nothing, he thought, could 
be more unreasonable than that the use of 
what is no ways hurtful or unlawful in itself, 
should be prohibited because it was liable to 
abuse. If that principle be once admitted, 
where is it to stop ? There was a Persian 
tyrant, who having committed some horrible 
atrocity in one of his fits of drunkenness, 
ordered all the wine in his dominions to be 
spilt as soon as he became sober, and was 
conscious of what he had done ; and in this 
he acted rightly, under a sense of duty as 
well as remorse ; for it was enjoining obe- 
dience to a law of his religion, and enforcing 
it in a manner the most effectual. But a 
Christian government, which because drun- 
kenness is a common sin shall prohibit all 
spirituous liquors, would by so doing subject 
the far greater and better part of the com- 
munity to an unjust and hurtful privation; 
thus punishing the sober, the inoffensive, and 
the industrious, for the sake of the idle, the 
worthless, and the profligate. 

Jones of Nayland regarded these things 
with no puritanical feeling. " In joy and 
thanksgiving," says that good and true 
minister of the Church of England, " the 
tongue is not content with speaking ; it must 
evoke and utter a song, while the feet are 
also disposed to dance to the measures of 
music, as was the custom in sacred cele- 
brities of old among the people of God, 
before the World and its vanities had en- 
grossed to themselves all the expressions of 
mirth and festivity. They have now left 



nothing of that kind to religion, which 
must sit by in gloomy solemnity, and see the 
World with the Flesh and the Devil assume 
to themselves the sole power of distributing 
social happiness." 

" Dancing," says Mr. Burchell, " appears 
to have been in all ages of the world, and 
perhaps in all nations, a custom so natural, 
so pleasing, and even useful, that we may 
readily conclude it will continue to exist as 
long as mankind shall continue to people the 
earth. We see it practised as much by the 
savage as by the civilised, as much by the 
lowest as by the highest classes of society ; 
and as it is a recreation purely corporeal, 
and perfectly independent of mental quali- 
fication, or refinement, all are equally fitted 
for enjoying it : it is this probably which 
has occasioned it to become universal. All 
attempts therefore at rendering any exertion 
of the mind necessary to its performance, 
are an unnatural distortion of its proper and 
original features. Grace and ease of motion 
are the extent of its perfection ; because 
these are the natural perfections of the 
human body. Every circumstance and ob- 
ject by which man is surrounded may be 
viewed in a philosophical light ; and thus 
viewed, dancing appears to be a recreative 
mode of exercising the body and keeping it 
in health, the means of shaking off spleen, 
and of expanding one of the best characters 
of the heart, — the social feeling. When it 
does not affect this, the fault is not in the 
dance, but in the dancer ; a perverse mind 
makes all things like itself. Dancing and 
music, which appear to be of equal anti- 
quity, and equally general among mankind, 
are connected together only by a Community 
of purpose : what one is for the body, the 
other is for the mind." 

The Doctor had come to a conclusion not 
unlike this traveller's concerning dancing, — 
he believed it to be a manifestation of that 
instinct by which the young are excited to 
wholesome exercise, and by which in riper 
years harmless employment is afforded for 
superfluous strength and restless activity. 
The delight which girls as well as boys take 
in riotous sports were proof enough, he said, 



504 



THE DOCTOR. 



that Nature had not given so universal an 
inclination without some wise purpose. An 
infant of six months will ply its arms and 
legs in the cradle, with all its might and 
main, for joy, — this being the mode of 
dancing at that stage of life. Nay, he said, 
he could produce grave authorities on which 
casuists would pronounce that a probable 
belief might be sustained, to prove that it is 
an innate propensity, and of all propensities 
the one which has been developed in the 
earliest part of mortal existence ; for it is re- 
corded of certain Saints, that on certain holi- 
days, dedicated either to the mystery, or to 
the heavenly patron under whose particular 
patronage they were placed, they danced 
before they were born, a sure token or 
presage of their future holiness and canoni- 
sation, and a not less certain proof that the 
love of dancing is an innate principle. 

Lovest thou Music ? 

- Oh, 'tis sweet ! 
What's dancing? 

E'en the mirth of feet.* 



CHAPTER CXCI. 

A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE 
OF THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN WHICH 
TIME IS MIS-SPENT. 

Time, as he passes us, has a dove's wing, 
Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound ; 
But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade ! 
Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged, 
With motley plumes ; and where the peacock shews 
His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red 
With spots quadrangular of diamond form, 
Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife, 
And spades, the emblem of untimely graves. 

COWPER. 

Hunting, gaming, and dancing are three 
propensities to which men are inclined 
equally in the savage and in the civilised, — 
in all stages of society from the rudest to the 
most refined, and in all its grades ; the 
Doctor used to say they might be called 
! semi-intellectual. The uses of hunting are 
obvious, wherever there are wild animals 
which may be killed for food, or beasts of 

* From a Masque quoted by D'Israeli. 



prey which for our own security it is ex- 
pedient to destroy. 

Indeed because hunting, hawking, and 
fishing, (all which according to Gwillim and 
Plato are comprised in the term Venation,) 
tend to the providing of sustenance for man, 
Farnesius doth therefore account them all a 
species of agriculture. The great heraldic 
author approves of this comprehensive classi- 
fication. But because the more heroic 
hunting, in which danger is incurred from 
the strength and ferocity of the animals 
pursued, hath a resemblance of military 
practice, he delivers his opinion that "this 
noble kind of venation is privileged from 
the title of an Illiberal Art, being a princely 
and generous exercise ; and those only, who 
use it for a trade of life, to make sure 
thereof, are to be marshalled in the rank of 
mechanics and illiberal artizans." The 
Doctor admired the refinement of these 
authors ; but he thought that neither lawful 
sporting nor poaching could conveniently be 
denominated agricultural pursuits. 

He found it not so easy to connect the 
love of gaming with any beneficial effect ; 
some kind of mental emotion however, he 
argued, was required for rendering life 
bearable by creatures with whom sleep is 
not so completely an act of volition, that 
like dogs they can lie down and fall asleep 
when they like. For those persons, therefore, 
who are disposed either by education, 
capacity, or inclination to make any worthier 
exertion of their intellectual faculties, 
gaming, though infinitely dangerous as a 
passion, may be useful as a pastime. It has 
indeed a strong tendency to assume a 
dangerous type, and to induce as furious an 
excitement as drunkenness in its most fero- 
cious form ; but among the great card- 
playing public of all nations, long experience 
has produced an effect in mitigating it, 
analogous to what the practice of inoculation 
has effected upon the small-pox. Vaccina- 
tion would have afforded our philosopher a 
better illustration, if it had been brought 
into notice during his life. 

Pope has assigned to those women who 
neither toil or spin, " an old age of cards," 



THE DOCTOR. 



505 



after " a youth of pleasure." This, perhaps, 
is not now so generally the course of female 
life, in a certain class and under certain 
circumstances, as it was in his days and in 
the Doctor's. The Doctor certainly was 
of opinion that if the senescent spinsters and 
dowagers within the circle of his little world 
had not their cards as duly as their food, 
many of them would have taken to some- 
thing worse in their stead. They would 
have sought for the excitement which they 
now found at the whist or quadrille table 
from the bottle, or at the Methodist Meet- 
ing. In some way or other, spiritual or 
spirituous, they must have had it * ; and the 
more scandalous of these ways was not 
always that which would occasion the 
greatest domestic discomfort, or lead to the 
most injurious consequences. Others would 
have applied to him for relief from maladies 
which, by whatever names they might be 
called, were neither more nor less than the 
effect of that tcedium vitae which besets those 
who having no necessary employment have 
not devised any for themselves. And when 
he regarded the question in this light he 
almost doubted whether the invention of 
cards had not been more beneficial than in- 
jurious to mankind. 

It was not with an unkind or uncharitable 
feeling, still less with a contemptuous one, 
that Anne Seward mentioning the death of 
a lady " long invalid and far advanced in 
life," described her as " a civil social being, 
whose care was never to offend; who had 
the spirit of a gentlewoman in never doing 
a mean thing, whose mite was never with- 
held from the poor ; and whose inferiority 
of understanding and knowledge found 
sanctuary at the card-table, that universal 
leveller of intellectual distinctions." Let 
not such persons be despised in the pride of 
intellect ! Let them not be condemned in 
the pride of self-righteousness ! 

" Our law," says the Puritan Matthew 
Mead, " supposes all to be of some calling, 

* It happened during one of the lamented Southey's 
visits here at the Vicarage, West-Tarring, that a cargo of 
spirits was run close by. His remark was — " Better 
spirituous smuggling than spiritual pride." 



not only men but women, and the young 
ladies too ; and therefore it calls them 
during their virgin state spinsters. But 
alas, the viciousness and degeneracy of this 
age hath forfeited the title. Many can card, 
but few can spin ; and therefore you may 
write them carders, dancers, painters, ranters, 
spenders, rather than spinsters. Industry is 
worn out by pride and delicacy ; the comb 
and the looking-glass possess the place and 
the hours of the spindle and the distaff; and 
their great business is to curl the locks, 
instead of twisting wool and flax. So that 
both males and females are prepared for all 
ill impressions by the mischief of an idle 
education." 

" There is something strange in it," says 
Sterne, " that life should appear so short in 
the gross, and yet so long in the detail. 
Misery may make it so, you'll say; — but 
we will exclude it, — and still you'll find, 
though we all complain of the shortness of life, 
what numbers there are who seem quite over- 
stocked with the days and hours of it, and 
are constantly sending out into the highways 
and streets of the city, to compel guests to 
come in, and take it off their hands : to do 
this with ingenuity and forecast, is not one 
of the least arts and business of life itself; 
and they who cannot. succeed in it, carry as 
many marks of distress about them, as 
bankruptcy itself could wear. Be as careless 
as we may, we shall not always have the 
power, — nor shall we always be in a temper 
to let the account run thus. When the 
blood is cooled, and the spirits which have 
hurried us on through half our days before 
we have numbered one of them, are begin- 
ning to retire; — then wisdom will press a 
moment to be heard, — afflictions, or a bed 
of sickness will find their hours of per- 
suasion : — and should they fail, there is 
something yet behind : — old age will over- 
take us at the last, and with its trembling 
hand, hold iip the glass to us." 



506 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CXCII. 

MORE OF THE DOCTOR' S PHILOSOPHY, WHICH 
WILL AND WILL NOT BE LIKED BY THE 
LADIES, AND SOME OF THE AUTHOR'S 
WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BY THE 
GENTLEMEN. THE READER IS INTRO- 
DUCED TO COUNT CASTIGLIONE, AND TO 
SIR JOHN CHEKE. 

Ou tend Vauteur d, cette heure ? 
Qjuefait-il? llevient-il? Va-t-ilf Ou s'il demeure ? 

L'Auteur. 
Non,je ne reviens pas, car je n'aipas He ; 
Je ne vais pas aussi, car je suis arrete ; 
Et ne demeure point, car, tout de ce pas meme 
Je pretens nCen alter. Moliere. 

The passage with, which the preceding 
Chapter is concluded, is extracted from 
Sterne's Sermons, one of those discourses in 
which he tried the experiment of adapting 
the style of Tristram Shandy to the pulpit ; 
— an experiment which proved as unsuc- 
cessful as it deserved to be. Gray, however, 
thought these sermons were in the style 
which in his opinion was most proper for 
the pulpit, and that they showed " a very 
strong imagination and a sensible head. 
But you see him," he adds, " often tottering 
on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw 
his perriwig in the face of his audience." 

The extract which has been set before the 
reader is one of those passages which bear 
out Gray's judgment; it is of a good kind, 
and in its kind so good, that I would not 
weaken its effect, by inserting too near it 
the following Epigram from an old Maga- 
zine, addressed to a lady passionately fond 
of cards. 

Thou, whom at length incessant gaming dubs, 
Thrice honourable title ! Queen of Clubs, 
Say what vast joys each winning card imparts, 
And that, too justly, called the King of Hearts. 
Say, when you mourn of cash and jewels spoil'd, 
May not the thief be Knave of Diamonds stil'd ? 
One friend, howe'er, when deep remorse invades, 
Awaits thee, Lady ; 'tis the Ace of Spades ! 

It has been seen that the Doctor looked 
upon the love of gaming as a propensity 
given us to counteract that indolence which, 
if not thus amused, would breed for itself 
both real and imaginary evils. And dancing 
he thought was just as useful in counteract- 
ing the factitious inactivity of women in 



their youth, as cards are for occupying the 
vacuity of their minds at a later period. Of 
the three semi-intellectual propensities, as 
he called them, which men are born with, 
those for hunting and gaming are useful 
only in proportion as the earth is uncul- 
tivated, and those by whom it is inhabited. 
In a well-ordered society there would be no 
gamblers, and the Nimrods of such a society 
must, like the heroes in Tongataboo, be con- 
tented with no higher sport than rat- 
catching : but dancing will still retain its 
uses. It will always be the most graceful 
exercise for children at an age when all that 
they do is graceful ; and it will always be 
that exercise which can best be regulated 
for them, without danger of their exerting 
themselves too much, or continuing in it too 
long. And for young women in a certain 
rank, or rather region of life, — the tem- 
perate zone of society, — those who are 
above the necessity of labour, and below the 
station in which they have the command of 
carriages and horses, — that is for the great 
majority of the middle class, — it is the 
only exercise which can animate them to 
such animal exertion as may suffice 

To give the blood its natural spring and play.* 

Mr. Coleridge says (in his Table Talk) 
" that the fondness for dancing in English 
women is the reaction of their reserved man- 
ners : it is the only way in which they can 
throw themselves forth in natural liberty." 
But the women are not more fond of 
it in this country, than they are in France 
and Spain. There can be no healthiar 
pastime for them, — (as certainly there is 
none so exhilarating, and exercise unless 
it be exhilarating is rarely healthful) — 
provided, — and upon this the Doctor always 
insisted, — provided it be neither carried on 
in hot rooms, nor prolonged to late hours. 
They order these things, he used to say, 
better in France; they order them better 
indeed anywhere than in England, and there 
was a time when they were ordered better 
among ourselves. 

" The youth of this city," says the honest 

* SOUTHEY. 



THE DOCTOR. 



507 



old chronicler and historian of the me- 
tropolis his native place, " used on holidays, 
after evening prayers, to exercise their 
basters and bucklers, at their masters doors ; 
and the maidens, one of them playing on a 
timbrel, to dance for garlands hanged 
athwart the streets, which open pastimes in 
my youth, being now suppressed, worser 
practises within doors are to be feared." 

Every one who is conversant with the 
Middle Ages, and with the literature of the 
reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles I. 
must have perceived in how much kindlier 
relations the different classes of society 
existed toward each other in those days than 
they have since done. The very word in- 
dependence had hardly found a place in the 
English language, or was known only as 
denoting a mischievous heresy. It is indeed, 
as one of our most thoughtful contemporaries 
has well said, an " unscriptural word," — and 
" when applied to man, it directly con- 
tradicts the first and supreme laws of our 
nature ; the very essence of which is uni- 
versal dependence upon God, and universal 
interdependence on one another." 

The Great Rebellion dislocated the rela- 
tions which had for some centuries thus 
happily subsisted ; and the money-getting 
system which has long been the moving 
principle of British society, has, aided by 
other injurious influences, effectually pre- 
vented the recovery which time, and the 
sense of mutual interest, and mutual duty, 
might otherwise have brought about. It 
was one characteristic of those old times, 
which in this respect deserve to be called 
good, that the different classes participated 
in the enjoyments of each other. There 
were the religious spectacles, which, instead 
of being reformed and rendered eminently 
useful as they might have been, were de- 
stroyed by the brutal spirit of puritanism. 
There were the Church festivals, till that 
same odious spirit endeavoured to separate, 
and has gone far toward separating, all 
festivity from religion. There were tourna- 
ments and city pageants at which all ranks 
were brought together ; they are now 
brought together only upon the race-course. 



Christmas Mummers have long ceased to be 
heard of. The Morris dancers have all but 
disappeared even in the remotest parts of 
the kingdom. I know not whether a May- 
pole is now to be seen. What between 
manufactures and methodism England is no 
longer the merry England which it was 
once a happiness and an honour to call 
our country. Akenside's words " To the 
Country Gentlemen of England," may be 
well remembered. 

And yet full oft your anxious tongues complain 
That lawless tumult prompts the rustic throng ; 
That the rude Village-inmates now disdain 
Those homely ties which rul'd their fathers long. 
Alas ! your fathers did by other arts 
Draw those kind ties around their simple hearts, 
And led in other paths their ductile will ; 
By succour, faithful counsel, courteous cheer, 
Won them their ancient manners to revere, 
To prize their country's peace and heaven's due rites 
fulfil. 

My friend saw enough of this change in 
its progress to excite in him many me- 
lancholy forebodings in the latter part of his 
life. He knew how much local attachment 
was strengthened by the recollection of 
youthful sports and old customs; and he 
well understood how little men can be 
expected to love their country, who have no 
particular affection for any part of it. 
Holidays he knew attached people to the 
Church, which enjoined their observance; 
but he very much doubted whether Sunday 
Schools would have the same effect. 

In Beaumont and Fletcher's Play of the 
Prophetess, the countrymen discourse con- 
cerning the abdicated Emperor who has 
come to reside among them. One says to 
the other, 

Do you think this great man will continue here ? 

The answer is 

Continue here ? what else ? he has bought the great 

farm; 
A groat man * with a great inheritance 
And all the ground about it, all the woods too, 
And stock'd it like an Emperor. Now all our sports again 
And all our merry gambols, our May Ladies, 
Our evening dances on the green, our songs, 
Our holiday good cheer ; our bagpipes now, boys, 
Shall make the wanton lasses skip again, 
Our sheep-shearings and all our knacks. 



* Southey has inserted a query here. " Qy Manor or 
Mansion." It is usually printed as in the text. — See 
Act v. Sc. iii. 



508 



THE DOCTOR. 



It is said, however, in the Cortegiano ; — 
Che non saria conveniente che un gentilhuomo 
andasse ad honorare con la persona sua una 
festa di contado, dove i spettatori, et i com- 
pagni fussero gente ignobile. What follows 
is curious to the history of manners. Disse 
allhor il S. Gasparo Pallavicino, net paese 
nostro di Lombardia non «' hanno queste ris- 
petti : anzi molti gentiV huomini giovani tro- 
vansi, che le feste ballano tuttoV di nel Sole 
co i villani, et con esti giocano a lanciar la 
barra, lottare, correre et saltare ; et io non 
credo che sia male, perch e ivi non si fa para- 
gone della nobiltd, ma delta for za, e destrezza, 
nelle quai cose spesso gli huomini di villa non 
vaglion meno che i nobili; et par che que 
quella domestichezza habbia in se una certa 
liber alitd amabile. — An objection is made to 
this ; Quel ballar nel Sole, rispose M. Fede- 
rico, a me non piace per modo alcuno ; ne so 
che guadagno vi si trovi. Ma chi vuol pur 
lottar, correr et saltar co i villani, dee (al 
parer mid) farlo in modo di provarsi, et 
(come si suol dir) per gentilezza, non per con- 
tender con loro, et dee V huomo esser quasi 
sicuro di vincere ; altramente non vi si metta ; 
perche sta troppo male, et troppo e brutta cosa, 
et fuor de la dignitd vedere un gentilhuomo 
vinto da un villano, et massimamente alia 
lotta ; perb credo io che sia ben astenersi 
almano in presentia di molti, perche il gua- 
dagno nel vincere e pochissimo, et la perdita 
nelV esse vinto e grandissima. 

That is, in the old version of Master 
Thomas Hoby ; — "It were not meet that a 
gentleman should be present in person, and 
a doer in such a matter in the country, where 
the lookers-on and the doers were of a base 
sort. Then said the Lord Gasper Pallavi- 
cino, in our country of Lombardy these 
matters are not passed upon ; for you shall 
see there young gentlemen, upon the holy- 
days, come dance all the day long in the sun 
with them of the country, and pass the time 
with them in casting the bar, in wrestling, 
running and leaping. And I believe it is 
not ill done ; for no comparison is there 
made of nobleness of birth, but of force and 
sleight ; in which things many times the men 
of the country are not a whit inferior to gen- 



tlemen : and it seemeth this familiar con- 
versation containeth in it a certain lovely 
freeness." " The dancing in the sun," an- 
swered Sir Frederick, " can I in no case 
away withal ; and I cannot see what a man 
shall gain by it. But whoso will wrestle, 
run and leap with men of the country, ought, 
in my judgment, to do it after a sort ; to 
prove himself, and (as they are wont to say) 
for courtesy, not to try mastery with them. 
And a man ought (in a manner) to be as- 
sured to get the upper hand, else let him 
not meddle withal ; for it is too ill a sight, 
and too foul a matter, and without estima- 
tion, to see a gentleman overcome by a carter, 
and especially in wrestling. Therefore I be- 
lieve it is well done to abstain from it, at the 
leastwise in the presence of many ; if he be 
overcome, his gain is small, and his loss in 
being overcome very great." 

This translation is remarkable for having 
a Sonnet, or more correctly speaking a qua- 
torzain by Sackville prefixed to it, and at 
the end of the volume a letter of Sir John 
Cheke's to the translator, curious for its 
peculiar spelling, and for the opinion ex- 
pressed in it that our language ought as 
much as possible to be kept pure and un- 
mixed. 

" I have taken sum pain," he says, " at 
your request, cheflie in. your preface; not in 
the reading of it, for that was pleasaunt unto 
me, boath for the roundnes of your saienges 
and welspeakinges of the saam, but in chang- 
ing certein wordes which might verie wel be 
let aloan, but that I am verie curious in mi 
freendes matters, not to determijn, but to 
debaat what is best. Whearin I seek not 
the bestnes haplie bi truth, but bi mijn own 
phansie and sheo of goodnes. 

" I am of this opinion that our own tung 
shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt 
and unmangeled with borowing of other 
tunges ; wherein if we take not heed bi tijm, 
ever borowing and never payeng, she shall 
be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For 
then doth our tung naturallie and praise- 
ablie utter her meaning, when she boroweth 
no conterfectness of other tunges to attire 
her self withall, but useth plainlie her own 



THE DOCTOR. 



509 



with such shift as nature, craft, experiens, 
and Mowing of other excellent doth lead 
her unto ; and if she went at ani tijm (as 
being unperfight she must) yet let her borow 
with suche bashfulnes, that it mai appear, 
that if either the mould of our own tung 
could serve us to fascion a woord of our own, 
or if the old denisoned wordes could content 
and ease this neede, we wold not boldly 
venture of unknoven wordes. This I say, 
not for reproof of you, who have scarslie and 
necessarily used, whear occasion serveth, a 
strange word so, as it seemeth to grow out 
of the matter and not to be sought for ; but 
for mijn our defens, who might be counted 
overstraight a deemer of thinges, if I gave 
not thys accompt to you, my freend and wijs, 
of mi marring this your handiwork. 

M But I am called awai. I prai you pardon 
mi shortnes ; the rest of my saienges should 
be but praise and exhortacion in this your 
doinges, which at moar leisor I shold do 
better. 

From my house in Wood street 
the 16 of July 1557. 

Yours assured 

Joan Cheek." 

Sir John Cheke died about two months 
after the date of this letter : and Hoby's 
translation was not published till 1561, be- 
cause "there were certain places in it, 
which of late years being misliked of some 
that had the perusing of it, the Author 
thought it much better to keep it in dark- 
ness a while, then to put it in light, unper- 
fect, and in piecemeal, to serve the time." 
The book itself had been put in the list of 
prohibited works, and it was not till 1576 
that the Conte Camillo Castiglione, the au- 
thor's son, obtained permission to amend the 
obnoxious passages and publish an expur- 
gated edition. 

It would have vexed Sir John if he had 
seen with how little care the printer, and 
his loving friend Master Hoby observed his 
system of orthography, in this letter. For 
he never used the final e unless when it is 
sounded, which he denoted then by doubling 
it ; he rejected the y, wrote u when it was 



long, with a long stroke over it, doubled the 
other vowels when they were long, and 
threw out all letters that were not pro- 
nounced. No better system of the kind has 
been proposed, and many worse. Little 
good would have been done by its adoption, 
and much evil, if the translators of the Bible 
had been required to proceed upon his 
principle of using no words but such as were 
true English of Saxon original. His dislike 
of the translation for corrupting as he thought 
the language into vocables of foreign growth, 
made him begin to translate the New Testa- 
ment in his own way. The Manuscript in 
his own hand, as far as it had proceeded, is 
still preserved at Bene't College*, and it 
shows that he found it impracticable to ob- 
serve his own rule. But though as a pre- 
cisian he would have cramped and im- 
poverished the language, he has been praised 
for introducing a short and expressive style, 
avoiding long and intricate periods, and for 
bringing " fair and graceful writing into 
vogue." He wrote an excellent hand him- 
self, and it is said that all the best scholars 
in those times followed his example, " so that 
fair writing and good learning seemed to 
commence together." 

O Soul of Sir John Cheke, thou wouldst 
have led me out of my way, if that had been 
possible, — if my ubiety did not so nearly re- 
semble ubiquity, that in Anywhereness and 
Everywhereness I know where I am, and 
can never be lost till I get out of Whereness 
itself into Nowhere. 



* This has been since printed with a good Glossary by 
the Rev. James Goodwin, Fellow and Tutor of Corpus 
Christi Coll. Cambridge, and is very curious. All that 
remains is the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and part 
of the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. Mark. 
As an instance of Cheke's Englishisms I may refer to the 
rendering of trgotrriXvToii in c. xxiii. v. 15. by freschman. 
Some little of the MS. is lost. — See Preface, p. 10. 



510 



THE DOCTOK. 



CHAPTER CXCHI. 

master thomas mace, and the two his- 
torians of his science, sir john haw- 
kins and dr. burney. some account 
of the oed eutanist and of his 
" music's monument." 

This Man of Music hath more in his head 
Than mere crotchets. Sir W. Davenant. 

Thou wast informed, gentle Reader, in the 
third Volume, and at the two hundred and 
sixth* page of this much-hereafter-to-be- 
esteemed Opus, that a Tattle de Moy was a 
new-fashioned thing in the Year of our 
Lord 1676. This was on the authority of 
the good old Lutanist, whom, I then told 
you, I took leave of but for a while, bethink- 
ing me of Pope's well-known lines, 

But all our praises why should Lords engross ? 
Rise, honest Muse ! and sing the Man of Ross. 

And now, gentle reader, seeing that 
whether with a consciousness of second sight 
or not, Master Mace, praiseworthy as the 
Man of Ross, has so clearly typified my 
Preludes and Voluntaries, my grave Pavines 
and graver Galliards, my Corantoes and 
Serabands, my Chichonas, and above all my 
Tattle-de-Moys, am I not bound in grati- 
tude to revive the memory of Master Mace ; 
or rather to extend it and make him more 
fully and more generally known than he has 
been made by the two historians of his 
science Sir John Hawkins and Dr. Burney ? 
It is to the honour of both these eminent 
men, who have rendered such good services 
to that science, and to the literature of their 
country, that they should have relished the 
peculiarities of this simple-hearted old lu- 
tanist. But it might have been expected 
from both ; for Dr. Burney was as simple- 
hearted himself, and as earnestly devoted to 
the art : and Sir John, who delighted in 
Ignoramus and in Izaak Walton, could not 
fail to have a liking for Thomas Mace. 

" Under whom he was educated," says Sir 
John, " or by what means he became pos- 
sessed of so much skill in the science of 

* P. 213. of this Edition. 



music, as to be able to furnish out matter 
for a folio volume, he has nowhere informed 
us ; nevertheless his book contains so many 
particulars respecting himself, and so many 
traits of an original and singular character, 
that a very good judgment may be formed 
both of his temper and ability. With regard 
to the first, he appears to have been an 
enthusiastic lover of his art ; of a very de- 
vout and serious turn of mind; and cheer- 
ful and good-humoured under the infirmities 
of age, and the pressure of misfortunes. 
As to the latter his knowledge of music 
seems to have been confined to the practice 
of his own instrument ; and so much of the 
principles of the science as enabled him to 
compose for it ; but for his style in writing 
he certainly never had his fellow." 

This is not strictly just as relating either 
to his proficiency in music, or his style as an 
author. Mace says of himself, " having said 
so much concerning the lute, as also taken 
so much pains in laying open all the hidden 
secrets thereof, it may be thought I am so 
great a lover of it, that I make light esteem 
of any other instrument besides ; which 
truly I do not ; but love the viol in a very 
high degree ; yea close unto the lute ; and 
have done much more, and made very many 
more good and able proficients upon it, than 
ever I have done upon the lute. And this 
I shall presume to say, that if I excel in 
either, it is most certainly upon the viol. 
And as to other instruments, I can as truly 
say, I value every one that is in use, ac- 
cording to its due place ; as knowing and 
often saying, that all God's creatures are 
good ; and all ingenuities done by man, are 
signs, tokens, and testimonies of the wisdom 
of God bestowed upon man." 

So also though it is true that Thomas 
Mace stands distinguished among the writers 
on Music, yet it could be easy to find many 
fellows for him as far as regards peculiarity 
of style. A humourist who should collect 
odd books might form as numerous a library, 
as the man of fastidious taste who should 
confine his collection to such works only as 
in their respective languages were esteemed 
classical. "The singularity of his style," 



THE DOCTOR. 



►11 



says Sir John, " remarkable for a profusion 
of epithets and words of his own invention, 
and tautology without end, is apt to disgust 
such as attend less to the matter than 
manner of his book ; but in others it has a 
different effect ; as it exhibits, without the 
least reserve, all the particulars of the 
author's character, which was not less ami- 
able than singular." — " The vein of humour 
that runs through it presents a lively por- 
traiture of a good-natured, gossipping old 
man, virtuous and kind-hearted." — The 
anxious " precision with which he constantly 
delivers himself, is not more remarkable 
than his eager desire to communicate to 
others all the knowledge he was possessed 
of, even to the most hidden secrets." — 
" The book breathes throughout a spirit of 
devotion ; and, agreeable to his sentiments 
of music is a kind of proof that his temper 
was improved by the exercise of his pro- 
fession." — There is no pursuit by which, if 
it be harmless in itself, a man may not be 
improved in his moral as well as in his 
intellectual nature, provided it be followed 
for its own sake : but most assuredly there 
is none however intrinsically good, or bene- 
ficial to mankind, from which he can desire 
any moral improvement, if his motive be 
either worldly ambition, or the love of gain. 
— 'ASvvcltov e/c (pavXrjg CKpop/xf/g {ttI rb TtXog 
fidpafieiv.* 

To give an account of " Music's Monu- 
ment," which Dr. Burney calls a matchless 
book, not to be forgotten among the curio- 
sities of the seventeenth century ! will be to 
give the character of Thomas Mace himself, 
for no author ever more compleatly em- 
bodied his own spirit in his writings. 

It is introduced with an Epistle Dedica- 
tory, which by an easy misrepresentation 
has been made to appear profane. 

To Thee, One-Only-Oneness, I direct 

My weak desires and works. 

Thou only art The Able True Protector ; 

Oh be my shield, defender and director, 

Then sure we shall be safe. 

Thou know'st, O Searcher of all hearts how I, 

With right, downright, sincere sincerity, 

Have longed long to do some little good, 

(According to the best I understood) 

* Iamblichus. 



With thy rich talent, though by me made poor, 
For which 1 grieve, and will do so no more, 
By thy good Grace assisting, which I do 
Most humbly beg for. Oh, adjoin it to 
My longing ardent soul ; and have respect 
To this my weak endeavour, and accept, 
In thy great mercy, both of it and me, 
Even as we dedicate ourselves to Thee. 

An Epistle, in verse, follows, "to all 
Divine Readers, especially those of the 
Dissenting Ministry, or Clergy, who want 
not only skill, but good will to this most 
excelling part of divine service, viz. singing 
of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, to the 
praise of the Almighty, in the public As- 
semblies of his Saints : and yet more par- 
ticularly, to all great and high Persons, 
Supervisors, Masters, or Governors of the 
Church, (if any such there should be,) 
wanting skill, or good will thereunto." 

He says to those " high men of honour," 
that 

Example is the thing ; 
There's but one way, which is yourselves to sing. 
This sure will do it ; for when the vulgar see 
Such worthy presidents their leaders be, 
Who exercise therein and lead the van, 
They will be brought to't, do they what they can. 
But otherwise for want of such example, 
Tis meanly valued, and on it they trample ; 
And by that great defect, so long unsought, 
Our best Church Music's well-nigh brought to nought. 

Besides, 
No robes adorn high persons like to it ; 
No ornaments for pure Divines more fit. 

That Counsel given by the Apostle Paul 
Does certainly extend to Christians all. 
Colossians the third, the sixteenth verse ; 
(Turn to the place :) that text will thus rehearse, 
Let the word of Christ dwell in you plent( ously, 
(What follows ? Music in its excellency.) 
Admonishing yourselves, in sweet accord. 
In singing psalms with grace unto the Lord, 
Sed sine arte, that cannot be done, 
Et sine arte, better let alone. 

Having thus " fronted this Book with the 
divine part, and preached his little short 
sermon" upon the last of St. Paul, he says 
that his first and chief design in writing 
this book was only to discover the occult 
mysteries of the noble lute, and to shew the 
great worthiness of that too much neglected 
and abused instrument, and his good will to 
all the true lovers of it, in making it plain 
and easy, giving the true reasons why it has 
been formerly a very hard instrument to 
play well upon, and also why now it is 



512 



THE DOCTOR. 



become so easy and familiarly pleasant. 
" And I believe," says he, " that whosoever 
will but trouble himself to read those reasons, 
— and join his own reason, with the reason- 
ableness of those reasons, will not be able 
to find the least reason to contradict those 
reasons." 

He professed that by his directions " any 
person, young or old, should be able to per- 
form so much and so well upon it, in so 
much or so little time, towards a full and 
satisfactory delight and pleasure, (yea, if it 
were but only to play common toys, jigs or 
tunes,) as upon any instrument whatever ; 
yet with this most notable and admirable 
exception, (for the respectable commenda- 
tion of the lute,) that they may, besides 
such ordinary and common contentments, 
study and practice it all the days of their 
lives, and yet find new improvements, yea 
doubtless if they should live unto the age 
of Methusalem, ten times over ; for there is 
no limitation to its vast bounds and bravery." 
It appears that the merit of this book in 
this respect is not overstated : one of his sons 
attained to great proficiency on this instru- 
ment by studying the book without any 
assistance from his father ; and Sir John 
Hawkins affirms on his own knowledge that 
Mr. John Immyns, lutanist to the Chapel 
Royal, has the like experience of it. " This 
person who had practised on sundry instru- 
ments for many years, and was able to sing 
his part at sight, at the age of forty took to 
the lute, and by the help of Mace's book 
alone, became enabled to play thorough 
base, and also easy lessons on it ; and by 
practice had rendered the tablature as fami- 
liar to him, as the notes of the scale." 

The notation called the tablature is mi- 
nutely explained in the work. It has not the 
least relation to the musical character ; the 
six strings of the lute are represented by as 
many lines, " and the several frets or stops 
by the letters a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, y, (a 
preference to i as being more conspicuous,) 
k ; the letter a ever signifying the open 
string in all positions." Many persons have 
been good performers on the lute, and at 
the same time totally ignorant of the notes 



of the Gamut. His printer, he said, " had 
outdone all music work in this kind ever 
before printed in this nation ; and was 
indeed the only fit person to do the like, he 
only having those new materials, the like to 
which was never had made before in Eng- 
land." They might have been more distinct, 
and more consistent; — five being common 
English characters, the c more resembling 
the third letter in the Greek alphabet than 
any thing else, the b reversed serving for g, 
and the d in like manner for e. 

The characters for the time of notes he 
compares to money, as supposing that most 
people would be ready enough to count 
them the better for that. Considering 
therefore the semi-breve as a groat, the 
minim becomes two pence, the crotchet a 
penny, the quaver a half-penny, and the 
semi-quaver a farthing. "Trouble not your- 
self for the demi-quaver," he says, " till you 
have a quick hand, it being half a semi- 
quaver." 

But besides these, there are marks in his 
notation for the fifteen graces which may be 
used upon the lute, though few or none used 
them all. They are the Shake, the Beat, 
the Back-fall, the Half-fall, the Whole-fall, 
the Elevation, the Single Relish, the Double 
Relish, the Slur, the Slide, the Spinger, the 
Sting, the Tutt, the Pause and the Soft and 
Loud Play, " which is as great and good a 
grace as any other whatever." 

" Some," says Master Mace, " there are, 
and many I have met with, who have such a 
natural agility in their nerves, and aptitude 
to that performance, that before they could 
do any thing else to purpose, they would 
make a shake rarely well. And some again 
can scarcely ever gain a good shake, by 
reason of the unaptness of their nerves to 
that action, but yet otherwise come to play 
very well. I, for my own part, have had 
occasion to break both my arms ; by reason 
of which, I cannot make the nerve-shake 
well, nor strong ; yet by a certain motion of 
my arm, I have gained such a contentive 
shake, that sometimes my scholars will ask 
me, how they shall do to get the like. I 
have then no better answer for them, than 



THE DOCTOR. 



513 



to tell them, they must first break their 
arm, as I have done ; and so possibly after 
that, by practice, they may get my manner 
of Shake." 

Rules are given for all these graces, but 
observe, he says, " that whatever your grace 
be, you must in your farewell express the 
true note perfectly, or else your pretended 
grace, will prove a disgrace." 

" The Spinger is a grace very neat and 
curious, for some sort of notes, and is done 
thus : After you have hit your note, you 
must just as you intend to part with it, dab 
one of your rest fingers lightly upon the 
same string, a fret or two frets below, (ac- 
cording to the air,) as if you did intend to 
stop the string, in that place, yet so gently, 
that you do not cause the string to sound, 
in that stop, so dab'd ; but only so that it 
may suddenly take away that sound which 
you last struck, yet give some small tincture 
of a new note, but not distinctly to be heard 
as a note ; which grace, if well done and 
properly, is very taking and pleasant." 

The Sting is " another very neat and 
pretty grace," it makes the sound seem to 
swell with pretty unexpected humour, and 
gives much contentment upon cases. 

The Tut is easily done, and always with 
the right hand. " When you would perform 
this grace, it is but to strike your letter 
which you intend shall be so graced, with 
one of your fingers, and immediately clap 
on your next striking finger upon the string 
which you struck; in 'which doing, you 
suddenly take away the sound of the letter ; 
and if you do it clearly, it will seem to speak 
the word, Tut, so plainly, as if it were a 
living creature, speakable!" 

While, however, the pupil was intent upon 
exhibiting these graces, the zealous master 
exhorted him not to be unmindful of his 
own, but to regard his postures, for a good 
posture is comely, creditable and praise- 
worthy, and moreover - advantageous as to 
good performance. " Set yourself down 
against a table, in as becoming a posture, as 
you would choose to do for your best repu- 
tation. Sit upright and straight ; then take 
up your lute, and lay the body of it in your 



lap across. Let the lower part of it lie 
upon your right thigh, the head erected 
against your left shoulder and ear ; lay your 
left hand down upon the table, and your 
right arm over the lute, so that you may set 
your little finger down upon the belly of the 
lute, just under the bridge, against the 
treble, or second string : and then keep 
your lute stiff", and strongly set with its 
lower edge against the table- edge ; and so, 
leaning your breast something hard against 
its ribs, cause it to stand steady and strong, 
so that a bystander cannot easily draw it from 
your breast, table, and arm. This is the most 
becoming, steady and beneficial posture." 

"Your left hand thus upon the table, 
your lute firmly fixed, yourself and it in your 
true postures, — bring up your left hand 
from the table, bended, just like the balance 
of a hook, all excepting your thumb, which 
must stand straight and span'd out; your 
fingers also, all divided out from the other 
in an equal and handsome order ; and in 
this posture, place your thumb under the 
neck of the lute, a little above the fret, just 
in the midst of the breadth of the neck ; all 
your four-fingers in this posture, being held 
close over the strings on the other side, so 
that each finger may be in a readiness to 
stop down upon any fret. And now in this 
lively and exact posture, I would have your 
posture drawn, which is the most becoming 
posture I can direct unto for a lutanist." 

" Know that an old lute is better than a 
new one." Old instruments indeed are 
found by experience to be far the best, the 
reasons for which Master Mace could no 
further dive into than to say, he appre- 
hended, "that by extreme age, the wood 
and those other adjuncts, glue, parchment, 
paper, linings of cloth, (as some used,) but 
above all the varnish, are by time very 
much dried, limped, made gentle, rarified, 
or to say better, even airified ; so that that 
stiffness, stubbornness, or clunguiness which 
is natural to such bodies, are so debilitated 
and made pliable, that the pores of the wood 
have a more free liberty to move, stir or 
secretly vibrate ; by which means the air, 
(which is the life of all things both animate 



514 



THE DOCTOR. 



and inanimate,) has a more free and easy 
recourse to pass and repass, &c. Whether 
I have hit upon the right cause I know not, 
but sure I am that age adds goodness to 
instruments." 

The Venice lutes were commonly good; 
and the most esteemed maker was Laux 
Malles, whose name was always written in 
text letters. Mace had seen two of his lutes, 
" pitiful, old, battered, cracked things ; " yet 
for one of these, which Mr. Gootiere the 
famous lutanist in his time showed him, the 
King paid an hundred pounds. The other 
belonged to Mr. Edward Jones, one of 
Gootiere' s scholars ; and he relates this 
" true story " of it ; that a merchant bar- 
gained with the owner to take it with him 
in his travels, on trial ; if he liked it, he was 
on his return to give an hundred pounds for 
it ; otherwise he was to return it safe, and 
pay twenty pounds " for his experience and 
use of it." — He had often seen lutes of three 
or four pounds a-piece " more illustrious and 
taking to a common eye." 

The best shape was the Pearl mould, both 
for sound and comeliness, and convenience 
in holding. The best wood for the ribs was 
what he calls air-wood, this was absolutely 
the best ; English maple next. There were 
very good ones, however, of plum, pear, yew, 
rosemary-air, and ash. Ebony and ivory, 
though most costly and taking to a common 
eye, were the worst. For the belly the 
finest grained wood was required, free from 
knots or obstructions ; cypress was very 
good, but the best was called Cullen's-cliff, 
being no other than the finest sort of fir, 
and the choicest part of that fir. To try 
whether the bars within, to strengthen and 
keep it straight and tight, were all fast, you 
were gently to knock the belly all along, 
round about, and then in the midst, with 
one of your knuckles ; " if any thing be 
either loose in it, or about it, you may easily 
perceive it, by a little fuzzing or hizzing ; 
but if all be sound, you shall hear nothing 
but a tight plump and twanking knock." 

Among the aspersions against the lute 
which Master Mace indignantly repelled, 
one was that it cost as much in keeping 



as a horse. " I do confess," s^id he, " that 
those who will be prodigal and extraordinary 
curious, may spend as much as may main- 
tain two or three horses, and men to ride 
upon them too if they please. But he never 
charged more than ten shillings for first 
stringing one, and five shillings a quarter 
for maintaining it with strings." 

The strings were of three sorts, minikins, 
Venice Catlins, and Lyons, for the basses ; 
but the very best for the basses were called 
Pistoy Basses ; these, which were smooth 
and well-twisted strings, but hard to come 
by, he supposes to be none others than thick 
Venice Catlins, and commonly dyed of a 
deep dark red. The red strings, however, 
were commonly rotten, so were the yellow ; 
the green sometimes very good ; the clear 
blue the best. But good strings might be 
spoilt in a quarter of an hour, if they were 
exposed to any wet, or moist air. Therefore 
they were to be bound close together, and 
wrapt closely up either in an oiled paper, 
a bladder, or a piece of sere cloth, " such as 
often comes over with them," and then to 
be kept in some close box, or cupboard, but 
not amongst linen, (for that gives moisture,) 
and in a room where is usually a fire. And 
when at any time you open them for your use, 
take heed they lie not too long open, nor in a 
dark window, nor moist place ; for moisture 
is the worst enemy to your strings. 

" How to choose and find a true string,, 
which is the most curious piece of skill in 
stringing, is both a pretty curiosity to do, 
and also necessary. First, draw out a 
length, or more ; then take the end, and 
measure the length it must be of, within an 
inch or two, (for it will stretch so much at 
least in the winding up,) and hold that 
length in both hands, extended to reasonable 
stiffness : then, with one of your fingers 
strike it ; giving it so much liberty in slack- 
ness as you may see it vibrate, or open 
itself. If it be true, it will appear to the 
eye just as if they were two strings ; but 
if it shows more than two, it is false, and 
will sound unpleasantly upon your instru- 
ment, nor will it ever be well in tune, either 
stopt or open, but snarl." Sir John Hawkins 



THE DOCTOR. 



515 



observes that this direction is given by- 
Adrian Le Roy in his instructions for the 
lute, and is adopted both by Mersennus and 
Kircher. Indeed this experiment is the 
only known test of a true string, and for 
that reason is practised by such as are 
curious at this day. 

In his directions for playing, Master Mace 
says, " take notice that you strike not your 
strings with your nails, as some do, who 
maintain it the best way of play ; but I do 
not ; and for this reason ; because the nail 
cannot draw so sweet a sound from the lute 
as the nibble end of the flesh can do. I con- 
fess in a concert it might do well enough, 
where the mellowness, (which is the most 
excellent satisfaction from a lute,) is lost in 
the crowd; but alone, I could never re- 
ceive so good content from the nail as from 
the flesh." 

Mace considered it to be absolutely neces- 
sary that all persons who kept lutes should 
know how to repair them ; for he had known 
a lute " sent fifty or sixty miles to be mended of 
a very small mischance, (scarce worth twelve 
pence for the mending,) which besides the 
trouble and cost of carriage, had been 
broken all to pieces in the return, and so 
farewell lute and all the cost." One of the 
necessary tools for this work is "a little 
working knife, such as are most commonly 
made of pieces of broken good blades, 
fastened into a pretty thick haft of wood or 
bone, leaving the blade out about two or 
three inches ; " " grind it down upon the 
back," he says, " to a sharp point, and set to 
a good edge ; it will serve you for many 
good uses, either in cutting, carving, making 
pins, &c." 

His directions for this work are exceed- 
ingly minute ; but when the lute was in 
order, it was of no slight importance to keep 
it so, and for this also he offers some choice 
observations. "You shall do well, ever 
when you lay it by in the day-time, to put 
it into a bed that is constantly used, be- 
tween the rug and blanket, but never be- 
tween the sheets, because they may be 
moist." "This is the most absolute and 
best place to keep it in always." There are 



many great commodities in so doing ; it will 
save your strings from breaking, it will keep 
your lute in good order, so that you shall 
have but small trouble in tuning it ; it will 
sound more brisk and lively, and give you 
pleasure in the very handling of it 5 if you 
have any occasion extraordinary to set up 
your lute at a higher pitch, you may do it 
safely, which otherwise you cannot so well 
do, without danger to your instrument and 
strings : it will be a great safety to your 
instrument, in keeping it from decay, it will 
prevent much trouble in keeping the bars from 
flying loose and the belly from sinking : and 
these six conveniences considered all together, 
must needs create a seventh, which is, that 
lute-playing must certainly be very much fa- 
cilitated, and made more delightful thereby. 
Only no person must be so inconsiderate as 
to tumble down upon the bed whilst the 
lute is there, for I have known," said 
he, " several good lutes spoilt with such a 
trick." 

I will not say of the reader, who after the 
foregoing specimens of Music's Monument 
has no liking for Master Mace and his book, 
that he 

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoil, 
but I cannot but suspect that he has no taste 
for caviare, dislikes laver, would as willingly 
drink new hock as old, and more willingly 
the base compound which passes for cham- 
pagne, than either. ~Nay I could even sus- 
pect that he does not love those " three 
things which persons loving, love what they 
ought, — the whistling of the wind, the 
dashing of the waves, and the rolling of 
thunder : " and that he comes under the 
commination of this other triad, " let no one 
love such as dislike the scent of cloves, the 
taste of milk, and the song of birds." My 
Welsh friends shall have the pleasure of 
reading these true sayings, in their own an- 
cient, venerable, and rich language. 

Tri dyn o garu tri pheth a garant a ddy- 
laint; gorddyan y gwg?it, boran y tbnau, ac 
angerdd y daran. 

Tri pheth ma chared neb a *u hanghara : 
rhogleu y meillion, bias llaeth, a chdn adar. 



516 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CXCIV. 

A MUSIC LESSON FROM MASTER THOMAS 

MACE TO BE PLATED BY LADY FAIR : 

A STORY, THAN WHICH THERE IS NONE 
PRETTIER IN THE HISTORY OP MUSIC. 

What shall I say ? Or shall I say no more ? 

1 must go on ! I'm brim-fall, running o'er. 

But yet I'll hold, because I judge ye wise ; 

And few words unto such may well suffice. 

But much— much more than this I could declare ; 

Yet for some certain reasons I'll forbear. 

But less than this I could not say ; because, 

If saying less, I should neglect my cause, 

For 'tis the Doctor's cause I plead so strong for, 

And 'tis his cause compleated that I long for, 

And 'tis true doctrine certainly I preach, 

And 'tis that doctrine every priest should teach. 

Thomas Mace, to all divine readers. 

O Lady fair, before we say, 

Now cease my lute ; this is the last 
Labour that thou and I shall waste, 
And ended is that we begun ; 
My lute be still, for I have done : * 

before we say this, O Lady fair, play I pray 
you the following lesson by good Master 
Mace. It will put you in tune for the story 
" not impertinent " concerning it, which he 
thought fit to relate, although, he said, many 
might choose to smile at it. You may thank 
Sir John Hawkins for having rendered it 
from tablature into the characters of musical 
notation. 



±Y^ C 1— 


=^^H-= 


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— i — \— 


y 1 

-a 


- — L_ "-J 11 




-J-J- 



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-&■ 







Sir Thomas Wvat. 



" This Lesson," says Master Mace, " I 
call my Mistress, and I shall not think it 
impertinent to detain you here a little longer 
than ordinary in speaking something of it, 
the occasion of it, and why I give it that 
name. And I doubt not, but the relation I 
shall give may conduce to your advantage 
in several respects, but chiefly in respect of 
Invention. 

" You must first know, That it is a lesson, 
though old ; yet I never knew it disrelished 
by any, nor is there any one lesson in this 
Book of that age, as it is ; yet I do esteem it 
(in its kind) with the best Lesson in the 
Book, for several good reasons, which I shall 
here set down. 

" It is, this very winter, just forty years 
since I made it — and yet it is new, because 
all like it, — and then when I was past being 
a suitor to my best beloved, dearest, and 
sweetest living Mistress, but not married, 
yet contriving the best, and readiest way to- 
wards it ; And thus it was, 

"That very night, in which I was thus 
agitated in my mind concerning her, my 
living Mistress, — she being in Yorkshire, 
and myself at Cambridge, close shut up in 
my chamber, still and quiet, about ten or 
eleven o'clock at night, musing and writing 
letters to her, her Mother, and 
some other Friends, in sum- 
ming up and determining the 
whole matter concerning our 
Marriage. You may conceive 
I might have very intent 
thoughts all that time, and 
might meet with some difficul- 
ties, for as yet I had not gained 
her Mother's consent, — so that 
in my writings I was sometimes 
put to my studyings. At which 
times, my Lute lying upon my 
table, I sometimes took it up, 
and walked about my chamber, 
letting my fancy drive which 
way it would, — (for I studied 
nothing, at that time, as to 
Music,) — yet my secret genius 
or fancy prompted my fingers, 
do what I could, into this very 



£e|12 



THE DOCTOR. 



517 



humour. So that every time I walked, and 
took up my Lute, in the interim, betwixt 
writing and studying, this Air would needs 
offer itself unto me continually ; insomuch 
that, at the last, (liking it well, and lest it 
should be lost,) I took paper and set it 
down, taking no further notice of it at that 
time. But afterwards it passed abroad for a 
very pleasant and delightful Air amongst all. 
Yet I gave it no name till a long time after, 
nor taking more notice of it, in any parti- 
cular kind, than of any other my Compo- 
sures of that nature. 

"But after I was married, and had brought 
my wife home to Cambridge, it so fell out 
that one rainy morning I stay'd within, 
and in my chamber my wife and I were all 
alone, she intent upon her needlework, and 
I playing upon my Lute, at the table by her. 
She sat very still and quiet, listening to all 
I played without a word a long time, till at 
last, I hapned to play this lesson ; which, so 
soon as I had once played, she earnestly de- 
sired me to play it again, 'for,' said she, 
' That shall be called my Lesson.' 

"From which words, so spoken, with em- 
phasis and accent, it presently came into my 
remembrance, the time when, and the occa- 
sion of its being produced, and I returned 
her this answer, viz., That it may very pro- 
perly be called your Lesson, for when I 
composed it you were wholly in my fancy, and 
the chief object and ruler of my thoughts ; 
telling her how, and when it was made. 
And therefore, ever after, I thus called it 
My Mistress, and most of my scholars since 
call it Mrs. Mace, to this day. 

" Thus I have detained you, (I hope not 
too long,) with this short relation ; nor 
should I have been so seemingly vain, as to 
have inserted it, but that I have an intended 
purpose by it, to give some advantage to the 
reader, and doubt not but to do it to those 
who will rightly consider what here I shall 
further set down concerning it. 

" Now in reference to the occasion of it, 
&c. It is worth taking notice, That there 
are times and particular seasons, in which the 
ablest Master of his Art shall not be able to 
command his Invention or produce things so 



times ; but he shall be (as it were) stupid, 
dull, and shut up, as to any neat, spruce, or 
curious Invention. 

" But again, at other times, he will have 
Inventions come flowing in upon him, with 
so much ease and freedom, that his greatest 
trouble will be to retain, remember, or set 
them down, in good order. 

" Yet more particularly, as to the occasion 
of this Lesson, I would have you take notice, 
that as it was at such a time, when I was 
wholly and intimately possessed with the 
true and perfect idea of my living Mistress, 
who was at that time lovely, fair, comely, 
sweet, debonair, uniformly-neat, and every 
way compleat ; how could, possibly, my 
fancy run upon anything at that time, but 
upon the very simile, form, or likeness, of 
the same substantial thing ? 

"And that this Lesson doth represent, 
and shadow forth siich a true relation, as 
here I have made, I desire you to take 
notice of it, in every particular ; which I 
assure myself may be of benefit to any, who 
shall observe it well. 

" First, therefore, observe the two first 
Bars of it, which will give you the Fugue ; 
which Fugue is maintained quite through 
the whole lesson. 

" Secondly, observe the Form, and Shape 
of the whole lesson, which consists of two 
uniform, and equal strains ; both strains 
having the same number of Bars. 

"Thirdly, observe the humour of it; 
which you may perceive (by the marks and 
directions) is not common, 

" These three terms, or things, ought to 
be considered in all compositions, and per- 
formances of this nature, viz. Ayres, or the 
like. 

"The Fugue is lively, ayrey,neat, curious, 
and sweet, like my Mistress. 

"The Form is uniform, comely, sub- 
stantial, grave, and lovely, like my Mistress. 

"The humour is singularly spruce, ami- 
able, pleasant, obliging, and innocent, like 
my Mistress. 

"This relation to some may seem odd, 
strange, humorous, and impertinent ; but to 



18 



THE DOCTOR. 



others (I presume) it may be intelligible 
and useful ; in that I know, by good ex- 
perience, that in Music, all these significa- 
tions, (and vastly many more,) may, by an 
experienced and understanding Artist, be 
clearly, and most significantly expressed ; yea, 
even as by language itself, if not much more 
effectually. And also, in that I know, that 
as a person is affected or disposed in his 
temper, or humour, by reason of what object 
of his mind soever, he shall at that time 
produce matter, (if he be put to it,) answer- 
able to that temper, disposition, or humour, 
in which he is. 

" Therefore I would give this as a caveat, 
or caution, to any, who do attempt to ex- 
ercise their fancies in such matters of 
Invention, that they observe times, and 
seasons, and never force themselves to any- 
thing, when they perceive an 
indisposition; but wait for a 
fitter, and more hopeful sea- 
son, for what comes most com- 
pleatly, comes most familiarly, 
naturally, and easily, without 
pumping for, as we use lo say. 

" Strive therefore to be in a 
good, cheerful, and pleasant 
humour always when you 
would compose or invent, and 
then, such will your produc- 
tions be ; or, to say better, 
chuse for your time of Study, 
and Invention, if you may, 
that time wherein you are so 
disposed, as I have declared. 
And doubtless, as it is in the 
study and productions of Mu- 
sic, so must it needs be in all 
other studies, where the use 
and exercise of fancy is re- 
quirable. 

" I will, therefore, take a little more pains 
than ordinary, to give such directions, as 
you shall no ways wrong, or injure my 
Mistress, but do her all the right you can, 
according to her true deserts. 

"First, therefore, observe to play soft, 
and loud, as you see it marked quite through 
the Lesson. 



" Secondly, use that Grace, which I call 
the Sting, where you see it set, and the 
Spinger after it. 

" And then, in the last four strains, ob- 
serve the Slides, and Slurs, and you cannot 
fail to know my Mistress's Humour, provided 
you keep true time, which you must be ex- 
tremely careful to do in all lessons : For 
Time is the one half of Music. 

" And now, I hope I shall not be very 
hard put to it, to obtain my pardon for all 
this trouble I have thus put you to, in the 
exercise of your patience ; especially from 
those, who are so ingenious and good- 
natured, as to prize, and value, such singular 
and choice endowments, as I have here 
made mention of in so absolute and com- 
pleat a subject." 



My Mistress or Mrs. Mace. 



pgggssi^^ 



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g up -' irwwrng 






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in 



Thomas Mace. 

There is no prettier story in the history 
of Music than this ; and what a loving, 
loveable, happy creature must he have been 
who could thus in his old age have related 
it! 



THE DOCTOR. 



519 



CHAPTER CXCV. 

ANOTHER LESSON, WITH THE STORY AND 
MANNER OF ITS PRODUCTION. 

Oudzt; sge? 5T«0', u; urofiXiiTOV Xoyov, 

iAe|«j, acXXa. rws ircairov tpgtvos. 

Sophocles. 

Master Mace has another lesson which he 
calls Hab-Nab ; it "has neither fugue, nor 
very good form," he says, " yet a humour, 
although none of the best ; " and his " story 
of the manner and occasion of Hab-Nab's 
production," affords a remarkable counter- 
part to that of his favourite lesson. 

" View every bar in it," he says, " and 
you will find not any one Bar like another, 
nor any affinity in the least kind betwixt 
strain and strain, yet the Air pleaseth some 
sort of people well enough ; but for my own 
part, I never was pleased with it ; yet 
because some liked it, I retained it. Nor 
can I tell how it came to pass that I thus 
made it, only I very well remember the 
time, manner, and occasion of its production, 
(which was on a sudden,) without the least 
premeditation, or study, and merely ac- 
cidentally ; and, as we use to say, ex tempore, 
in the tuning of a lute. 

"And the occasion, I conceive, might 
possibly contribute something towards it, 
which was this. 

"I had, at that very instant, when I made 
it, an agitation in hand, viz., the stringing 
up, and tuning of a Lute, for a person of an 
ununiform, and inharmonical disposition, 
(as to Music,) yet in herself well propor- 
tioned, comely, and handsome enough, and 
ingenious for other things, but to Music 
very unapt, and learned it only to please her 
friends, who had a great desire she should 
be brought to it, if possible, but never 
could, to the least good purpose ; so that at 
the last we both grew weary ; for there is 
no striving against such a stream. 

" I say, this occasion possibly might be 
the cause of this so inartificial a piece, in 
regard that that person, at that time, was 
the chief object of my mind and thoughts. 



I call it inartificial, because the chief ob- 
servation (as to good performance) is wholly 
wanting. Yet it is true Music, and has 
such a form and humour, as may pass, and 
give content to many. Yet I shall never 
advise any to make things thus by hab-nab*, 
without any design, as was this. And 
therefore I give it that name. 

u There are abundance of such things to 
be met with, and from the hands of some, 
who fain would pass for good composers ; 
yet most of them may be traced, and upon 
examination, their things found only to be 
snaps and catches; which they, — having 
been long conversant in Music, and can 
command an Instrument, through great and 
long practice, some of them very well, — 
have taken here and there, (hab-nab,) from 
several airs and things of other men's works, 
and put them handsomely together, which 
then pass for their own compositions. 

" Yet I say, it is no affront, offence, or 
injury, to any Master, for another to take 
his Fugue, or Point to work upon, nor dis- 
honour for any Artist so to do, provided he 
shew by his Workmanship, a different Dis- 
course, Form, or Humour. But it is rather 
a credit and a repute for him so to do ; for 
by his works he shall be known. It being 
observable, That great Master Composers 
may all along be as well known by their 
Compositions, or their own compositions 
known to be of them, as the great and 
learned writers may be known by their 
styles and works." 

* Hab-Nab is a good old English word, derived from 
the Anglo-Saxon. Skinner is correct enough. " Temere, 
sine consilio ab AS. Habban Habere, Nabban, non Ha- 
bere, addito scilicet na, non, cum apostropho " WiU- 
nill, i. e. Will ye, or will ye not, is a parallel form. 
Every one will recollect the lines of Hudibras, (Part ii. 
Canto iii.) 

With that he circles draws, and squares, 
With cyphers, astral characters : 
Then looks 'em o'er to understand 'em 
Although set down, hab nab, at random. 
Dr. Grey illustrates the expression from Don Quixote: 
" Let every man," says Sancho Pancha, " take care what 
he talks or how he writes of other men, and not set down 
at rando7n, hab-nab, higgledy-piggledy, what comes into 
his noddle." Part ii. c. iii. 

On referring to the original it will be seen that the 
Translator has used three words for one. " Cada uno 
mire como habla 6 como escriba de las presonas, y no 
ponga a troche mochc lo primero que le viene al magin." 



520 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CXCVI. 

FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MASTER THOMAS 

MACE, HIS LIGHT HEART, HIS SORROWS, 

AND HIS POVERTY, " POORLY, POOR MAN, 

HE LIVED, POORLY, POOR MAN, HE DIED" 
PHINEAS FLETCHER. 

The sweet and the sour, 
The nettle and the flower, 
The thorn and the rose, 
This garland compose. 
Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs. 

Little more is known of Thomas Mace 
than can be gathered from his book. By a 
good portrait of him in his sixty-third year, 
it appears that he was born in 1613, and by 
his arms that he was of gentle blood. And 
as he had more subscribers to his book in 
York than in any other place, (Cambridge 
excepted,) and the name of Henry Mace, 
Clerk, occurs among them, it may be pre- 
sumed that he was a native of that city, or 
of that county. This is the more likely, be- 
cause when he was established at Cambridge 
in his youth, his true love was in Yorkshire ; 
and at that time his travels are likely to 
have been confined between the place of his 
birth and of his residence. 

The price of his book was twelve shillings 
in sheets ; and as he obtained about three 
hundred subscribers, he considered this fair 
encouragement to publish. But when the 
work was completed and the accounts cast 
up, he discovered that "in regard of his 
unexpected great charge, besides his uncon- 
ceivable care and pains to have it compleatly 
done, it could not be well afforded at that 
price, to render him any tolerable or reason- 
able requital." He gave notice therefore, 
that after it should have been published 
three months, the price must be raised; 
" adding thus much, (as being bold to say) 
that there were several pages, yea several 
lessons in this book, (according to the ordi- 
nary value, esteem, or way of procuring such 
things,) which were every one of them of 
more value than the price of the whole book 
by far." 

It might be truly said of him, that 



Poorly, poor man, he lived, poorly, poor man, he died,* 

for he never attained to any higher prefer- 
ment than that of being " one of the Clerks 
of Trinity College." But it may be doubted 
whether any of those who partook more 
largely of the endowment of that noble 
establishment, enjoyed so large a portion of 
real happiness. We find him in the sixty- 
third year of his age, and the fortieth of his 
marriage, not rich, not what the world calls 
fortunate, but a contented, cheerful old man ; 
even though " Time had done to him this 
wrong" that it had half deprived him of his 
highest gratification, for he had become so 
deaf that he could not hear his own lute. 
When Homer says of his own blind bard 
that the Muse gave him good and evil, de- 
priving him of his eyes, but giving him the 
gift of song, we understand the compen- 
sation ; 

Tev trigi Movtr' l$i\'/i<ri, S/Sau V ocyocdov tt xkxm ri, 

but what can compensate a musician for the 
loss of hearing ! There is no inward ear to 
be the bliss of solitude. He could not, like 
Pythagoras, appryroj rivl ical SvatTTiyoriTit) 
SreiorijTi xpw^tvoe, by an effort of ineffable 
and hardly conceivable divinity retire into 
the depths of his own being, and there listen 
to that heavenly harmony of the spheres 
which to him alone of all the human race was 
made audible; — 'Eavrwydp \16vy t<Zv 1-k\ yrjg 
a7rdvT(i>v<JvveTa teal lirrjicoa ra KOCTjxiKa (pBsyfxara 
lvo\iiZ,tv air avrfjg Tfjg Qvcmcrjg 7rr)yrjg Ka\ pi^rjg.'f 
Master Mace had no such supernatural 
faculty, and no such opinion of himself. But 
the happy old man devises a means of over- 
coming to a certain degree his defect by in- 
venting what he called a Dyphone, or Double 
Lute of fifty strings, a representation of which 
is given in his book, as " the one only instru- 
ment in being of that kind, then lately in- 
vented by himself, and made with his own 
hands in the year 1672." 

" The occasion of its production was my 
necessity ; viz. my great defect in hearing ; 
adjoined with my unsatiable love and desire 

* Phineas Fletcher. 
t Iamblichi Liber de Pythagorica Vita, c. xv. 



THE DOCTOR. 



521 



after the Lute. It being an instrument so 
soft, and past my reach of hearing, I did 
imagine it was possible to contrive a louder 
Lute, than ever any yet had been ; where- 
upon, after divers casts and contrivances, I 
pitched upon this order, the which has (in a 
great degree) answered my expectation, it 
being absolutely the lustiest or loudest Lute 
that I ever yet heard. For although I can- 
not hear the least twang of any other Lute, 
when I play upon it, yet I can hear this in 
a very good measure, yet not so loud as to 
distinguish every thing I play, without the 
help of my teeth, which when I lay close to 
the edge of it, (there, where the lace is 
fixed,) I hear all I play distinctly. So that 
it is to me (I thank God !) one of the prin- 
cipal refreshments and contentments I enjoy 
in this world. What it may prove to others 
in its use and service, (if any shall think fit 
to make the like,) I know not, but I conceive 
it may be very useful, because of the several 
conveniences and advantages it has of all 
other Lutes." 

This instrument was on the one side a 
Theorboe, on the other lute, having on the 
former part twenty-six strings, twenty-four 
on the latter. It had a fuller, plumper, and 
lustier sound, he said, than any other lute, 
because the concave was almost as long 
again, being hollow from neck to mouth. 
" This is one augmentation of sound ; there 
is yet another ; which is from the strange 
and wonderful secret, which lies in the 
nature of sympathy, in unities, or the uniting 
of harmonical sounds, the one always aug- 
menting the other. For let two several 
instruments lie -asunder at any reasonable 
distance, when you play upon one, the other 
shall sound, provided they be both exactly 
tuned in unisons to each other ; otherwise 
not. This is known to all curious inspectors 
into such mysteries. If this therefore be 
true, it must needs be granted, that when 
the strings of these two twins, accordingly 
put on, are tuned in unities and set up to a 
stiff lusty pitch, they cannot but more aug- 
ment and advantage one the other." 

Some allowances he begged for it, because 
it was a new-made instrument and could not 



yet speak so well as it would do, when it 
came to age and ripeness, though it already 
gave forth "a very free, brisk, trouling, 
plump and sweet sound," and because it was 
made by a hand that never before attempted 
the making of any instrument. He con- 
cludes his description of it, with what he 
calls a Recreative Fancy : saying, " because 
it is my beloved darling, I seemed, like an 
old doting body, to be fond of it ; so that 
when I finished it, I bedecked it with these 
five rhymes following, fairly written upon 
each belly. 

" First, round the Theorboe knot, thus, 

I am of old, and of Great Britain's fame, 
Theorboe was my name. 

Then next, about the French Lute knot, 
thus, 

I'm not so old ; yet grave, and much acute ; 
My name was the French lute. 

Then from thence along the sides, from one 
knot to the other, thus, 

But since we arethus joined both in one, 
Henceforth our name shall be the Lute Dyphone. 

Then again cross-wise under the Theorboe- 
knot, thus, 

Lo here a perfect emblem seen in me, 
Of England and of France, their unity ; 
Likewise that year they did each other aid, 
I was contrived, and thus compleatly made. 

viz. when they united both against the 

Dutch and beat them soundly, A. D. 1672. 

"Then lastly, under the French Lute-knot, 

thus, 

Long have we been divided, now made one, 
We sang in sevenths ; now in full unison. 
In this firm union, long may we agree, 
No unison is like Lute's harmony. 

Thus in its body, tis trim, spruce and fine 
But in its sp'rit, tis like a thing divine." 

Poor Mace formed the plan of a Music- 
room, and hoped to have erected it himself ; 
" but it pleased God," says he, " to disappoint 
and discourage me several ways, for such a 
work ; as chiefly by the loss of my hearing, 
and by that means the emptiness of my 
purse, (my meaning may easily be guessed 
at,) I only wanted money enough but no 
good will thereunto." However he engraved 
his plan, and annexed a description of it, 



522 



THE DOCTOR. 



" in hopes that at one time or other, there 
might arise some honourable and truly nobly- 
spirited person, or persons, who may con- 
sider the great good use and benefit of such 
a necessary convenience, and also find in his 
heart to become a benefactor to such an 
eminent good work, — for the promotion of 
the art and encouragement of the true lovers 
of it ; there being great need of such a thing, 
in reference to the compleating and illus- 
trating of the University Schools." 

What he designed was a room six yards 
square, having on each side three galleries 
for spectators, each something more than 
three yards deep. These were to be one 
story from the ground, " both for advantage 
of sound, and also to avoid the moisture of 
the earth, which is very bad, both for in- 
strument and strings ;" and the building- 
was to be " in a clear and very delightful 
dry place, both free from water, the over- 
hanging of trees, and common noises." The 
room was for the performers, and it was to 
be " one step higher on the floor than the 
galleries the better to convey the sound to 
the auditors : " — being thus clear and free 
from company, all inconvenience of talking, 
crowding, sweating and blustering, &c. are 
taken away ; the sound has its free and un- 
interrupted passage ; the performers are no 
ways hindered ; and the instruments will 
stand more steadily in tune, (for no lutes, 
viols, pedals, harpsicons, &c, will stand in 
tune at such a time ; no, nor voices them- 
selves ;) " For I have known," says he, " an 
excellent voice, well prepared for a solemn 
performance, who has been put up in a crowd, 
that when he has been to perform his part, 
could hardly speak, and by no other cause 
but the very distemper received by that 
crowd and overheat." 

The twelve galleries, though but little, 
would hold two hundred persons very well ; 
and thus the uneasy and unhandsome ac- 
commodation, which has often happened to 
persons of quality, being crowded up, 
squeezed and sweated among persons of an 
inferior rank, might be avoided, " which 
thing alone, having such distinct reception 
for persons of different qualities, must needs 



be accounted a great conveniency." But 
there was a scientific convenience included 
in the arrangement ; for the lower walls were 
to be " wainscoted, hollow from the wall, 
and without any kind of carved, bossed, or 
rugged work, so that the sound might run 
glib and smooth all about, without the least 
interruption. And through that wainscot 
there must be several conveyances all out 
of the room — by grooves, or pipes to cer- 
tain auditor's seats, where the hearer, as he 
sate, might at a small passage, or little hole, 
receive the pent-up sound, which let it be 
never so weak in the music-room, he, (though 
at the furthest end of the gallery,) should 
hear as distinctly as any who were close by 
it." The inlets into these pipes should be 
pretty large, a foot square at least, yet the 
larger the better, without all doubt, and so 
the conveyance to run proportion ably nar- 
rower, till it came to the ear of the auditor, 
where it need not be above the wideness of 
one's finger end. "It cannot," says he, "be 
easily imagined, what a wonderful advantage 
such a contrivance must needs be, for the 
exact and distinct hearing of music ; without 
doubt far beyond all that ever has yet been 
used. For there is no instrument of touch, 
be it never so sweet, and touched with the 
most curious hand that can be, but in the 
very touch, if you be near unto it, you may 
perceive the touch to be heard ; especially 
of viols and violins : but if you be at a dis- 
tance, that harshness is lost, and conveyed 
unto the air, and you receive nothing but 
the pure sweetness of the instrument ; so as 
I may properly say, you lose the body, but 
enjoy the soul or spirit thereof." 

Such a necessary, ample and most con- 
venient erection would become, he thought, 
any nobleman, or gentleman's house ; and 
there might be built together with it as con- 
venient rooms for all services of a family, as 
by any other contrivance whatever, and as 
magnificently stately. Were it but once 
experienced, he doubted not, but that the 
advantages would apparently show them- 
selves, and be esteemed far beyond what 
he had written, or that others could con- 
ceive. 



THE DOCTOR. 



523 



The last notice -winch we have of good 
Master Mace is an advertisement, dated 
London, 1690, fourteen years after the pub- 
lication of his book. Dr. Burney found it 
in the British Museum, in a collection of 
title-pages, devices and advertisements. It 
is addressed " to all Lovers of the best sort 
of Music." 

Men say the times are strange ; — tis true ; 

'Cause many strange things hap to be. 
Let it not then seem strange to you 

That here oue strange thing more you see. 

That is, in Devereux Court, next the Grecian 
Coffee House, at the Temple back gate, there 
is a deaf person teacheth music to perfec- 
tion ; who by reason of his great age, viz. 
seventy-seven, is come to town, with his 
whole stock of rich musical furniture ; viz. 
instruments and books, to put off, to whom- 
soever delights in such choice things ; for he 
has nothing light or vain, but all substantial 
and solid Music. Some particulars do here 
follow. 

" First, There is a late invented Organ, 
which, for private use, exceeds all other 
fashioned organs whatever ; and for which, 
substantial artificial reasons will be given ; 
and, for its beauty, it may become a noble- 
man's dining-room. 

" Second, There belongs to it a pair of 
fair, large-sized consort viols, chiefly fitted 
and suited for that, or consort use ; and 'tis 
great pity they should be parted. 

" Third, There is a pedal harpsicon, (the 
absolute best sort of consort harpsicon that 
has been invented ; there being in it more 
than twenty varieties, most of them to come 
in with the foot of the player ; without the 
least hindrance of play,) exceedingly plea- 
sant. 

" Fourth, Is a single harpsicon. 

" Fifth, A new invented instrument, called 
a Dvphone, viz. a double lute ; it is both 
theorboe and French lute compleat ; and as 
easy to play upon as any other lute. 

" Sixth, Several other theorboes, lutes and 
viols, very good. 

" Seventh, Great store of choice collec- 
tions of the works of the most famous com- 
posers that have lived in these last hundred 



years, as Latin, English, Italian and some 
French. 

" Eighth, There is the publishers own 
Music's Monument ; some few copies thereof 
he has still by him to put off, it being a sub- 
scribed book, and not exposed to common 
sale. All these will be sold at very easy 
rates, for the reasons aforesaid ; and because, 
indeed, he cannot stay in town longer than 
four months, exactly." 

He further adds, " if any be desirous to 
partake of his experimental skill in this high 
noble art, during his stay in town, he is 
ready to assist them ; and haply, they may 
obtain that from him, which they may not 
meet withal elsewhere. He teacheth these 
five things ; viz. the theorboe, the French 
lute, and the viol, in all their excellent ways 
and uses ; as also composition, together with 
the knack of procuring invention to young 
composers, (the general and greatest diffi- 
culty- they meet withal ;) this last thing not 
being attempted by any author, (as he knows 
of,) yet may be done, though some have been 
so wise, or otherwise to contradict it : 

Sed experientia docuit. 

Any of these five things may be learned so 
understandingly, in this little time he stays, 
by such general rules as he gives, together 
with Music's Monument, (written principally 
to such purposes,) as that any, aptly inclined, 
may, for the future, teach themselves, with- 
out any other help." 

This is the last notice of poor Mace : poor 
he may be called, when at the age of seventy- 
seven he is found in London upon the for- 
lorn hope of selling his instruments and his 
books, and getting pupils during this stay. 
It may be inferred that he had lost the son 
of whose musical proficiency he formerly 
spoke with so much pleasure ; for otherwise 
this professional collection and stock in trade 
would hardly have been exposed to sale, but 
it appears that the good old man retained 
his mental faculties, and his happy and con- 
tented spirit. 

Dr. Burney recommends the perusal of 
what he calls his matchless book " to all 
who have taste for excessive simplicity and 
quaintness, and can extract pleasure from 



524 



THE DOCTOR. 



the sincere and undissernbled happiness of 
an author, who with exalted notions of his 
subject and abilities, discloses to his readers 
every inward working of self-approbation in 
as undisguised a manner, as if he were com- 
muning with himself in all the plenitude of 
mental comfort and privacy." 



CHAPTER CXCVII. 

QUESTION PROPOSED, WHETHER A MAN BE 
MAGNIFIED OR MINIFIED BY CONSIDERING 
HIMSELF UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE 
HEAVENLY BODIES, AND ANSWERED WITH 
LEARNING AND DISCRETION. 

I find by experience that Writing is like Building, 
wherein the undertaker, to supply some defect, or serve 
some convenience which at first he foresaw not, is usually 
forced to exceed his first model and proposal, and many 
times to double the charge and expence of it. 

Dr. John Scott. 

Is man magnified or minified by considering 
himself as under the influence of the hea- 
venly bodies, — not simply as being 

Moved round in earth's dismal course 
With rocks and stones and trees * ; 

but as affected by them in his constitution 
bodily and mental, and dependent on them 
for weal or woe, for good or evil fortune ; 
as subjected, that is, according to astrolo- 
gical belief to 

The Stars, who, by I know not what strange right, 
Preside o'er mortals in their own despite, 
Who without reason, govern those who most, 
(How truly, judge from thence !) of reason boast ; 
And by some mighty magic, yet unknown, 
Our actions guide, yet cannot guide their own.f 

Apart from what one of our Platonic divines 
calls " the power of astral necessity, and un- 
controllable impressions arising from the 
subordination and mental sympathy and 
dependence of all mundane causes," which 
is the Platonist's and Stoic's " proper notion 
of fate | ; " apart, I say, from this, and from 
the Calvinist's doctrine of predestination, is 



* Wordsworth. 
t Churchill. t John Smith. 



tion, that the same celestial movements 
which cause the flux and reflux of the ocean, 
should be felt in the pulse of a patient 
suffering with a fever : and that the eternal 
laws which regulate the stars in their 
courses should decide the lot of an in- 
dividual ? 

Here again a distinction must be made, 
— between the physical theory and the 
pseudo-science. The former is but a ques- 
tion of more or less ; for that men are 
affected by atmospherical influence is proved 
by every endemic disease ; and invalids feel 
in themselves a change of weather as de- 
cidedly as they perceive its effect upon the 
weather-glass, the hygrometer, or the strings 
of a musical instrument. The sense of our 
weakness in this respect, — of our depen- 
dence upon causes over which we have no 
control, and which in their operation and 
nature are inexplicable by us, must have a 
humbling and therefore a beneficial tendency 
in every mind disposed to goodness. It is 
in the order of Providence that we should 
learn from sickness and adversity lessons 
which health and prosperity never teach. 

Some of the old theoretical physicians 
went far beyond this. Sachs von Lewen- 
heimb compared the microcosm of man with 
the macrocosm in which he exists. " The 
heart in the one," he said, "is what the ocean 
is in the other, the blood has its ebbing and 
flowing like the tide, and as the ocean re- 
ceives its impulse from the moon and the 
winds, the brain and the vital spirits act in 
like manner upon the heart." Baillet has 
noticed for censure the title of his book in 
his chapter Des prejuges des Titres des 
Livres; it is Oceanus Macro- Micro- cosmicus. 
Peder Severinsen carrying into his medical 
studies a fanciful habit of mind which he 
might better have indulged in his younger 
days when he was a Professor of Poetry, 
found in the little world of the human body, 
antitypes of everything in the great world, 
its mountains and its valleys, its rivers and 
its lakes, its minerals and its vegetables, its 
elements and its spheres. According to 
him the stars are living creatures, subject to 
the same diseases as ourselves. Ours indeed 



THE DOCTOR. 



525 



are derived from them by sympathy, or 
astral influence, and can be remedied only 
by those medicines, the application of which 
is denoted by their apparent qualities, or by 
the authentic signature of nature. 

This fancy concerning the origin of dis- 
eases is less intelligible than the mythology 
of those Rosicrucians who held that they 
were caused by evil demons rulers of the 
respective planets, or by the Spirits of the 
Firmament and the Air. A mythology this 
may more properly be called than a theory ; 
and it would belong rather to the history of 
Manicheism than of medicine, were it not 
that in all ages fanaticism and imposture 
have, in greater or less degree, connected 
themselves with the art of healing. 

But however dignified, or super-celestial 
the theoretical causes of disease, its effect is 
always the same in bringing home, even to 
the proudest heart, a sense of mortal weak- 
ness : whereas the belief which places man 
in relation with the Stars, and links his 
petty concerns and fortunes of a day with 
the movements of the heavenly bodies, and 
the great chain of events, tends to exalt him 
in his own conceit. The thriftless man in 
middle or low life who says, in common 
phrase, that he was born under a threepenny 
planet, and therefore shall never be worth a 
groat, finds some satisfaction in imputing 
his unprosperity to the Stars, . and casting 
upon them the blame which he ought to 
take upon himself. In vain did an old 
Almanack-maker say to such men of the 
Creator, in a better strain than was often 
attained by the professors of his craft. 

He made the Stars to be an aid unto us, 

Not (as is fondly dream'd) to help undo us : 

Much less without our fault to ruinate 

By doom of irrecoverable Fate. 

And if our best endeavours use we will, 

These glorious Creatures will be helpful still 

In all our honest ways : for they do stand 

To help, not hinder us, in God's command, 

Who doth not only rule them by his powers 

But makes their glory servant unto ours. 

Be wise in Him, and if just cause there be 

The Sun and Moon shall stand and wait on thee. 

On the other hand the lucky adventurer 
proceeds with superstitious confidence in his 
Fortune ; and the ambitious in many in- 
stances have devoted themselves, or been 



deceived to their own destruction. It is 
found accordingly that the professors of 
astrology generally in their private practice 
addressed themselves to the cupidity or the 
vanity of those by whom they were em- 
ployed. Honest professors there were who 
framed their schemes faithfully upon their 
own rules; but the greater number were 
those who consulted their own advantage 
only, and these men being well acquainted 
with human nature in its ordinary character, 
always took this course. — Their character 
has changed as little as human nature itself 
in the course of two thousand years since 
Ennius expressed his contempt for them, in 
a passage preserved by Cicero. 

Non habeo denique nauci Marsum augurem, 
Non vicanos haruspices, non de circo astrologos, 
Non Isiacos conjeclores, non interpretes somnium. 
Non enim sunt it aut scientia aut arte divini, 
Sed superstitiost vates, impudentesque harioli, 
Aut inertes, aut insani, aut quibus egestas imperat : 
Qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam. 
Quibus divitias pollicentur, ab Us drachmamipsi pelunt. 
De his divitiis sibi deducant drachmam, reddant ccetera. 

Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar were each 
assured by the Chaldaeans that he should die 
in his own house, in prosperity, and in a 
good old age. Cicero tells us this upon his 
own knowledge : Quam multa ego Pompeio, 
quam multa Crasso, quam multa huic ipsi 
Ccesari a Chaldceis dicta memini, neminem 
eorum nisi senectute, nisi domi, nisi cum clari- 
tate esse moriturum I ut mihi ermirum 
videatur, quemquam extare, qui etiam nunc 
credat iis, quorum p?xedicta quotidie videat re 
et eventis refelli. 

And before the age of Ennius, Euripides 
had in the person of Tiresias shown how 
surely any such profession, if the professor 
believed in his own art, must lead to mar- 
tyrdom, or falsehood. When the blind old 
Prophet turns away from Creon, he says, in 
words worthy of Milton's favourite poet, 

Toe fx.lv ?rcc% rifAuv itocvt £%£'?" r,yov, rixror, 
TJ(o; cTxov' 'itrrii §' e,ttirii(ii x?^™' T£ X , '!'> 
Mxtocio;' r,v fxiv ix^i*- cr 4 ,ur,vet; Tiix?t 
Uiztos xa.6i(TTr,x' , «S av cl&vorxtnrji, 
Wivhvi h' vt'' o'tKTOv roitri x" a ". u -^°'i Myaiv, 
' Admit roc tmv OtMv. Q>oi{3ov etvBgutroti uctov 
Xg>]v OttmaiSuv, 'it Biioixtv o&hitoc. 

The sagacity of the poet will be seen by 
those who are versed in the history of the 



526 



THE DOCTOR. 



Old Testament ; and for those who are not 
versed in it, the sooner they cease to be 
ignorant in what so nearly concerns them, 
the better it may be for themselves. 

Jeremy Taylor says that he reproves 
those who practised judicial astrology, and 
pretended to deliver genethliacal predictions, 
"not because their reason is against re- 
ligion, for certainly," said he, " it cannot be ; 
but because they have not reason enough in 
what they say; they go upon weak prin- 
ciples which they cannot prove ; they reduce 
them to practice by impossible mediums ; 
they argue about things with which they 
have little conversation. Although the art 
may be very lawful if the stars were upon 
the earth, or the men were in heaven, if 
they had skill in what they profess, and 
reason in all their pretences, and after 
all that their principles were certain, and 
that the stars did really signify future 
events, and that those events were not 
overruled by everything in heaven and 
in earth, by God, and by our own will and 
wisdom, — yet because here is so little 
reason and less certainty, and nothing but 
confidence and illusion, therefore it is that 
religion permits them not ; and it is not the 
reason in this art that is against religion, 
but the folly or the knavery of it ; and the 
dangerous and horrid consequents which 
they feel that run a-whoring after such 
idols of imagination." 

In our days most of those persons who 
can afford to employ the greater part of 
their thoughts upon themselves fall at a 
certain age under the influence either of a 
physical or a spiritual director, for Pro- 
testantism has its Directeurs a3 well as 
Popery, less to its advantage and as little to 
its credit. The spiritual professors have 
the most extensive practice, because they, 
like their patients, are of all grades, and are 
employed quite as much among the sound 
as the sick. The astrologer no longer 
contests the ascendancy with either. That 
calling is now followed by none but such 
low impostors, that they are only heard of 
when one of them is brought before a 
magistrate for defrauding some poor cre- 



dulous creature in the humblest walks of 
life. So low has that cunning fallen, which 
in the seventeenth century introduced its 
professors into the cabinets of kings, and 
more powerful ministers. An astrologer 
was present at the birth of Louis XIV., 
that he might mark with all possible pre- 
cision the exact moment of his nativity. 
After the massacre of St. Bartholomew's 
day, Catherine de Medici, deep in blood as 
she was, hesitated about putting to death 
the King of Navarre and the Prince of 
Conde, and the person of whom she took 
counsel was an astrologer, — had she gone 
to her Confessor their death would have 
been certain. Cosmo Ruggieri was an un- 
principled adventurer, but on this occasion 
he made a pious use of his craft, and when 
the Queen inquired of him what the nativi- 
ties of these Princes prognosticated, he 
assured her that he had calculated them 
with the utmost exactness, and that accord- 
ing to the principles of his art, the State had 
nothing to apprehend from either of them. 
He let them know this as soon as he could, 
and told them that he had given this answer 
purely from regard for them, not from any 
result of his schemes, the matter being in its 
nature undiscoverable by astrology. 

The Imperial astrologers in China excused 
themselves once for a notable failure in their 
art, with more notable address. The error 
indeed was harmless, except in its probable 
consequences to themselves ; they had pre- 
dicted an eclipse, and no eclipse took place. 
But instead of being abashed at this proof 
of their incapacity the ready rogues com- 
plimented the Emperor, and congratulated 
him upon so wonderful and auspicious an 
event. The eclipse, they said, portended 
evil, and therefore in regard to him the 
Gods had put it by. 

An Asiatic Emperor who calls himself 
Brother to the Sun and Moon might well 
believe that his relations would go a little 
out of their way to oblige him, if the Queen 
of Navarre could with apparent sincerity 
declare her belief that special revelations 
are made to the Great, as one of the privi- 
leges of their high estate, and that her 



THE DOCTOR. 



527 



mother, that Catherine de Medici whose 
name is for ever infamous, was thus miracu- 
lously forewarned of every remarkable event 
that befell her husband and her children, 
nor was she herself without her share, in this 
privilege, though her character was not 
more spotless in one point than her mother's 
in another. De ces divins advertissemens, 
she says, je ne me veux estimer digne, toutes- 
fois pour lie me taire comme ingrate des graces 
que fay recedes de Dieu, que je dois etveux 
confesser toute ma vie, pour luy en rendre grace, 
et que chacun le hue aux merveilles des effets 
de sa puissance, bonte, et miser icorde, qu'il luy 
a plufaire en moy,fadvoueray li avoir jamais 
este proclie de quelques signalez accidens, ou 
sinistres, ou heureux, que f en aye eu quelque 
advertissement ou en songe, ou autrement; 
et puis bien dire ce vers, 

De mon bien ou mon mal, mon esprit m'est oracle. 



CHAPTER CXCVIII. 

peter hopkins' views of astrology, his 
skill in chiromancy, palmistry, or 
manual divination wisely tempered, 
spanish proverb and sonnet by bar- 
tolome leonardo de argensola. tip- 
poo sultan. mahometan superstition, 
w. y. playtes' prospectus tor the horn 
book for the remembrance of the 
signs of salvation. 

Seguite dunque con la mente lieta, 
Seguite, Consignor, che com* io dico, 
Presto presto sarete in su la meta. 

Ludovico Dolce. 

Peter Hopkins had believed in astrology 
when he studied it in early life with his 
friend Gray ; his faith in it had been over- 
thrown by observation and reflection, and 
the unperceived influence of the opinions of 
the learned and scientific public ; but there 
was more latent doubt in his incredulity 
than had ever lurked at the root of his 
belief. 

He was not less skilled in the kindred, 
though more trivial art of Chiromancy, Pal- 
mistry, or Manual Divination, for the divine 
origin of which a verse in the Book of Job 



was adduced as scriptural proof; "He sealeth 
up the hand of every man, that all men may 
know his work." The text appears more 
chiromantical in the Vulgate : Qui in manu 
omnium hominum signa posuit: Who has 
placed signs in the hand of all men. The 
uses of the science were represented to be 
such, as to justify this opinion of its origi- 
nation: "For hereby," says Fabian Withers, 
" thou shalt perceive and see the secret 
works of Nature, how aptly and necessarily 
she hath compounded and knit each member 
with other, giving unto the hand, as unto a 
table, certain signs and tokens whereby to 
discern and know the inward motions and 
affections of the mind and heart, with the 
inward state of the whole body : as also 
our inclination and aptness to all our external 
actions and doings. For what more profitable 
thing may be supposed or thought, than when 
a man in himself may foresee and know his 
proper and fatal accidents, and thereby to 
embrace and follow that which is good, and 
to avoid and eschew the evils which are 
imminent unto him, for the better under- 
standing and knowledge thereof?" 

But cautioning his readers against the 
error of those who perverted their belief in 
palmistry and astrology, and used it as a 
refuge or sanctuary for all their evil deeds, 
" we ought," said he, " to know and under- 
stand that the Stars do not provoke or force 
us to anything, but only make us apt and 
prone ; and being so disposed, allure as it 
were, and draw us forward to our natural 
inclination. In the which if we follow the 
rule of Reason, taking it to be our only guide 
and governor, they lose all the force, power 
and effect which they by any means may 
have in and upon us : contrariwise, if we 
give ourselves over to follow our own sen- 
suality and natural dispositions, they work 
even the same effect on us — that they do in 
brute beasts." 

Farther he admonishes all " which should 
read or take any fruit of his small treatise, 
to use such moderation in perusing of the 
same that they do not by and by take in 
hand to give judgment either of their own, 
or other men's estates or nativities, without 



528 



THE DOCTOR. 



diligent circumspection and taking heed; 
weighing and considering how many ways a 
man may be deceived ; as by the providence 
and discretion of the person on whom he 
gives judgment, also, the dispensation of 
God, and our fallible and uncertain specu- 
lation," " Wherefore," he continues, " let all 
men in seeking hereby to foresee their own 
fortune, take heed that by the promise of 
good, they be not elate, or high-minded, 
giving themselves over to otiosity or idle- 
ness, and trusting altogether to the Natural 
Influences ; neither yet by any signs or 
tokens of adversity, to be dejected or cast 
down, but to take and weigh all things with 
such equality and moderation, directing 
their state of life and living to all perfectness 
and goodness, that they may be ready to 
embrace and follow all that which is good 
and profitable ; and also not only to eschew 
and avoid, but to withstand and set at nought 
all evil and adverse fortune, whensoever it 
may happen unto them." 

Whoever studies the history of opinions, 
that is, of the aberrations, caprices, and ex- 
travagances of the human mind, may find 
some consolation in reflecting upon the 
practical morality which has been preached 
not only by men of the most erroneous faith, 
but even by fanatics, impostors and hypo- 
crites, as if it were in the order of Providence 
that there should be no poison which had not 
also some medicinal virtue. The books of 
palmistry have been so worn by perusal that 
one in decent preservation is now among the 
rarities of literature ; and it may be hoped 
that of the credulous numbers who have 
pored over them, many have derived more 
benefit from the wholesome lessons which 
were thus unexpectedly brought home to 
them, than they suffered detriment from 
giving ear to the profession of a fallacious 
art. 

The lesson was so obvious that the Spa- 
niards expressed it in one of their pithy 
proverbs, es nuestra alma en nuestra palma. 
The thought has been expanded into a son- 
net by Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, a 
poet whose strains of manly morality have 
not been exceeded in that language. 



Fabio, pensar que el Padre soberano 

En esas ray as de la palma dieslra 

( Que son arrugas de la piel) te muestra 
Los accidentes del discurso humano; 
Es beber con el vulgo el error vano 

De la ignorancia, su comun maestra. 

Bien te confieso, que la suerte nuestra. 
Mala, o buena, la puso en nuestra mano. 
Di, quidn te estorvara el ser Ret/, si vives 

Sin envidiar la suerte de los Reyes, 
Tan contento y pacifico en la tuya, 

Que esten ociosas para ti sus leyes; 
Y qualquier novedad que el Cielo influya, 

Como cosa ordinaria la recibes f 

Fabius to think that God hath interlined 

The human hand like some prophetic page, 
And in the wrinkles of the palm denned 

As in a map, our mortal pilgrimage, 
This is to follow, with the multitude, 

Error and Ignorance, their common guides, 
Yet heaven hath placed, for evil or for good, 

Our fate in our own hands, whate'er betides, 
Being as we make it. Art thou not a king 

Thyself my friend, when envying not the lot 
Of thrones, ambition hath for thee no sting, 

Laws are to thee as they existed not, 
And in thy harmless station no event 
Can shake the calm of its assured content. 

" Nature," says a Cheirologist, " was a 
careful workman in the creation of the 
human body. She hath set in the hand of 
man certain signs and tokens of the heart, 
brain and liver, because in them it is that 
the life of man chiefly consists, but she hath 
not done so of the eyes, ears, mouth, hands 
and feet, because those parts of the body 
seem rather to be made for a comeliness or 
beauty, than for any necessity." What he 
meant to say was that any accident which 
threatened the three vital parts was be- 
tokened in the lines of the palm, but that 
the same fashioning was not necessary in 
relation to parts which might be injured 
without inducing the loss of life. Therefore 
every man's palm has in it the lines relating 
to the three noble parts; the more minute 
lines are only found on subjects of finer 
texture, and if they originally existed in 
husbandmen and others whose hands, are 
rendered callous by their employments, they 
are effaced. 

It was only cheirologically speaking that 
he disparaged what sailors in their emphatic 
language so truly call our precious eyes and 
limbs, not that he estimated them like 
Tippoo Sultan, who in one of his letters 
says, that if people persisted in visiting a 



THE DOCTOK. 



529 



certain person who was under his displeasure, 
" their ears and noses should be dispensed 
with." This strange tyrant wrote odes in 
praise of himself, and describes the effect 
of his just government to be such, that in 
the security of his protection " the deer of 
the forest made their pillow of the lion and 
the tyger, and their mattress of the leopard 
and the panther." 

Tippoo did not consider ears and noses to 
be superfluities when in that wanton wicked- 
ness which seldom fails to accompany the 
possession of irresponsible power he spoke 
of dispensing with them. But in one in- 
stance arms and legs were regarded as 
worse than superfluous. Some years ago a 
man was exhibited who was born without 
either, and in that condition had found a 
woman base enough to marry him. Having 
got some money together, she one day set 
this wretched creature upon a chimney- 
piece, from whence he could not move, and 
went off with another man, stripping him of 
everything that she could carry away. The 
first words he uttered, when some one came 
into the room and took him down, were an 
imprecation upon those people who had legs 
and arms, because, he said, they were always 
in mischief ! 

The Mahommedans believe that every 
man's fate is written on his forehead, but 
that it can be read by those only whose 
eyes have been opened. The Brahmins say 
that the sutures of the skull describe in like 
manner the owner's destined fortune, but 
neither can this mysterious writing be seen 
by any one during his life, nor decyphered 
after his death. Both these notions are 
mere fancies which afford a foundation for 
nothing worse than fable. Something more 
extraordinary has been excogitated by W. 
Y. Playtes, Lecturer upon the Signs of the 
light of the Understanding. He announces 
to mankind that the prints of the nails of 
the Cross which our Lord showed Thomas 
are printed in the roots of the nails of the 
hands and feet of every man that is born 
into the world, for witnesses, and for leading 
us to believe in the truth of all the signs, 
and graven images and pictures that are 



seen in the Heavenly Looking Glass of Re- 
flection, in the Sun and the Moon and the 
Stars. This Theosophist has published a 
short Prospectus of his intended work 
entitled the Horn Book for the remembrance 
of the Signs of Salvation, which Horn Book 
is (should subscriptions be forthcoming) to 
be published in one hundred and forty-four 
numbers, forming twelve octavo volumes of 
six hundred pages each, with fifty plates, 
maps and tables, and 365,000 marginal re- 
ferences, — being one thousand for every 
day in the year. Wonder not, reader, at the 
extent of this projected work ; for, says the 
author, " the Cow of the Church of Truth 
giveth abundance of milk, for the Babes of 
Knowledge." But for palmistry there was 
a plausible theory which made it applicable 
to the purposes of fraud. 

Among the odd persons with whom Peter 
Hopkins had become acquainted in the 
course of his earlier pursuits, was a sincere 
student of the occult sciences, who, being a 
more refined and curious artist, whenever 
he cast the nativity of any one, took an 
impression from the palm of the hand, as 
from an engraved plate, or block. He had 
thus a fac-simile of what he wanted. Accord- 
ing to Sir Thomas Browne, the variety in 
the lines is so great, that there is almost no 
strict conformity. Bewick in one of his 
works has in this manner printed his own 
thumb. There are French deeds of the 15th 
century which are signed by the imprint of 
five fingers dipt in ink, underwritten Ce est 
la griffe de monseigneur* 

Hopkins himself did not retain any lurk- 
ing inclination to believe in this art. You 
could know without it, he said, whether a 
person were open-handed, or close-fisted, 
and this was a more useful knowledge than 
palmistry could give us. But the Doctor 
sometimes made use of it to amuse children, 
and gave them at the same time playful 
admonition, and wholesome encouragement. 



* The Reader, who is curious in such matters, may 
turn to Ames and Herbert, (Dibdin, ii. 380.) for the hands 
in Holt's Lac Puerorum, emprynted at London by Wyn- 
kyn de Worde. 



530 



THE DOCTOR. 



CHAPTER CXCIX. 

CONCERNING THE GREAT HONOURS TO WHICH 
CERTAIN HORSES HAVE ATTAINED, AND 
THE ROYAL MERITS OF NOBS. 

Siento para contarlas que me llama 
El a mi, yo a mi pluma, ella a lafama. 

Balbuena. 

There have been great and good horses 
whose merits have been recorded in history 
and in immortal song as they well deserved 
to be. Who has not heard of Bucephalus ? 
of whom Pulteney said that he questioned 
whether Alexander himself had pushed 
his conquests half so far, if Bucephalus had 
not stooped to take him on his back. Statius 
hath sung of Arion, who when he carried 
Neptune left the winds panting behind him, 
and who was the best horse that ever has 
been heard of for taking the water. 

Scepe per Ionium Libycumque natantibxis ire 
Interjunctus equis, omnesque assuetus in oras 
Cceruleum defer re pair em. 

Tramp, tramp across the land he went, 
Splash, splash across the sea. 

But he was a dangerous horse in a gig. 
Hercules found it difficult to hold him in, 
and Polynices when he attempted to drive 
him made almost as bad a figure as the 
Taylor upon his ever- memorable excursion 
to Brentford. 

The virtues of Caligula's horse, whom 
that Emperor invited to sup with him, whom 
he made a Priest, and whom he intended to 
make Consul, have not been described by 
those historians who have transmitted to us 
the account of his extraordinary fortune ; 
and when we consider of what materials, 
even in our days, both Priests and Senators 
are sometimes made, we may be allowed to 
demur at any proposition which might in- 
clude an admission that dignity is to be 
considered an unequivocal mark of desert. 
More certain it is that Borysthenes was a 
good horse, for the Emperor Adrian erected 
a monument to his memory, and it was 
recorded in his epitaph that he used to fly 
over the plains and marshes and Etrurian 
hills, hunting Pannonian boars ; he appears 



by his name to have been, like Nobs, of 
Tartaric race. 

Bavieca was a holy and happy horse, — I 
borrow the epithets from the Bishop of 
Chalons's sermon upon the Bells. Gil Diaz 
deserved to be buried in the same grave 
with him. And there is an anonymous 
Horse, of whom honourable mention is made 
in the Roman Catholic Breviary, for his 
religious merits, because after a Pope had 
once ridden him, he never would suffer 
himself to be unhallowed by carrying a 
woman on his back. These latter are both 
Roman Catholic Houyhnhnms, but among 
the Mahometans also, quadrupedism is not 
considered an obstacle to a certain kind of 
canonisation. Seven of the Emperor of 
Morocco's horses have been Saints, or Ma- 
rabouts, as the Moors would call it; and 
some there were who enjoyed that honour 
in the year 1721 when Windus was at 
Mequinez. One had been thus distinguished 
for saving the Emperor's life ; " and if a 
man," says the Traveller, " should kill one 
of his children, and lay hold of this horse, 
he is safe. This horse has saved the lives 
of some of the captives, and is fed with 
cuscuru and camel's milk. After the Em- 
peror has drank, and the horse after him, 
some of his favourites are suffered to drink 
out of the same bowl." This was probably 
the horse who had a Christian slave ap- 
pointed to hold up his tail when he was led 
abroad, and to carry a vessel and towel, — 
" for use unmeet to tell." 

I have discovered only one Houyhnhnm 
who was a martyr, excepting those who are 
sometimes burnt with the rest of the family 
by Captain Rock's people in Ireland. This 
was poor Morocco, the learned horse of 
Queen Elizabeth's days : he and his master 
Banks, having been in some danger of being 
put to death at Orleans, were both burnt 
alive by the Inquisition at Rome, as ma- 
gicians. — The word martyr is here used in 
its religious acceptation : for the victims of 
avarice and barbarity who are destroyed by 
hard driving and cruel usage are numerous 
enough to make a frightful account among 
the sins of this nation. 



THE DOCTOR. 



531 



Fabretti the antiquary had>a horse which, 
when he carried his master on an antiquarian 
excursion, assisted him in his researches ; 
for this sagacious horse had been so much 
accustomed to stop where there were ruins, 
and probably had found so much satisfaction 
in grazing, or cropping the boughs among 
them at his pleasure, that he was become a 
sort of antiquary himself; and sometimes 
by stopping and as it were pointing like a 
setter, gave his master notice of some 
curious and half-hidden objects which he 
might otherwise have passed by unperceived. 

How often has a drunken rider been 
carried to his own door by a sure-footed 
beast, sensible enough to understand that 
his master was in no condition either to 
guide him, or to take care of himself. How 
often has a stage coach been brought safely 
to its inn after the coachman had fallen 
from the box. Kay, was there not a mare 
at Ennis races in Ireland (Atalanta was her 
name) who, having thrown her rider, kept 
the course with a perfect understanding of 
what was expected from her, looked back 
and quickened her speed as the other horses 
approached her, won the race, trotted a few 
paces beyond the post, then wheeled round, 
and came up to the scale as usual ? And 
did not Hurleyburley do the same thing at 
the Goodwood races ? 

That Nobs was the best horse in the world 
I will not affirm. Best is indeed a bold 
word to whatever it be applied, and yet in 
the shopkeeper's vocabulary it is at the 
bottom of his scale of superlatives. A 
haberdasher in a certain great city is still 
remembered, whose lowest priced gloves 
were what he called Best, but then he had 
five degrees of optimism ; Best, Better than 
Best, Best of all, Better than Best of all, 
and the Real Best. It may be said of Nobs, 
then, that he was one of the Real Best : 
equal to any that Spain could have produced 
to compare with him, though concerning 
Spanish horses, the antiquary and historian 
Morales, (properly and as it were pro- 
phetically baptized Ambrosio, because his 
name ought ever to be in ambrosial odour 
among his countrymen,) concerning Spanish 



horses, I say, that judicious author has said, 
la estima que agora se hace en todo el mundo 
de un caballo Espahol es la mas solemne cosa 
que puede haber en animales. 

Neither will I assert that there could not 
have been a better horse than Nobs, because 
I remember how Roger Williams tells us, 
" one of the chiefest Doctors of England 
was wont to say concerning strawberries, 
that God could have made a better berry, 
but he never did." Calling this to mind, I 
venture to say as that chiefest Doctor might, 
and we may believe would have said upon 
the present occasion, that a better horse 
than Nobs there might have been, — but 
there never was. 

The Duchess of Newcastle tells us that 
her Lord, than whom no man could be a 
more competent judge, preferred barbs and 
Spanish to all others, for barbs, he said, 
were like gentlemen in their kind, and 
Spanish horses like Princes. This saying 
would have pleased the Doctor, as coinciding 
entirely with his own opinions. He was no 
believer in equality either among men or 
beasts ; and he used to say, that in a state 
of nature Nobs would have been the king of 
his kind. 

And why not ? If I do not show you 
sufficient precedents for it call me Fimbul 
Fambi. 



CHAPTER CC. 

A CHAPTER OF KINGS. 

Fimbul-Fambi heitr 

Sd erfatt kann segia, 

That er dsnotvrs athal. 

Fimbul-fambi (fatuus) vocatur 

Qui pauca novit narrarc : 

Ea est hominis insciti proprictas. 

Edda, Hava Mai. 

Theke are other monarchies in the inferior 
world, besides that of the Bees, though they 
have not been registered by Naturalists, nor 
studied by them. 

For example, the King of the Fleas keeps 
his court at Tiberias, as Dr. Clarke dis- 
covered to his cost, and as Mr. Cripps will 
testify for him. 



532 



THE DOCTOR. 



The King of the Crocodiles resides in 
Upper Egypt ; he has no tail, but Dr. 
Southey has made one for him. 

The Queen Muscle may be found at the 
Falkland Islands. 

The Oysters also have their King accord- 
ing to Pliny. Theirs seems to be a sort of 
patriarchical monarchy, the King, or per- 
adventure the Queen, Oyster being dis- 
tinguished by its size and age, perhaps 
therefore the parent of the bed ; for every 
bed, if Pliny err not, has its sovereign. In 
Pliny's time the diver made it his first 
business to catch the royal Oyster, because 
his or her Majesty being of great age and 
experience, was also possessed of marvellous 
sagacity, which was exercised for the safety 
of the commonweal ; but if this were taken 
the others might be caught without difficulty, 
just as a swarm of Bees may be secured 
after the Queen is made prisoner. Seeing, 
however, that his Oyster Majesty is not to 
be heard of now at any of the Oyster shops 
in London, nor known at Colchester or 
Milton, it may be that liberal opinions have, 
in the march of intellect, extended to the 
race of Oysters, that monarchy has been 
abolished among them, and that republi- 
canism prevails at this day throughout all 
Oysterdom, or at least in those parts of it 
which be near the British shores. It has 
been observed also by a judicious author 
that no such King of the Oysters has been 
found in the West Indian Pearl fisheries. 

The King of the Bears rules over a terri- 
tory which is on the way to the desert of 
Hawaida, and Hatim Tai married his 
daughter, though the said Hatim was long 
unwilling to become a Mac Mahon by 
marriage. 

" I was told by the Sheikh Othman and 
his- son, two pious and credible persons," 
says the traveller Ibn Batista, "that the 
Monkies have a leader whom they follow as 
if he were their King (this was in Ceylon). 
About his head is tied a turban composed of 
the leaves of trees, (for a crown,) and he 
reclines upon a staff, (which is his sceptre). 
At his right and left hand are four Monkies 
with rods in their hands, (gold sticks,) all 



of which stand at his head whenever the 
leading Monkey (his Majesty) sits. His 
wives and children are daily brought in on 
these occasions, and sit down before him; 
then comes a number of Monkies (his privy 
council), which sit and form an assembly 
about him. After this each of them comes 
with a nut, a lemon or some of the mountain 
fruit, which he throws down before the 
leader. He then eats (dining in public, 
like the King of France,) together with his 
wives, and children, and the four principal 
Monkies : they then all disperse. One of 
the Jogres also told me, that he once saw 
the four Monkies standing in the presence 
of the leader, and beating another Monkey 
with rods ; after which they plucked off all 
his hair." 

The Lion is the King of Beasts. Hut- 
chinson, however, opines that Bulls may be 
ranked in a higher class ; for helmets are 
fortified with their horns, which is a symbol 
of pre-eminence. Certainly he says, both 
the Bull and Lion discover the King, but 
the Bull is a better and more significant 
representative of a King than the Lion. 
But neither Bull nor Lion is King of all 
Beasts, for a certain person whose name 
being anagrammatised render eth Johnny 
the Bear, is notoriously the King of the 
Bears at this time : even Ursa Major would 
not dispute his title. And a certain honour- 
able member of the House of Commons 
would by the tottle of that whole House be 
voted King of the Bores. 

The King of the Codfish frequents the 
shores of Finmark. He has a sort of 
chubbed head, rising in the shape of a crown, 
his forehead is broad, and the lower jaw 
bone projects a little ; in other parts he 
resembles his subjects, whom he leads and 
directs in their migrations. The Laplanders 
believe that the fisherman who takes him 
will from that time forth be fortunate, 
especially in fishing ; and they show their 
respect for his Cod-Majesty, when he is 
taken, by hanging him up whole to dry, 
instead of cutting off his head as they do to 
the common fish. 

In Japan the Tai, which the Dutch call 



THE DOCTOR. 



533 



Steenbrassem, is the King of Fish, because 
it is sacred to their sea-god Jebis, and 
because of its splendid colours, and also, 
perhaps, because of its exorbitant price, it 
being so scarce, that for a court enter- 
tainment, or on other extraordinary occa- 
sions, one is not to be had under a thousand 
cobangs. 

Among the Gangas or Priests of Congo 
is one whose official title is Mutuin, and who 
calls himself King of the Water, for by 
water alone he professes to heal all diseases. 
At certain times all who need his aid are 
assembled on the banks of a river. He 
throws an empty vessel in, repeats some 
mysterious words, then takes it out full and 
distributes the water as an universal me- 
dicine. 

The Herring has been called the King of 
Fish, because of its excellence, the Herring, 
as all Dutchmen know, and as all other men 
ought to know, exceeding every other fish 
in goodness. Therefore it may have been 
that the first dish which used to be brought 
to table in this country on Easter Day, was 
a Red Herring on horseback, set in a corn 
sallad. 

Others have called the Whale, King of 
Fish. But Abraham Rees, D.D. and F.R.S. 
of Cyclopaedian celebrity, assures us that the 
whale,notwithstanding its piscine appearance, 
and its residence in the waters, has no claim 
to a place among fishes. Uncle Toby would 
have whistled Lillabullero at being told that 
the Whale was not a fish. The said Abraham 
Rees, however, of the double Dees, who is, 
as the advertisement on the cover of his own 
Cyclopaedia informs us, " of acknowledged 
learning and industry, and of unquestionable 
experience in this (the Cyclopaedian) depart- 
ment of literary labour," candidly admits 
that the Ancients may surely be excused for 
thinking Whales were fish. But how can 
Abraham Rees be excused for denying the 
Whale's claim to a place among the in- 
habitants of the Great Deep, — which was 
appointed for him at the Creation ? 

But the Great Fish, who is undoubtedly 
the King of Fish, and of all creatures that 
exist in the sea, Whales, Mermen-and-Maids 



included, is the fish Arez, which Ormuzd 
created, and placed in the water that sur- 
rounds Horn, the King of Trees, to protect 
that sacred arboreal Majesty against the 
Great Toad sent there by Ahriman to de- 
stroy it. 

It is related in the same archives of cos- 
mogony that the King of the Goats is a 
White Goat, who carries his head in a 
melancholy and cogitabund position, regard- 
ing the ground, — weighed down perhaps 
by the cares of royalty ; that the King of 
the Sheep has his left ear white, — from 
whence it may appear that the Royal Mutton 
is a black sheep, which the Royal Ram of 
the Fairy Tales is not : that the King of the 
Camels has two white ears : and that the 
King of the Bulls is neither Apis, nor John 
Bull, but a Black Bull with yellow ears. 
According to the same archives, a White 
Horse with yellow ears and full eyes is King 
of the Horses ; — doubtless the Mythological 
Horse King would acknowledge Nobs for 
his Vicegerent. The Ass King is also white : 
his Asinine Majesty has no Vicegerent. The 
number of competitors being so great that 
he has appointed a regency. 

The King of Dogs is yellow. The King 
of Hares red. 

There are Kings among the Otters in the 
Highland waters, and also among their rela- 
tions the Sea Otters. The royal Otter is 
larger than his subjects, and has a white 
spot upon the breast. He shuns observa- 
tion, which it is sometimes provident for 
Kings to do, especially under such circum- 
stances as his, for his skin is in great re- 
quest, among soldiers and sailors ; it is sup- 
posed to ensure victory, to secure the wearer 
from being wounded, to be a prophylactic 
in times of contagious sickness, and a pre- 
servative in shipwreck. But it is not easy 
to find an Otter King, and when found there 
is danger in the act of regicide, for he bears 
a charmed life. The moment in which he is 
killed proves fatal to some other creature, 
either man or beast, whose mortal existence 
is mysteriously linked with his. The nature 
of the Otter monarchy has not been de- 
scribed: it is evident, however, that his 



534 



THE DOCTOR. 



ministers have no loaves to dispose of, — but 
then they have plenty of fishes. 

The Ant, who, when Solomon entered the 
Valley of Ants with his armies of Genii and 
men and birds, spoke to the nation of Ants, 
saying, " O Ants, enter ye not your habita- 
tions, lest Solomon and his host tread you 
under foot, and perceive it not," — that wise 
pismire is said by certain commentators upon 
the Koran to have been the Queen of the 
Ants. 

Men have held the Eagle to be the King 
of Birds ; but, notwithstanding the authority 
of Horace, the Gods know otherwise, for 
they appointed the Tchamrosch to that dig- 
nity, at the beginning. Some writers in- 
deed would have the Eagle to be Queen, 
upon the extraordinary ground that all 
Eagles are hens; though in what manner 
the species is perpetuated these persons have 
not attempted to show. 

The Carrion Crows of Guiana have their 
King, who is a White Crow {vara avis in 
terris) and has wings tipt with black. When 
a flight of these birds arrive at the prey 
which they have scented from afar, however 
ravenous they may be, they keep at a re- 
spectful distance from the banquet, till his 
Carrion Majesty has satisfied himself. But 
there is another Bird, in South America, 
whom all the Birds of prey of every species 
acknowledge for their natural sovereign, 
and carry food to him in his nest, as their 
tribute. 

The King of the Elks is so huge an elk 
that other elks look like pismires beside him. 
His legs are so long, and his strength withal 
such, that when the snow lies eight feet deep 
it does not in the least impede his pace. He 
has an arm growing out of his shoulder, and 
a large §uite who attend upon him wherever 
he goes, and render him all the service he 
requires. 

I have never heard anything concerning 
the King of the Crickets except in a rodo- 
montade of Matthew Merrygreeks, who, said 
Ralph Roister Doister, 

Bet him on Christmas day 
That he crept in a hole, and had not a^ord to say. 

Among the many images of Baal, one was 



the form or representation of a Fly, and 
hence, says Master Perkins, he is called 
Baalzebub the Lord of Flies, because he was 
thought to be the chiefest Fly in the world. 
That is he was held to be the King of the 
Flies. I wish the King of the Spiders would 
catch him. 

The King of the Peacocks may be read of 
in the Fairy Tales. The Japanese name for 
a crane is Tsuri, and the common people in 
that country always give that bird the same 
title which is given to their first secular Em- 
peror, Tsiri-sama — my great Lord Crane. 

The Basilisk, or crowned Cockatrice, who 
is the chief of a Cock's egg, is accounted the 
King of Serpents. And as it has been said 
that there is no Cock Eagle, so upon more 
probable cause it is affirmed that there is no 
female Basilisk, that is no Henatrice, the 
Cock laying only male eggs. But the most 
venomous of this kind is only an earthly and 
mortal vicegerent, for the true King of Ser- 
pents is named Sanc-ha-naga, and formerly 
held his court in Chacragiri, a mountain in 
the remote parts of the East, where he and 
his serpentine subjects were oppressed by 
the Rational Eagle Garuda. In the spirit of 
an imperial Eagle, Garuda required from 
them a serpent every day for his dinner, 
which was regarded by the serpents as a 
most unpleasant tribute, especially by such 
as were full grown and in good condition ; 
for the Rational Eagle being large and strong 
enough to carry Vishnu on his back, ex- 
pected always a good substantial snake suffi- 
cient for a meal. Sanc-ha-naga, like a 
Patriot King, endeavoured to deliver his 
liege subjects from this consuming tyranny ; 
the attempt drew upon him the wrath of 
Garuda, which would soon have been fol- 
lowed by his vengeance, and the King of 
Serpents must have been devoured himself, 
if he and all the snakes had not retired, as 
fast as they could wriggle, to Sanc-ha-vana, 
in Sanc-ha-dwip, which is between Cali and 
the Sea ; there they found an asylum near 
the palace of Carticeya, son of the mountain 
goddess Parvats, and Commander of the 
Celestial Armies. Carticeya is more power- 
ful than Garuda, and therefore the divine 



THE DOCTOR. 



535 



Eagle is too rational to invade them while 
they are under his protection. It would 
have been more fortunate for the -world if the 
King of Serpents had not found any one to 
protect him ; for whatever his merits may 
be towards his subjects, he is a most pestilent 
Potentate, the breath of his nostrils is a 
fiery wind which destroys and consumes all 
creatures and all herbs within an hundred 
yojanas of his abode, and which, in fact, is the 
Simoom, so fatal to those who travel in the 
deserts. The sage Agastya for a time put a 
stop to this evil, for he, by the virtue of his 
self-inflection, obtained such power, that he 
caught Sanc-ha-naga, and carried him about 
in an earthen vessel. That vessel, however, 
must have been broken in some unhappy 
hour, for the fiery and poisonous wind is 
now as frequent as ever in the deserts. 

The Hindoos say that whoever performs 
yearly and daily rites in honour of the King 
of the Serpents will acquire immense 
riches. This King of the Serpents, I say, 
to wit Sanc'-ha-naga, — (or Sane' ha-mucha, 
as he is also called from the shape of his 
mouth resembling that of a shell.) — because 
there is another King of the Serpents, 
Karkotaka by name, whom the sage Xarada 
for deceiving him punished once by casting 
him into a great fire, and confining him 
there by a curse till he was delivered in the 
manner which the reader may find related 
in the 14th book of Xela and Damarante, 
as translated by Mr. Milnian from the 
Sanscrit. 

The Locusts according to Agur in the 
Book of Proverbs have no King, although 
they go forth all of them by bands. Perhaps 
their form of government has changed, for 
the Moors of Morocco inform us that they 
have a sovereign, who leads forth their in- 
numerable armies ; and as his nation belongs 
to the Mahometan world, his title is Sultan 
Jereed. 

The Rose is the Queen of the Garden : 

Plebei cediteflores; 
Hortorurn regina suos ostendit honores. * 

Bampfield Moore Carew was King of the 

* Rapin. 



Beggars ; and James Bosvill was King of 
the Gypsies. He lies buried in Rossington 
Churchyard, near Doncaster, and for many 
years the gypsies from the south visited his 
grave annually, and among other rites poured 
a flagon of ale upon it. 

There was a personage at Oxford who 
bore in that University the distinguished 
title of Rex Kafforum. After taking his 
degree he exchanged it for that of the 
Reverend. 

The Scurr(E, — (\re have no word in our 
language which designates men who profess 
and delight in indulging an ill-mannered 
and worse-minded buffoonery,) — the Scurrce 
also have their King. He bears a Baron's 
coronet. 

The throne of the Dandies has been vacant 
since the resignation of the personage dig- 
nified and distinguished by the title of Beau 
Brummel. 

By an advertisement in the Times of 
Friday, June 18. 1830, I learn that the 
beautiful and stupendous Bradwell Ox is 
at present the " truly wonderful King of the 
Pastures," the said King Ox measuring 
fourteen feet in girth, and sixteen feet in 
length, being eighteen hands high, and five 
years and a half old, and weighing four 
thousand five hundred pounds, or more than 
five hundred and sixty stone, which is nearly 
double the size of large oxen in general. 

Under the Twelve Csesars (and probably 
it might deserve the title long after them), 
the Via Appia was called the Queen of 
Roads. That from Hyde Park Corner is 
Regina viarwn in the 19th century. 

Easter Sunday has been called the King 
of Days, though Christmas Day might dis- 
pute the sovereignty, being in Greek the 
Queen day of the Kalendar. 'H i3a<Ti\i<7<ra 
yjneoa Justin Martyr calls it. 

Who is King of the Booksellers ? There is 
no King among them at this time, but there 
is a Directory of five Members, Longman. 
Rees, Orme, Brown and Green in the East : 
the Emperor Murraylemagne, whom Byron 
used to call the Grand Murray, reigned 
alone in the West, till Henry Colburn 
divided his empire, and supported the sta- 



536 



THE DOCTOR. 



tion which he had assumed by an army of 
trumpeters which he keeps in constant pay. 
If the Books had a King that monarchy 
must needs be an elective one, and the 
reader of these volumes knows where the 
election would fall. But literature being a 
Republic, this cannot be the King of Books. 
Suffice it that it is a Book for a King, or, 
for our Sovereign Lady the Queen. 



INTERCHAPTER XXI. 

MEASURE TOR MEASURE. 

he Plebe e bestia 
Di cento teste, e non rinchiude in loro 
Pur oncia di super. Chiabrera. 

The Public, will, I very well know, make 
free with me more suo, as it thinks it has a 
right to do with any one who comes before 
it with anything designed for its service, 
whether it be for its amusement, its use, or 
its instruction. Now, my Public, I will 
more meo make free with you — that we may 
be so far upon equal terms : 

OuSev t>u •zoi.gtt.iMzix'iw Joyous.* 

You have seldom or never had the truth 
spoken to you when you have been directly 
addressed. You have been called the en- 
lightened Public, the generous Public, the 
judicious Public, the liberal Public, the 
discerning Public, and so forth. Nay your 
bare title the Public oftentimes stands 
alone par excellence in its plain majesty like 
that of the king, as if needing no affix to 
denote its inherent and pre-eminent im- 
portance. But I will speak truth to you, 
my Public. 

Be not deceived ! I have no bended knees, 
No supple tongue, no speeches steep'd in oil, 
No candied flattery, nor honied words ! t 

I must speak the truth to you, my Public, 

Sincera verita non vuol tacersi.% 

Where your enlightenedness (if there be 
such a word) consists, and your generosity, 
and your judgment, and your liberality, and 



* Euripides. 



t Randolph's Aristippus. 
% Chiabrera. 



your discernment, and your majesty to boot, 
— to express myself as Whitfield or Rowland 
Hill would have done in such a case (for 
they knew the force of language) — I must 
say, it would puzzle the Devil to tell. II 
faut librement avec verite /rancher ce mot, 
sans en estre repris ; ou si Von est, c'est tres- 
mal a propos.§ 

I will tell you what you are ; you are a 
great, ugly, many-headed beast, with a great 
many ears which are long, hairy, ticklish, 
moveable, erect, and never at rest. 

Look at your picture in Southey's Hexa- 
meters, — that poem in which his laureated 
Doctorship writes verses by the yard instead 
of the foot, — he describes you as "many- 
headed and monstrous," 

with numberless faces, 
Numberless bestial ears, erect to all rumours, and restless, 
And with numberless mouths which are fill'd with lies as 
with arrows. 

Look at that Picture, my Public ! — It is 
very like you ! 

For individual readers I profess just as 
much respect as they individually deserve. 
There are a few persons in every generation 
for whose approbation, — rather let it be 
said for whose gratitude and love, — it is 
worth while "to live laborious days," and 
for these readers of this generation and the 
generations that are to follow, — for these 

Such as will join their profit with their pleasure, 

And come to feed their understanding parts ; — 

For these I'll prodigally spend myself, 

And speak away my spirit into air ; 

For these I'll melt my brain into invention, 

Coin new conceits, and hang my richest words 

As polished jewels in their bounteous ears.|| 

Such readers, they who to their learning 
add knowledge, and to their knowledge 
wisdom, and to their wisdom benevolence, 
will say to me, 

'CI xocXot Xiyaiv, troXv 5' a.pt.uvo))' trt tuv koyuv 
l%yoarx,fx.lv', ti'O' IniX- 

UoiS OLTOCVTOC /JUOI ffXQijS' 

in; iyoj (Mot hoxSi 
%oiv [AKzeotv flSoi) hiiXduv ojctt' a.xovtroc.1. 
■vgo; rcch' Si j3iXTiim Oxppr^ix.; Xiy\ w; a.- 

But such readers are very few. Walter 
Landor said that if ten such persons should 



§ Brantome. 



Ben Jonson, 



f Aristophanes. 



THE DOCTOR. 



537 



approve his writings, he would call for a 
division and count a majority. To please 
them is to obtain an earnest of enduring 
fame; for which, if it be worth anything, 
no price can be too great. But for the 
aggregate anything is good enough. Yes, 
my Public, Mr. Hume's arithmetic, and Mr. 
Brougham's logic, Lord Castlereagh's syn- 
tax, Mr. Irving's religion, and Mr. Carlisle's 
irreligion, the politics of the Edinburgh Re- 
view, and the criticism of the Quarterly, 
Thames water, Brewers' beer, Spanish loans, 
old jokes, new constitutions, Irish eloquence, 
Scotch metaphysics, Tom and Jerry, Zim- 
merman on Solitude, Chancery Equity and 
Old Bailey Law, Parliamentary wit, the 
patriotism of a Whig Borough-monger, and 
the consistency of a British cabinet ; Et sil 
y a encore quelque chose a dire, je le tiens 
pour dit. — 

Yes, my Public, 

Nor would I you should look for other looks, 
Gesture, or compliment from me. * 

Minus dico quam vellem, et verba omninb 
frigidiora hcec quam ut satis exprimant quod 
concipio "f" : these and anything worse than 
these, — if worse than what is worse can be 
imagined, will do for you. If there be any- 
thing in infinite possibility more worthless 
than these, more floccical-naucical, nihilish- 
pilish, assisal-teruncial, more good for nothing 
than good for nothingness itself, it is good 
enough for you. 



LNTERCHAPTER XXII. 

VARIETY OF STILES. 

Qualis vir, talis 07'atio. 

Erasmi Adagia. 

Authors are often classed, like painters, 
according to the school in which they have 
been trained, or to which they have attached 
themselves. But it is not so easy to ascertain 
this in literature as it is in painting ; and if 
some of the critics who have thus endea- 
voured to class them were sent to school 



* Ben Jonson. 



f PlCUS MlRANDULA. 



themselves, and there whipt into a little more 
learning, so many silly classifications of this 
kind would not mislead those readers who 
suppose, in the simplicity of their own good 
faith, that no man presumes to write upon a 
subject which he does not understand. 

Stiles may with more accuracy be classed, 
and for this purpose metals might be used 
in literature as they are in heraldry. We 
might speak of the golden stile, the silver, 
the iron, the leaden, the pinchbeck and the 
bronze. 

Others there are which cannot be brought 
under any of these appellations. There is 
the Cyclopean stile, of which Johnson is the 
great example ; the sparkling, or micacious, 
possessed by Hazlitt, and much affected in 
Reviews and Magazines ; the oleaginous, in 
which Mr. Charles Butler bears the palm, 
or more appropriately the olive branch : the 
fulminating — which is Walter Landor's, 
whose conversation has been compared to 
thunder and lightning ; the impenetrable — 
which is sometimes used by Mr. Coleridge ; 
and the Jeremy-Benthamite, which cannot 
with propriety be distinguished by any other 
name than one derived from its unparalleled 
and unparallelable author. 

Ex stilo, says Erasmus, perpendimus in- 
genium cujusque, omnemque mentis habitant ex 
ipsa dictionis ratione conjectamus. Est enim 
tumidi, stilus turgidus ; abjecti, humilis, exan- 
guis ; asperi, scaber ; amarulenti, tristis ac 
maledicus ; deliciis affluentis, picturatus ac 
dissolutus ; Sreviter, omne vitae simulacrum, 
omnis animi vis, in oratione perinde ut in 
speculo reprcesentatur, ac vel intima pecto?*is, 
arcanis quibusdam vestigiis, deprehenduntur. 

There is the lean stile, of which Nathaniel 
Lardner, and William Coxe may be held up 
as examples ; and there is the larded one, 
exemplified in Bishop Andrewes, and in 
Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy ; 
Jeremy Taylor's is both a flowery and a 
fruitful stile : Harvey the Meditationist's a 
weedy one. There are the hard and dry ; 
the weak and watery ; the manly and the 
womanly ; the juvenile and the anile ; the 
round and the pointed ; the flashy and the 
fiery ; the lucid and the opaque ; the lumi- 



538 



THE DOCTOR. 



nous and the tenebrous ; the continuous and 
the disjointed. The washy and the slap- 
dash are both much in vogue, especially in 
magazines and reviews ; so are the barbed 
and the venomed. The High-Slang stile is 
exhibited in the Court Journal and in Mr. 
Colburn's novels ; the Low- Slang in Tom 
and Jerry, Bell's Life in London, and most 
Magazines, those especially which are of 
most pretensions. 

The flatulent stile, the feverish, the aguish, 
and the atrabilious, are all as common as the 
diseases of body from which they take their 
name, and of mind in which they originate ; 
and not less common than either is the dys- 
peptic stile, proceeding from a weakness in 
the digestive faculty. 

Learned, or if not learned, Dear Reader, 
I had much to say of stile, but the under 
written passage from that beautiful book, 
Xenophon's Memorabilia Socratis, has in- 
duced me, as the Latins say, stilum vertere, 
and to erase a paragraph written with ink 
in which the gall predominated. 

'Eyij §' OUV X.U.) OLUTOS, S 'AvTItpoJv, cbVTig aXXtt? Til Vj t9CXU> 

ocyocSai ») xvv) '/) cit>vi6i vi&trou, gvtw xa.) 'irt [/.ciXXev '/ibofAott 
ro7i tpiXois Jx.ya.6oig' noci, lotv ti o~x&> ocyocdov bihoitrxeo, xoci 
ocXXoig truvia-T'/i/x.!, va.^' Sv civ fiyaf^cti u$iX'/i<rho-dat.i ti uvtous 
its ocetT'/iv' xoe.) Tovg dYiCotu^oug tmv •xa.Xot.i itoQmv avogw)/, ovg 
ixiivoi xariXfrov iv PifiXioig y^oicpivng, mviXittcuv xoivri <rvv Toig 
QsXois di£g%Of&M' xki oi,v ti o%M/u.iv kya.8ov, exXiyofAiBa,, zcti 
iu,iyoc, vofAi&ftiv xigdog, loot aXXiiXoig mQ&i/aoi yiyvup.iQ<x,. 



INTERCHAPTER XXIII. 

A LITTLE ADVICE BESTOWED UPON THE 
SCORNFUL READER IN A SHORT INTER- 
CHAPTER. 

No man is so foolish but may give another good counsel 
sometimes ; and no man is so wise, but may easily err, if 
he will take no other's counsel but his own. 

Ben Jonson. 

I will now bestow a little advice upon the 
scornful reader. 

"And who the Devil are you," exclaims 
that reader, "who are impertinent enough 
to offer your advice, and fool enough to sup- 
pose that I shall listen to it ? " 

"Whatever your opinion may be, Sir, con- 
cerning an Evil Principle, whether you hold 



with the thorough-paced Liberals, that there 
is no Principle at all, (and in one sense, ex- 
emplify this in your own conduct,) or with 
the Unitarians that there is no Evil one ; or 
whether you incline to the Manichean scheme 
of Two Principles, which is said to have its 
advocates, — in either case the diabolical ex- 
pletive in your speech is alike reprehensible : 
you deserve a reprimand for it ; and you are 
hereby reprimanded accordingly. — Having 
discharged this duty, I answer your question 
in the words of Terence, with which I doubt 
not you are acquainted, because they are to 
be found in the Eton grammar : Homo sum, 
nihil humani a me alienum puto." 

" And what the Devil have the words of 
Terence to do with my query ? " 

"You are again reprimanded, Sir. If it be 
a bad thing to have the Devil at one's elbow, 
it cannot be a good one to have him at one's 
tongue's end. The sentence is sufficiently 
applicable. It is a humane thing to offer 
advice where it is wanted, and a very humane 
thing to write and publish a book which is 
intended to be either useful or delightful to 
those who read it. " 

" A humane thing to write a book ! — 
Martin of Galway's humanity is not a better 
joke than that ! " 

"Martin of Galway's humanity is no joke, 
Sir. He has begun a good work, and will 
be remembered for it with that honour 
which is due to all who have endeavoured 
to lessen the sum of suffering and wickedness 
in this wicked world." 

" Answer me one question, Mr. Author, if 
you please. If your book is intended to be 
either useful or delightful, why have you 
filled it with such a parcel of nonsense ? " 

" What you are pleased to call by that 
name, Mr. Reader, may be either sense or 
nonsense according to the understanding 
which it meets with. Quicguid recipitur, 
recipitur in modum recipients. Look in the 
seventh Chapter of the second book of 
Esdras, and at the twenty-fifth verse you 
will find the solution of your demand." 

"And do you suppose I shall take the 
trouble of looking into the Bible to please 
the humour of such a fellow as you ?" 



THE DOCTOR. 



539 



" If you do not, Sir, there are others who 
will ; and more good may arise from looking 
into that book, — even upon such an occasion, 
— than either they or I can anticipate." 



And so, scornful reader, wishing thee a 
better mind, and an enlightened under- 
standing, I bid thee gladly and heartily 
farewell ! 



PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH VOLUME.* 



INVENIAS ETIAM DISJECT! MEMBRA POET^. 



The present Volume contains all that it is 
thought advisable to publish of the Papers 
and Fragments for The Doctor, &c. Some 
of these Papers, as in the former Volume, 
were written out fair and ready for Publica- 
tion — but the order, and the arrangement 
intended is altogether unknown. 

I have taken care to examine the different 
extracts, — and occasionally I have added a 
note or an explanation, where such seemed 
to be needed. The whole has been printed 



with scrupulous exactness from the MSS. 
The Epilude of Mottoes is a selection from 
such as had not been used in the body 
of the work. Some of them may possibly 
have been quoted before — but if so, it has 
escaped my recollection. — 

Mihi dnlces 
Ignoscent, si quid peccaro stultus, amici, 
Inque vicem iliorum patiar delicta libenter. 

John Wood Warter. 

Vicarage, West-Tarring, Sussex. 
Sept. Uth, 1847. 



CHAPTER CCI. 

question concerning the use of tongues, 
the athanasian confessors. gibbon's 
relation of the supposed miracle of 
tongues. the facts shown to be true, 
the miracle imaginary, and the his- 
torian the dupe of his own unbelief. 

Perseveremus, peractis qua? rem continebant, scrutari 
etiam ea qua?, si vis verum, connexa sunt, non coha?rentia; 
qua? quisquis diligenter inspicit, necfacit opera? pra?tium, 
nee tamen perdit operant. Seneca. 

For what use were our tongues given us ? 
" To speak with, to be sure," will be the 
immediate reply of many a reader. But 
Master, Mistress, Miss or Master Speaker, 
(whichever you may happen to be,) I beg 
leave to observe that this is only one of the 
uses for which that member was formed, 
and that for this alone it has deserved to be 
called an unruly member ; it is not its 
primary, nor by any means its most im- 
portant use. For what use was it given to 



* This refers to Vol. vii. of the edition in 8vo. 



thy labourer the ox, thy servant the horse, 
thy friend, — if thou deservest to have such 
a friend, — the dog, — thy playfellow the 
kitten, — and thy cousin the monkey ? f 

In another place I shall answer my own 
question, which was asked in this place, 
because it is for my present purpose to make 
it appear that the tongue, although a very 
convenient instrument of speech, is not 
necessary for it. 

It is related in Gibbon's great history, a 
work which can never be too highly praised 
for its ability, nor too severely condemned 
for the false philosophy which pervades it, 
that the Catholics, inhabitants of Tipasa, a 
maritime colony of Mauritania, were by 
command of the Arian King, Hunneric, 
Genseric's detestable son and successor, 
assembled on the forum, and there deprived 
of their right hands and their tongues. 
"But the holy confessors," he proceeds to 
say, " continued to speak without tongues ; 



t Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia noti?. 

Ennius. 



540 



THE DOCTOR. 



and this miracle is attested by Victor, an 
African bishop, who published an history of 
the persecution within two years after the 
event. ' If any one,' says Victor, ' should 
doubt of the truth, let him repair to Con- 
stantinople, and listen to the clear and 
perfect language of Restitutus, the sub- 
deacon, one of these glorious sufferers, who 
is now lodged in the palace of the Emperor 
Zeno, and is respected by the devout Em- 
press.' At Constantinople we are astonished 
to find a cool, a learned, an unexceptionable 
witness, without interest and without passion. 
iEneas of Gaza, a Platonic philosopher, has 
accurately described his own observations 
on these African sufferers. 'I saw them 
myself : I heard them speak : I diligently 
inquired by what means such an articulate 
voice could be formed without any organ of 
speech : I used my eyes to examine the 
report of my ears : I opened their mouth, 
and saw that the whole tongue had been 
completely torn away by the roots ; an 
operation which the physicians generally 
suppose to be mortal.' The testimony of 
iEneas of Gaza might be confirmed by the 
superfluous evidence of the Emperor Jus- 
tinian, in a perpetual edict ; of Count 
Marcellinus in his Chronicles of the times ; 
and of Pope Gregory the First, who had 
resided at Constantinople as the minister of 
the Roman Pontiff. They all lived within 
the compass of a century, and they all 
appeal to their personal knowledge, or the 
public notoriety, for the truth of a miracle, 
which was repeated in several instances, 
displayed on the greatest theatre of the 
world, and submitted during a series of 
years, to the calm examination of the senses." 
He adds in a note that " the miracle is 
enhanced by the singular instance of a boy 
who had never spoken before his tongue was 
cut out." 

Now comes the unbelieving historian's 
comment. He says, " this supernatural gift 
of the African confessors, who spoke without 
tongues, will command the assent of those, 
and of those only, who already believe, that 
their language was pure and orthodox. 
But the stubborn mind of an infidel is 



guarded by secret, incurable suspicion ; and 
the Arian, or Socinian, who has seriously 
rejected the doctrines of the Trinity, will 
not be shaken by the most plausible evi- 
dence of an Athanasian miracle." 

Well has the sceptical historian applied 
the epithet stubborn to a mind affected with 
the same disease as his own. 

Oh dear unbelief 
How wealthy dost thou make thy owner's wit ! 
Thou train of knowledge, what a privilege 
Thou givest to thy possessor ! anchorest him 
From floating with the tide of vulgar faith, 
From being damn'd with multitudes ! * 

Gibbon would not believe the story because 
it had been adduced as a miracle in con- 
firmation of the Catholic doctrine as opposed 
to the Arian heresy. He might probably 
have questioned the relation between the 
alleged miracle and the doctrine : and if he 
had argued that it is not consistent with the 
plan of revelation (so far as we may pre- 
sume to reason upon it) for a miracle to be 
wrought in proof of a doctrinal point, a 
Christian who believes sincerely in that very 
doctrine might agree with him. 

But the circumstances are attested, as he 
fairly admits, by the most ample and un- 
exceptionable testimony ; and like the Pla- 
tonic philosopher whose evidence he quotes, 
he ought to have considered the matter of 
fact, without regard to the application which 
the Catholics, in perfect good faith, made 
of it. The story is true, but it is not 
miraculous. 

Cases which demonstrate the latter part 
of this question were known to physiologists 
before a book was published at Paris in the 
year 1765, the title of which I find in Mr. 
DTsraeli's Curiosities of Literature, thus 
translated ; " The Christian Religion proved 
by a single fact ; or a Dissertation in which 
is shown that those Catholics whose tongues 
Hunneric King of the Vandals cut out, 
spoke miraculously all the remainder of 
their days : from whence is deduced the 
consequence of the miracle against the 
Arians, the Socinians and the Deists, and 
particularly against the author of Emilius, 



THE DOCTOR. 



541 



by solving their difficulties." It bears this 
motto, JEcce Ego admirationem facio populo 
Jiuic, miraculo grandi et stupendo. And Mr. 
DTsraeli closes his notice of the Book by 
saying " there needs no farther account of 
it than the title." That gentleman, who has 
contributed so much to the instruction and 
entertainment of his contemporaries, will I 
am sure be pleased at perusing the facts in 
disproof of the alleged miracle, brought 
together here by one who as a Christian 
believes in miracles and that they have not 
ceased, and that they never will cease. 

In the Philosophical Transactions, and in 
the Gentleman's Magazine, is an account of 
a woman, Margaret Cutting by name, who 
about the middle of the last century was 
living at Wickham Market in Suffolk. 
When she was four years of age " a cancer 
ate off her tongue at the root, yet she never 
lost the power of speech, and could both 
read distinctly afterwards and sing." Her 
speech was very intelligible, but it was a 
little through the nose owing to the want of 
the uvula ; and her voice was low. In this 
case a new tongue had been formed, about 
an inch and half in length and half an inch 
broad ; but this did not grow till some years 
after the cure. 

Upon the publication of this case it was 
observed that some few instances of a like 
nature had been recorded ; and one in par- 
ticular by Tulpius of a man whom he had 
himself examined, who, having had his 
tongue cut out by the Turks, could after 
three years speak distinctly. One of the 
persons who published an account of this 
woman saw several men upon whom the 
same act of cruelty had been committed by 
these barbarians or by the Algerines : " one 
of them," says he, " aged thirty-three, 
wrote a good hand, and by that means 
answered my questions. He informed me 
that he could not pronounce a syllable, nor 
make any articulate sound ; though he had 
often observed that those who suffered that 
treatment when they were very young, 
were some years after able to speak; and 
that their tongues might be observed to 
grow in proportion to the other parts of the 



body : but that if they were adults, or full- 
grown persons, at the time of the operation, 
they were never able to utter a syllable. 
The truth of this observation was confirmed 
to me by the two following cases. Patrick 
Strainer and his son-in-law came to Harwich, 
in their way to Holland, the third of this 
month. I made it my business to see and 
examine them. The father told me he had 
his tongue cut out by the Algerines, when he 
was seven years of age : and that some time 
after he was able to pronounce many sylla- 
bles, and can now speak most words toler- 
ably well ; his tongue, he said, was grown at 
least half an inch. The son-in-law, who is 
about thirty years of age, was taken by the 
Turks, who cut out his tongue ; he cannot 
pronounce a syllable ; nor is his tongue 
grown at all since the operation ; which was 
more than five years ago." 

Sir John Malcolm, in one of his visits to 
Persia, became acquainted with Zal Khan 
of Khist, who " was long distinguished as 
one of the bravest and most attached 
followers of the Zend family. When the 
death of Lootf Ali Khan terminated its 
powers, he, along with the other governors of 
provinces and districts in Furs, submitted 
to Aza Mahomed Khan. That cautious and 
cruel monarch, dreading the ability, and 
doubtful of the allegiance of this chief, 
ordered his eyes to be put out. An appeal 
for the recall of the sentence being treated 
with disdain, Zal Khan loaded the tyrant 
with curses. ' Cut out his tongue,' was the 
second order. The mandate was imperfectly 
executed, and the loss of half this member 
deprived him of speech. Being afterwards 
persuaded that its being cut close to the 
root would enable him to speak so as to be 
understood, he submitted to the operation ; 
and the effect has been, that his voice, 
though indistinct and thick, is yet intel- 
ligible to persons accustomed to converse 
with him. This I experienced from daily 
intercourse. He often spoke to me of his 
sufferings and of the humanity of the present 
King, who had restored him to his situation 
as head of his tribe, and governor of Khist. 
— I am not an anatomist," Sir John adds, 



542 



THE DOCTOR. 



" and cannot therefore give a reason why a 
man, who could not articulate with half a 
tongue, should speak when he had none at 
all. But the facts are as stated ; and I had 
them from the very best authority, old Zal 
Khan himself." * 

A case occurred in the household of that 
Dr. Mark Duncan whom our James I. 
would have engaged as his Physician in 
ordinary, but Duncan having married at 
Saumur and settled in that city declined the 
invitation, because his wife was unwilling to 
leave her friends and relations and her 
native place. Yielding therefore, as became 
him, to her natural and reasonable reluctance, 
he passed the remainder of his useful and 
honourable life at Saumur. It is noticed as 
a remarkable circumstance that the five 
persons of whom his family consisted died 
and were interred in as many different king- 
doms, one in France, another at Naples, a 
third at Stockholm, a fourth in London, 
and the fifth in Ireland. A son of Duncan's 
valet, in his thirteenth year, lost his tongue 
by the effects of the small-pox, the root 
being so consumed by this dreadful disease, 
that in a fit of coughing it came away. The 
boy's speech was no otherwise affected by 
the loss than that he found it difficult to 
pronounce the letter r. He was exhibited 
throughout Europe, and lived long after- 
wards. A surgeon at Saumur composed a 
treatise upon the case, and Duncan, who was 
then Principal of the College in that city, 
supplied him with this title for it Aglosso- 

* This account of Zal Khan (Mrs. Southey writes me 
word) was farther confirmed by the testimony of Mr. 
Bruce, her relative, who knew him and had looked into 
the tongue-less mouth. Mr. Bruce was well acquainted 
with another person who had undergone the same cruel 
punishment. Being a wealthy man, he bribed the exe- 
cutioner to spare a considerable portion of the tongue ; 
but finding that he could not articulate a word with the 
imperfect member, he had it entirely extracted — root 
and all, and then spoke almost as intelligibly as before his 
punishment. 

This person was well known at Calcutta, as well as at 
Bushire and Shiraz — where Mr. Bruce first became ac- 
quainted with him. He was a man of some consequence 
and received as such in the first circles at Calcutta, and it 
was in one of those — a dinner party — that on the question 
being warmly argued — as to the possibility of articulation 
after the extraction of the tongue, he opened his mouth 
and desired the company assembled to look into it, and so 
set their doubts on the matter for ever at rest. 



stomographie. A rival physician published 
a dissertation to prove that it ought to be 
Aglossostomatographie, and he placed these 
verses at the conclusion of this odd treatise. 

Lecteur, tu t 'esmerveilleras 
Qu'un garcon qui n'a point de langue, 
Pronorlce Men une harangue; 
Mais bien plus tu festonneras 
Qu'un barbier que ne sgait pas lire 
Le grec, se mesle d'en escrire. 
Que si ce plaisant epigramme, 
Doux fruit d'un penser de rnon dme 
Te semble n'aller pas tant mal, 
C'est queje Vaifait d cheval. 
Quelques gens malins changerent le dernier vers dans 

les exemplaires qu'ils purent trouver, et y mirent — C'est 

queje Vaifait en cheval. 

The reader who thinks upon what he 
reads, will find some materials for thinking 
on, in what has here been collected for him. 
First as to the physical facts : — they show 
that the power of reproduction exists in the 
human body, in a greater degree than has 
been commonly supposed. But it is pro- 
bable that this power would be found only 
in young subjects, or in adults whose con- 
stitutions were unusually healthful and 
vigorous. A very small proportion of the 
snails which have been decapitated by ex- 
perimental physiologists have reproduced 
their heads ; though the fact of such re- 
production is certainly established. 

Rhazes records two cases which had fallen 
under his own observation ; in one of which 
the tibia, in the other the under-jaw, had 
been reproduced; neither acquired the 
consistency of the other bones. The Doctor 
used to adduce these cases in support of a 
favourite theory of his own, with which 
the reader will in due time be made ac- 
quainted. 

Secondly, there is a moral inference to be 
drawn from the effect which the story pro- 
duced upon Gibbon. He could not in- 
validate, or dispute the testimony upon 
which it came before him ; but he chose to 
disbelieve it. For he was ignorant that the 
facts might be physically true, and he would 
not on any evidence give credit to what 
appeared miraculous. A stubborn mind 
conduces as little to wisdom, or even to 
knowledge, as a stubborn temper to hap- 
piness. 



THE DOCTOR. 



543 



CHAPTER CCIT. 
A law or Alfred's against lying tongues. 

OBSERVATIONS ON LAX ONES. 

As I have gained no small satisfaction to myself, — so I 
am desirous that nothing that occurs here may occasion 
the least dissatisfaction to others. And I think it will be 
impossible anything should, if they will be but pleased to 
take notice of my design. Henry More. 

If the laws of our great Alfred, whose 
memory is held in such veneration by all 
who are well acquainted with his history, 
and his extraordinary virtues, and whose 
name has been so often taken in vain by 
speculative reformers who were ignorant of 
the one, and incapable of estimating the 
other; — if the laws of Alfred, I say, had 
continued in use, everything relating to the 
reproduction of human tongues would long 
before this time have been thoroughly un- 
derstood ; for by those laws any one who 
broached a public falsehood, and persisted 
in it, was to have his tongue cut out ; and 
this punishment might not be commuted for 
any smaller fine than that at which the life of 
the criminal would have been rated. 

The words of the law are these : 
De rumoribus fictitiis. 

Si quis publicum mendacium confingat, et 
Me in eo Jirmetur, nulla levi re hoc emendet, 
sed lingua ei excidatur ; nee minori precio 
redimi liceat, quamjuxta capitis cestimationem 
censebatur. 

What a wholesome effect might such a 
law have produced upon orators at public 
meetings, upon the periodical press, and 
upon the debates in Parliament. 

" I am charmed," says Lady M. W. Mon- 
tague, "with many points of the Turkish 
law, to our shame be it spoken, better de- 
signed and better executed than ours ; par- 
ticularly the punishment of convicted liars 
(triumphant criminals in our country, God 
knows !) : they are burnt in the forehead 
with a hot iron, when they are proved the 
authors of any notorious falsehoods. How 
many white foreheads should we see dis- 
figured, how many fine gentlemen would 
be forced to wear their wisrs as low as their 



eyebrows, were this law in practice with 
us!" 

But who can expect that human laws 
should correct that propensity in the wicked 
tongue! They who have "the poison of 
asps under their lips," and " which have said 
with our tongues will we prevail ; we are 
they that ought to speak : who is lord over 
us?" — they who "love to speak all words 
that may do hurt, and who cut with lies like 
a sharp razor" — what would they care for 
enactments which they would think either 
to evade by their subtlety, or to defy in the 
confidence of their numbers and their 
strength ? Is it to be expected that those 
men should regard the laws of their country, 
who set at nought the denunciations of 
scripture, and will not " keep their tongues 
from evil, and their lips that they speak no 
guile," though they have been told that it is 
" he who hath used no deceit in his tongue 
and hath not slandered his neighbour, who 
shall dwell in the tabernacle of the Lord, 
and rest upon his holy hill ! " 

Leave we them to their reward, which is 
as certain as that men shall be judged 
according to their deeds. Our business is 
with the follies of the unruly member, not 
with its sins : with loquacious speakers and 
verbose writers, those whose " tongues are 
gentelmen-ushers to their wit, and still go 
before it," * who never having studied the 
exponibilia, practise the art of battology by 
intuition ; and in a discourse which might 
make the woeful hearer begin to fear that 
he had entered unawares upon eternity, 
bring forth, " as a man would say in a word 
of two syllables, nothing." * The West 
Britons had in their own Cornish language 
this good proverbial rhyme, (the — graphy 
whereof, be it ortho or not is Mr. Pol- 
whele's,) 

An lavor goth ewe lavar gtn'r, 
Ne vedn nevera dottz vas a tavax re Air. 

The old saying is a true saying, 
Never will come good from a tongue too long. 

Oh it is a grievous thing to listen, or seem 
to listen as one is constrained to do, some- 



Ben Jonson. 



544 



THE DOCTOR. 



times by the courtesy of society, and some- 
times by "the law of sermon," to an un- 
merciful manufacturer of speech, who before 
he ever arrives at the empty matter of his 
discourse, 

no puede — dexar — de decir 

— antes, — siguiera 
quatro, o cinco mil palabrasl * 

Vossius mentions three authors, who, to 
use Bayle's language, — for in Bayle the 
extract is found, enfermaient de grands riens 
dans une grande multitude de paroles. Anaxi- 
menes the orator was one ; when he was 
about to speak, Theocritus of Chios said, 
" here begins a river of words and a drop of 
sense," — "Apx^rai Xe^eojv [iev 7roTct[ibg, vov de 
araXayfiag. Longolius, an orator of the 
Lower Empire, was the second. The third 
was Faustus Andrelinus, Professor of Poetry 
at Paris, and Poeta Laureatus : of him 
Erasmus dicitur dixisse, — is said to have 
said, — that there was but one thing wanting 
in all his poems, and that thing was com- 
prised in one word of one syllable, NOT2. 

It were better to be remembered as Bayle 
has remembered Petrus Carmilianus, because 
of the profound obscurity in which this 
pitiful poet was buried, than thus to be 
thought worthy of remembrance only for 
having produced a great deal that deserved 
to be forgotten. There is, or was, an officer 
of the Exchequer called Clericus Nihilorum, 
or Clerk of the Nihils. If there were a 
High Court of Literature with such an 
officer on its establishment, it would be no 
sinecure office for him in these, or in any 
days, to register the names of those authors 
who have written to no purpose, and the 
titles of those books from which nothing is 
to be learned. 

On ne vid jamais, says the Sieur de 
Brocourt, homme qui ne die plustost trop, que 
moins qu'il ne doit ; et jamais parole proferee 
ne seroit tant, comme plusieurs teues ont 
projite ; car tousjours pouvons-nous bien dire 
ce qu'avons teu, et non pas taire ce qaavons 
publie. The latter part of this remark is 
true ; the former is far too general. For 

* Calderon. 



more harm is done in public life by the 
reticence of well-informed men, than by the 
loquacity of sciolists ; more by the timidity 
and caution of those who desire at heart the 
good of their country, than by the audacity 
of those who labour to overthrow its con- 
stitutions. It was said in the days of old, 
that " a man full of words shall not prosper 
upon the earth." Mais nous avons change 
tout cela.f 

Even in literature a leafy style, if there 
be any fruit under the foliage, is preferable 
to a knotty one, however fine the grain. 
Whipt cream is a good thing ; and better 
still when it covers and adorns that amiable 
combination of sweetmeats and ratafia cakes 
soaked in wine, to which Cowper likened his 
delightful poem, when he thus described the 
" Task." " It is a medley of many things, 
some that may be useful, and some that, for 
aught I know, may be very diverting. I am 
merry that I may decoy people into my 
company, and grave that they may be the 
better for it. Now and then I put on the 
garb of a philosopher, and take the oppor- 
tunity that disguise procures me, to drop a 
word in favour of religion. In short, there 
is some froth, and here and there a bit of 
sweetmeat, which seems to entitle it justly 
to the name of a certain dish the ladies call 
a Trifle." But in Task or Trifle unless the 
ingredients were good, the whole were 
nought. They who should present to their 
deceived guests whipt white of egg would 
deserve to be whipt themselves. 

If there be any one who begins to suspect 
that in tasking myself, and trifling with my 
reader, my intent is not unlike Cowper's, he 
will allow me to say to him, " by your leave, 
Master Critic, you must give me licence to 
flourish my phrases, to embellish my lines, 
to adorn my oratory, to embroider my 
speeches, to interlace my words, to draw out 
my sayings, and to bombard the whole suit 
of the business for the time of your 
wearing." j 



t See Remarks on Mr. Evans's Third Series of Scrip- 
ture Biography: " Moses," p. 43. 
% Taylor, the Water Poet. 



THE DOCTOR. 



545 



CHAPTER CCm. 

WHETHER A MAN AND HIMSELF BE TWO. 
MAXIM OF BATEE*S. ADAM EITTEETONS 

SERMONS. A RIGHT-HEARTED OED DIVINE 

WITH WHOM THE AUTHOR HOPES TO BE 
BETTER ACQUAINTED IN A BETTER WORED. 
THE READER REFERRED TO HIM FOR EDI- 
FICATION. WHY THE AUTHOR PURCHASED 
HIS SERMONS. 

Paroiles. Go to, thou art a witty fool, I have found 
thee. 

Clown. Did you find me in yourself, Sir ? or were you 
taught to find me ? The search, Sir, was profitable ; and 
much fool may you find in you, even to the world's plea- 
sure and the increase of laughter. 

All's wel that ends well. 

" Whether this author means to make his 
Doctor more fool or philosopher, is more 
than I can discover," says a grave reader, 
who lavs down the open book, and knits his 
brow while he considers the question. 

Make him, good Reader ! I, make him ! — 

make " the noblest work of " But as 

the Spaniards say, el creer es cortesia, and it 
is at your pleasure either to believe the 
veracity of these biographical sketches, or to 
regard them as altogether fictitious. It is at 
your pleasure, I say ; not at your peril : 
but take heed how you exercise that 
pleasure in cases which are perilous ! The 
worst that can happen to you for disbelief • 
in this matter is, that I shall give you little 
credit for courtesy, and less for discrimina- ; 
tion : and in Doncaster you will be laughed 
to scorn. You might as well proclaim at 
Coventry your disbelief in the history of 
Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom ; or tell the 
Swiss that their tale of shooting the apple 
on the child's head was an old story before 
William Tell was born. 

But perhaps you did not mean to express 
any such groundless incredulity, your doubt 
may be whether I represent or consider my 
friend as having in his character a larger 
portion of folly or of philosophy ? 

This you might determine, Reader, for 
yourself, if I could succeed in delineating 
him to the life, — the inner I mean, not the 
outward man, 



Et en pen de papier, comme sur un tableau, 

Vous pourtraire au naif tout son ban, et son beau.* 

He was the soul of goodness, 
And all our praises of him are like streams 
Drawn from a spring, that still rise full, and leave 
The part remaiuing greatest. 

But the Duchess of Newcastle hath decided 
in her philosophy that it is not possible for 
any one person thoroughly to understand 
the character of another. In her own words, 
"if the Mind was not joined and mixed 
with the sensitive and inanimate parts, and 
had not interior as well as exterior parts, 
the whole Mind of one man might perceive 
the whole Mind of another man ; but that 
being not possible — one whole Mind cannot 
perceive another whole Mind." By which 
observation we may perceive there are no 
Platonic Lovers in Nature. An odd con- 
clusion of her Grace's, and from odd pre- 
mises. But she was an odd personage. 

So far, however, the beautiful and fanciful 
as well as fantastic Duchess is right, that 
the more congenial the disposition of two 
persons who stand upon the same intel- 
lectual level, the better they understand 
each other. The lower any one is sunk in 
animal life, the less is he capable of ap- 
prehending the motives and views of those 
who have cultivated the better part of their 
nature. 

If I am so unfortunate as to fail in pro- 
ducing the moral likeness which I am en- 
deavouring to pourtray, it will not be owing 
to any want of sympathy with the subject in 
some of the most marked features of his 
character. 

It is a maxim of Bayle's, Quil ny a point 
de grand esprit dans le car act ere du quel il 
nentre un peu de folie. And he named 
Diogenes as one proof of this. Think indeed 
somewhat more than a little upon the words 
folly and philosophy, and if you can see any- 
way into a mist, or a stone wall, you will 
perceive that the same radicals are found in 
both. 

This sort of mixed character was never 
more whimsically described than by Andrew 

* PASQflER. 



546 



THE DOCTOR. 



Erskine in one of his letters to Boswell, in 
which he tells him, "since I saw you I 

received a letter from Mr.D ; it is 

filled with encomiums upon you; he says 
there is a great deal of humility in your 
vanity, a great deal of tallness in your 
shortness, and a great deal of whiteness in 
your black complexion. He says there's a 
great deal of poetry in your prose, and a 
great deal of prose in your poetry. He says 
that as to your late publication, there is a 
great deal of Ode in your Dedication, and 
a great deal of Dedication in your Ode. He 
says there is a great deal of coat in your 
waistcoat, and a great deal of waistcoat in 
your coat, that there is a great deal of live- 
liness in your stupidity, and a great deal of 
stupidity in your liveliness. But to write 
you all he says would require rather more 
fire in my grate than there is at present, and 
my fingers would undoubtedly be numbed, 
for there is a great deal of snow in this 
frost, and a great deal of frost in this 
snow." 

The Marquis de Custine in a book which 
in all its parts, wise or foolish, strikingly 
characterises its author, describes himself 
thus: J'ai un melange de gravite et de 
legerete qui m 'empechera de devenir autre 
chose qu'un vieil enfant Men triste. Sije suis 
destine a eprouver de grands malheurs, 
faurai Toccasion de remercier Dieu de 
m avoir fait naitre avec cette disposition a la 
fois serieuse et frivole : le serieux maidera a 
me passer du monde — T enfantillage a sup- 
porter le douleur. Cest a quoi il reussit 
mieux que la raison. 

Un peu de folie there certainly was in the 
grand esprit of my dear master, and more 
than un peu there is in his faithful pupil. 
But I shall not enter into a discussion 
whether the gravity of which the Marquis 
speaks preponderated in his character, or 
whether it was more than counterpoised by 
the levity. Enough of the latter, thank 
Heaven ! enters into my own composition not 
only to preserve me from becoming un vieil 
enfant Men triste, but to entitle me in all 
innocent acceptance of the phrase to the 
appellation of a merry old boy, that is to 



say, merry at becoming times, there being a 
time for all things. I shall not enter into 
the discussion as it concerns my guide, phi- 
losopher and friend, because it would be 
altogether unnecessary; he carried ballast 
enough, whatever I may do. The elements 
were so happily mixed in him that though 
Nature did not stand up and say to all the 
world "this is a man," because such a 
miracle could neither be in the order of 
Nature or of Providence ; — I have thought 
it my duty to sit down and say to the public 
this was a Doctor. 

There is another reason why I shall 
refrain from any such inquiry ; and that 
reason may be aptly given in the words of a 
right-hearted old divine, with whom certain 
congenialities would lead my friend to be- 
come acquainted in that world, where I also 
hope in due season to meet and converse 
with him. 

" People," says Adam Littleton, " are 
generally too forward in examining others, 
and are so taken up with impertinence and 
things that do not concern them, that they 
have no time to be acquainted with them- 
selves ; like idle travellers, that can tell you 
a world of stories concerning foreign 
countries, and are very strangers at home. 
Study of ourselves is the most useful know- 
ledge, as that without which we can know 
neither God nor anything else aright, as we 
should know them. 

" And it highly concerns us to know our- 
selves well ; nor will our ignorance be par- 
donable, but prove an everlasting reproach, 
in that we and ourselves are to be in- 
separable companions in bliss or torment to 
all eternity ; and if we, through neglect of 
ourselves here, do not in time provide for 
that eternity, so as to secure for ourselves 
future happiness, God will at last make us 
know ourselves, when it will be too late to 
make any good use of that knowledge, but 
a remediless repentance that we and our- 
selves ever met in company ; when poor 
ruined self shall curse negligent sinful self 
to all ages, and wish direful imprecations 
upon that day and hour that first joined 
them together. 



THE DOCTOR. 



547 



"Again, God has given man that ad- 
vantage above all other creatures, that he 
can with reflex acts look back and pass judg- 
ment upon himself. But seeing examination 
here supposes two persons, the one to ex- 
amine, the other to be examined, and yet 
seems to name but one, a man to examine 
himself ; unless a man and himself be two, 
and thus every one of us have two selfs in 
him ; let us first examine who 'tis here is to 
execute the office of examinant, and then 
who 'tis that is to be the party examined. 

" Does the whole man in this action go 
over himself by parts ? Or does the re- 
generate part call the unregenerate part to 
account ? Or if there be a divided self in 
every man, does one self examine the other 
self, as to wit, the spiritual self, the carnal 
self ? Or is it some one faculty in a man, 
by which a man brings all his other faculties 
and parts to trial, — such a one as the con- 
science may be ? If so, how then is con- 
science itself tried, having no Peers to be 
tried by, as being superior to all other 
human powers, and calling them all to the 
bar?" 

Here let me interpose a remark. Whether 
a man and himself be two must be all one in 
the end ; but woe to that house in which 
the man and his wife are ! 

The end of love is to have two made one 
In will, and in affection.* 

The old Lexicographer answers his own 
question thus : " Why, yes ; I do think 'tis 
the conscience of a man which examines the 
man, and every part of him, both spiritual 
and carnal, as well regenerate as unregene- 
rate, and itself and all. For hence it was 
called conscientia, as being that faculty by 
which a man becomes conscious to himself, 
and is made knowing together with himself 
of all that good and evil that lies working in 
his nature, and has been brought forth in 
his actions. And this is not only the Re- 
gister, and Witness and Judge of all parts 
of man, and of all that they do, but is so 
impartial an officer also, that it will give a 
strict account of all itself at any time does, 

* Ben Jonson. 



accusing or excusing even itself in every 
motion of its own." 

Reader I would proceed with this extract, 
were it not for its length. The application 
which immediately follows it, is eloquently 
and forcibly made, and I exhort thee if ever 
thou comest into a library where Adam 
Littleton's Sermons are upon the shelf, 

look. 
Not on, but in this Thee-concerning book ! t 

Take down the goodly tome, and turn to the 
sermon of Self-Examination, preached be- 
fore the (Royal) Family at Whitehall, 
March 3, 1677-8. You will find this passage 
in the eighty-sixth page of the second 
paging, and I advise you to proceed with 
it to the end of the Discourse. 

I will tell the reader for what reason I 
purchased that goodly tome. It was because 
of my grateful liking for the author, from 
the end of whose dictionary I, like Daniel in 
his boyhood, derived more entertainment 
and information to boot, than from any 
other book which, in those days, came within 
the walls of a school. That he was a truly 
learned man no one who ever used that 
dictionary could doubt, and if there had not 
been oddity enough in him to give his 
learning a zest, he never could have com- 
pounded an appellation for the Monument, 
commemorating in what he calls an heptastic 
vocable, — which may be interpreted a 
seven-leagued word, — the seven Lord 
Mayors of London under whose mayoralties 
the construction of that lying pillar went 
on from its commencement to its completion. 
He called it the Fordo-Watermamio-Han- 
sono - Hooker o - Vmero - Sheldono - Davisian 
pillar. 

I bought the book for the author's sake, 
— which in the case of a living author is a 
proper and meritorious motive, and in the 
case of one who is dead, may generally be 
presumed to be a wise one. It proved so in 
this instance. For though there is nothing 
that bears the stamp of oddity in his sermons, 
there is much that is sterling. They have a 
merit of their own, and it is of no mean 

t Sir William Denny. 



548 



THE DOCTOR. 



degree. Their manner is neither Latimerist 
nor Andrewesian, nor Fullerish, nor Cotton- 
Matherish, nor Jeremy Taylorish, nor Bar- 
rowish, nor Southish, but Littletonian. 
They are full of learning, of wisdom, of 
sound doctrine, and of benevolence, and of 
earnest and persuasive piety. No one who 
had ears to hear could have slept under 
them, and few could have listened to them 
without improvement. 



CHAPTER CCIV. 

adam Littleton's statement that every 
man is made up oe three egos. dean 

young distance between a man's 

head and his heart. 

Perhaps when the Reader considers the copiousness of 
the argument, he will rather blame me for being too brief 
than too tedious. Dr. John Scott. 

In the passage quoted from Adam Littleton 
in the preceding chapter, that good old 
divine inquired whether a man and himself 
were two. A Moorish prince in the most 
extravagant of Dryden's extravagant tra- 
gedies, (they do not deserve to be called 
romantic,) agrees with him, and exclaims to 
his confidential friend, 

Assist me, Zulema, if thou wouldst be 

The friend thou seem'st, assist me against me. 

Machiavel says of Cosmo de Medici that who- 
ever considered his gravity and his levity 
might say there were two distinct persons in 
him. 

" There is often times," says Dean Young, 
(father of the poet,) " a prodigious distance 
betwixt a man's head and his heart ; such a 
distance that they seem not to have any 
correspondence ; not to belong to the same 
person, not to converse in the same world. 
Our heads are sometimes in Heaven, con- 
templating the nature of God, the blessed- 
ness of Saints, the state of eternity; while 
our hearts are held captive below in a 
conversation earthly, sensual, devilish. 'Tis 
possible we may sometimes commend virtue 
convincingly, unanswerably ; and yet our 



own hearts be never affected by our own 
arguments-; we may represent vice in her 
native dress of horror, and yet our hearts be 
not at all startled with their own menaces. 
We may study and acquaint ourselves with 
all the truths of religion, and yet all this out 
of curiosity, or hypocrisy, or ostentation ; 
not out of the power of godliness, or the 
serious purpose of good living. All which 
is a sufficient proof that the consent of the 
Head and of the Heart are two different 
things." 

Dean Young may seem in this passage to 
have answered Adam the Lexicographist's 
query in the affirmative, by showing that the 
head belongs sometimes to one Self and the 
heart to the other. Yet these two Selves, 
notwithstanding this continual discord, are 
so united in matrimony, and so inseparably 
made one flesh, that it becomes another 
query whether death itself can part them. 

The aforesaid Dean concludes one of his 
Discourses with the advice of an honest 
heathen. Learn to be one Man; that is, 
learn to live and act alike. " For," says he, 
" while we act from contrary principles ; 
sometimes give, and sometimes defraud ; 
sometimes love, and sometimes betray; some- 
times are devout, and sometimes careless of 
God ; this is to be two Men, which is a 
foolish aim, and always ends in loss of pains. 
' No,' says wise Epictetus, ' Learn to be one 
Man,' thou mayest be a good man ; or thou 
mayest be a bad man, and that to the pur- 
pose ; but it is impossible that thou shouldst 
be both. And here the Philosopher had the 
happiness to fall in exactly with the notion 
of my text. We cannot serve two Masters." 

But in another sermon Adam Littleton 
says that " every man is made of three Egos, 
and has three Selfs in him;" and that this 
" appears in the reflection of Conscience 
upon actions of a dubious nature ; whilst 
one Self accuses, another Self defends, and 
the third Self passes judgment upon what 
hath been so done by the man ! " This he 
adduced as among various " means and un- 
worthy comparisons, whereby to show that 
though the mysterious doctrine of the 
Trinity " far exceeds our reason, there want 



THE DOCTOR. 



549 



not natural instances to illustrate it. But 
he adds most properly that we should neither 
" say or think aught of God in this kind," 
without a preface of reverence and asking- 
pardon ; " for it is sufficient for us and most 
suitable to the mystery, so to conceive, so to 
discourse of God, as He himself has been 
pleased to make Himself known to us in his 
Word." 

If all theologians had been as wise, as 
humble, and as devout as Adam Littleton, 
from how many heresies and evils might 
Christendom have been spared ! 

In the Doctor's own days the proposition 
was advanced, and not as a paradox, that a 
man might be in several places at the same 
time. Presence corporelle de Tliomme en 
plusieurs lieux prouvee possible par les prin- 
cipes de la bonne Philosophie is the title of a 
treatise by the Abbe de Lignac, who having 
been first a Jesuit, and then an Oratorian, 
secularised himself without departing from 
the principles in which he had been trained 
up. The object of his treatise was to show 
that there is nothing absurd in the doctrine I 
of Transubstantiation. He made a dis- 
tinction between man and his body, the 
body being always in a state of change, the 
man remaining the while identically the same. 
But how his argument that because a worm 
may be divided and live, the life which ani- j 
mated it while it was whole continues a 
single life when it animates all the parts into 
which the body may have separated, proves 
his proposition, or how his proposition, if 
proved, could prove the hyper-mysterious 
figment of the Romish Church to be no 
figment, but a divine truth capable of 
philosophical demonstration, CEdipus himself 
were he raised from the dead would be unable 
to explain. 



CHAPTER CCY. 

EQUALITY OF THE SEXES, A POINT ON 

WHICH IT W^S NOT EAST TO COLLECT THE 

doctor's opinion. the salic law. 

DANIEL ROGERs's TREATISE OF MATRI- 
MONIAL honour, miss hatfield's let- 
ters OX THE IMPORTAXCE OF THE FEMALE 
SEX, AND LODOVICO DOMENICHl's DIALOGUE 
UPON THE NOBLENESS OF WOMEN. 

Mirths and toys 
To cozen time withal : for o' my troth, Sir, 
I can love, — I think well too, — well enough ; 
And think as well of women as they are, — 
Pretty fantastic things, some more regardful, 
And some few worth a service. I'm so honest 
I wish 'em all in Heaven, and you know how hard, Sir, 
'Twill be to get in there with their great farthingals. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. 
And not much easier now with their great sleeves. 

Author, A.D. 1830. 

The question concerning the equality of the 
sexes, which was discussed so warmly some 
thirty years ago in Magazines and Debating 
Societies, was one upon which it was not 
easy to collect the Doctor's real opinion. 
His manner indeed was frequently sportive 
when his meaning was most serious, and as 
frequently the thoughts and speculations 
with which he merely played, and which were 
sports or exercitations of intellect and hu- 
mour, were advanced with apparent gravity. 
The propensity, however, was always re- 
tained within due bounds, for he had treasured 
up his father's lessons in his heart, and would 
have regarded it as a crime ever to have 
trifled with his principles or feelings. But 
this question concerning the sexes was a 
subject which he was fond of introducing 
before his female acquaintance ; it was like 
hitting the right note for a dog when you 
play the flute, he said. The sort of half 
anger, and the indignation, and the astonish- 
ment, and the merriment withal, which he 
excited when he enlarged upon this fertile 
theme, amused him greatly, and moreover he 
had a secret pleasure in observing the in- 
vincible good-humour of his wife, even when 
she thought it necessary for the honour of 
her sex to put on a semblance of wrath at 
the notions which he repeated, and the com- 
ments with which he accompanied thorn. 



550 



THE DOCTOR. 



He used to rest his opinion of male supe- 
riority upon divinity, law, grammar, natural 
history, and the universal consent of nations. 
Noting also by the way, that in the noble 
science of heraldry, it is laid down as a rule 
" that amongst things sensitive the males are 
of more worthy bearing than the females." * 

The Salic law he looked upon as in this 
respect the Law of Nature. And therefore 
he thought it was wisely appointed in 
France, that the royal Midwife should re- 
ceive a fee of five hundred crowns upon the 
birth of a boy, and only three hundred if it 
were a female child. This the famous 
Louise Bourgeois has stated to be the cus- 
tom, who for the edification of posterity, the 
advancement of her own science, and the 
use of French historians, published a Recit 
veritable de la naissance de Messieurs et 
Dames les enfans de France, containing 
minute details of every royal parturition at 
which she had officiated. 

But he dwelt with more force on the theo- 
logical grounds of his position. " The wife 
is the weaker vessel. Wives submit your- 
selves to your husbands : be in subjection to 
them. The Husband is the head. Sarah 
obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord." And 
here he had recourse to the authority of 
Daniel Rogers, (whom he liked the better for 
his name's sake,) who in his Treatise of 
Matrimonial Honour teaches that the duty 
of subjection is woman's chief command- 
ment ; and that she is properly made subject 
by the Law of Creation and by the Law of 
Penalty. As thus. All other creatures were 
created male and female at the same time ; 
man and woman were not so, for the Man 
was first created — as a perfect creature, and 
afterwards the woman was thought of. 
Moreover she was not made of the same 
matter, equally, with man, — but of him, of a 
rib taken from him, and thirdly, she was made 
for his use and benefit as a meet helpmate, 
" three weighty reasons and grounds of the 
woman's subjection to the man, and that 
from the purpose of the Creator; who might 
have done otherwise, that is, have yielded to 



the Woman co-equal beginning, sameness of 
generation, or relation of usefulness ; for he 
might have made her without any such pre- 
cedency of matter, without any dependency 
upon him, and equally for her good as for 
his. All show at ennobling the Man as the 
Head and more excellent, not that the Man 
might upbraid her, but that she might in all 
these read her lesson of subjection. And 
doubtless, as Malachi speaks, herein is wis- 
dom, for God hath left nothing to be bettered 
by our invention. 

" The woman, being so created by God in 
the integrity of Nature had a most divine 
honour and partnership of his image, put 
upon her in her creation ; yea, such as (with- 
out prejudice of those three respects) might 
have held full and sweet correspondence 
with her husband. But her sin still aug- 
mented her inequality, and brought her 
lower and lower in her prerogative. For 
since she would take upon her, as a woman, 
without respect to the order, dependence 
and use of her creation, to enterprise so sad 
a business, as to jangle and demur with the 
Devil about so weighty a point as her hus- 
band's freehold, and of her own brain to lay 
him and it under foot, without the least 
parley and consent of his, obeying Satan 
before him, — so that till she had put all 
beyond question and past amendment, and 
eaten, she brought not the fruit to him, 
therefore the Lord stript her of this robe of 
her honour, and smote into the heart of Eve 
an instinct of inferiority, a confessed yielding 
up of her insufficient self to depend wholly 
upon her husband." 

This being a favourite commentary with 
the Doctor upon the first transgression, what 
would he have said if he had lived to read 
an Apology for Eve by one of her daughters ? 
— yes, an Apology for her and a Defence, 
showing that she acted meritoriously in 
eating the Apple. It is a choice passage, 
and the reader shall have it from Miss Hat- 
field's Letters on the Importance of the 
Female Sex. 

" By the creation of woman, the great 
design was accomplished, — the universal 
system was harmonised. Happiness and in- 



THE DOCTOR. 



551 



nocence reigned together. But unacquainted 
with the nature or existence of evil, — con- 
scious only of good and imagining that all 
were of that essence around her ; without 
the advantages of the tradition of forefathers 
to relate, or of ancient records to hand 
down, Eve was fatally and necessarily igno- 
rant of the rebellious disobedience of the 
fallen Angels, and of their invisible vigilance 
and combination to accomplish the destruc- 
tion of the new favourites of Heaven. 

" In so momentous an event as that which 
has ever been exclusively imputed to her, 
neither her virtue nor her prudence ought 
to be suspected ; and there is little reason to 
doubt, that if the same temptations had been 
offered to her husband under the same ap- 
pearances, but he also would have acquiesced 
in the commission of this act of disobedience. 

" Eve's attention was attracted by the 
manner in which the Serpent first made his 
attack : he had the gift of speech, which she 
must have observed to be a faculty peculiar 
to themselves. This appeared an evidence 
of something supernatural. The wily tempter 
chose also the form of the serpent to assist 
his design, as not only in wisdom and saga- 
city that creature surpassed all others, but 
his figure was also erect and beautiful, for it 
was not until the offended justice of God 
denounced the curse, that the Serpent's crest 
was humbled to the dust. 

" During this extraordinary interview, it 
is evident that Eve felt a full impression of 
the divine command, which she repeated 
to the tempter at the time of his solicita- 
tions. She told him they were not to eat of 
that Tree. — But the Serpent opposed her 
arguments with sophistry and promises. He 
said unto the Woman, ye shall not surely 
die — but shall be as Gods. What an idea 
to a mortal ! — Such an image astonished 
her! — It was not the gross impulses of 
greedy appetite that urged her, but a nobler 
motive had induced her to examine the con- 
sequences of the act. — She was to be better 
and happier ; — to exchange a mortal for an 
angelic nature. Her motive was great, — 
virtuous, — irresistible. Might she not have 
felt herself awed and inspired with a belief 



of a divine order ? — Upon examination she 
found it was to produce a greater good than 
as mortals they could enjoy ; this impression 
excited a desire to possess that good ; and 
that desire determined her will and the future 
destiny of a World! " 

It must be allowed that this Lady 
Authoress has succeeded in what might have 
been supposed the most difficult of all at- 
tempts, that of starting a new heresy, — her 
followers in which may aptly be denominated 
Eveites. 

The novelty consists not in excusing the 
mother of mankind, but in representing her 
transgression as a great and meritorious act. 
An excuse has been advanced for her in 
Lodovico Domenichi's Dialogue upon the 
Nobleness of Women. It is there pleaded 
that the fruit of the fatal tree had not been 
forbidden to Eve, because she was not created 
when the prohibition was laid on. Adam it 
was who sinned in eating it, not Eve, and it 
is in Adam that we have all sinned, and all 
die. Her offence was in tempting him to 
eat, et questo anchora senza intention cattiva, 
essendo stata tentata dal JDiavoIo. Ehuomo 
adunque peccb per certa scientia, et la Donna 
ignorantemente, et ingannata. 

I know not whether this special pleading 
be Domenichi's own ; but he must have been 
conscious that there is a flaw in it, and could 
not have been in earnest, as Miss Hatfield 
is. The Veronese lady Isotta ISTogarola 
thought differently ; essendo studiosa molto 
di Theologia et di Philosophia, she composed 
a Dialogue wherein the question whether 
Adam or Eve in the primal transgression 
had committed the greater sin. How she 
determined it I cannot say, never having 
seen her works. 

Domenichi makes another assertion in 
honour of womankind which Miss Hatfield 
would undoubtedly consider it an honour for 
herself to have disproved in her own person, 
that no heresy, or error in the faith, ever 
originated with a woman. -» 

Had this Lady, most ambitious of Eve's 
daughters, been contemporary with Doctor 
Dove, how pleasant it would have been to 
have witnessed a debate between them upon 



552 



THE DOCTOR. 



the subject ! He would have wound her up 
to the highest pitch of indignation, and she 
would have opened the flood-gates of female 
oratory upon his head. 



CHAPTER CCVL 

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. OPINIONS OF THE 
RABBIS. ANECDOTE OF LADY JEKYLL AND 
A TART REPLY OF WILLIAM WHISTON's. 
JEAN d'eSPAGNE. QUEEN ELIZABETH OF 
THE QUORUM QUARUM QUORUM GENDER. 
THE SOCIETY OF GENTLEMEN AGREE WITH 
MAHOMET IN SUPPOSING THAT WOMEN HAVE 
NO SOULS, BUT ARE OF OPINION THAT THE 
DEVIL IS AN HERMAPHRODITE. 

Sing of the nature of women, and then the song shall be 
surely full of variety, old crotchets, and most sweet closes : 
It shall be humourous, grave, fantastic, amorous, melan- 
choly, sprightly, one in all and all in one. Marston. 

The Doctor had other theological arguments 
in aid of the opinion which he was pleased 
to support. The remark has been made 
which is curious, or in the language of 
Jeremy Taylor's age, considerable, that we 
read in Genesis how when God saw every- 
thing else which he had made he pronounced 
that it was very good, but he did not say 
this of the woman. 

There are indeed certain Rabbis who 
affirm that Eve was not taken out of Adam's 
side : but that Adam had originally been 
created with a tail, (herein agreeing with the 
well-known theory of Lord Monboddo,) and 
that among the various experiments and 
improvements which were made in his form 
and organisation before he was finished, the 
tail was removed as an inconvenient ap- 
pendage, and of the excrescence or super- 
fluous part which was then lopped off, the 
Woman was formed. 

11 We are not bound to believe the Rabbis 
in everything," the Doctor would say ; " and 
yet it cannot be denied that they have pre- 
served some valuable traditions which ought 
to be regarded with much respect." And 
then by a gentle inclination of the head, 
and a peculiar glance of the eye, he let it be 
understood that this was one of those tradi- 
tions which were entitled to consideration. 



" It was not impossible," he said, " but that a 
different reading in the original text might 
support such an interpretation : the same 
word in Hebrew frequently signified different 
things, and rib and tail might in that lan- 
guage be as near each other in sound or as 
easily miswritten by a hasty hand, or mis- 
read by an inaccurate eye, as costa and cauda 
in Latin." He did not pretend that this was 
the case — but that it might be so. And by 
a like corruption (for to such corruptions 
all written and even all printed books are 
liable) the text may have represented that 
Eve was taken from the side of her husband 
instead of from that part of the back where 
the tail grew. The dropping of a syllable 
might occasion it. 

" And this view of the question," he said, 
" derived strong support from that well- 
known and indubitable text wherein the Hus- 
band is called the Head ; for although that 
expression is in itself most clear and signifi- 
cative in its own substantive meaning, it 
becomes still more beautifully and empha- 
tically appropriate when considered as re- 
ferring to this interpretation and tradition, 
and implying as a direct and necessary 
converse that the Wife is the Tail." 

There is another legend relating to a like 
but even less worthy formation of the first 
helpmate, and this also is ascribed to the 
Rabbis. According to this mythos the rib 
which had been taken from Adam was for a 
moment laid down, and in that moment a 
monkey stole it and ran off with it full 
speed. An Angel pursued, and though not 
in league with the Monkey he could have 
been no good Angel ; for overtaking him, 
he caught him by the Tail, brought it 
maliciously back instead of the Rib, and of 
that Tail was Woman made. What became 
of the Rib, with which the Monkey got 
clear off, " was never to mortal known." 

However the Doctor admitted that on the 
whole the received opinion was the more 
probable. And after making this admission 
he related an anecdote of Lady Jekyll, who 
was fond of puzzling herself and others 
with such questions as had been common 
enough a generation before her, in the days 



THE DOCTOR. 



553 



of the Athenian Oracle. She asked William 
Whiston of berhymed name and eccentric 
memory, one day at her husband's table, to 
resolve a difficulty which occurred to her in 
the Mosaic account of the creation. " Since 
it pleased God, Sir," said she, " to create the 
Woman out of the Man, why did he form 
her out of the rib rather than any other 
part?" W r histon scratched his head and 
answered : "Indeed, Madam, I do not know, 
unless it be that the rib is the most crooked 
part of the body." " There ! " said her 
husband, " you have it now : I hope you 
are satisfied ! " 

He had found in the writings of the 
Huguenot divine, Jean D'Espagne, that 
Women have never had either the gift of 
tongues, or of miracle ; the latter gift, ac- 
cording to this theologian, being withheld 
from them because it properly accompanies 



preachi 



and women are forbidden to be 



preachers. A reason for the former ex- 
ception the Doctor supplied ; he said it was 
because one tongue was quite enough for 
them : and he entirely agreed with the 
Frenchman that it must be so, because there 
could have been no peace on earth had it 
been otherwise. But whether the sex 
worked miracles or not was a point which 
he left the Catholics to contend. Female 
Saints there certainly had been, — " the 
Lord," as Daniel Rogers said, " had gifted 
and graced many women above some men 
especially with holy affections ; I know not," 
says that divine, " why he should do it else 
(for he is wise and not superfluous in 
needless things) save that as a Pearl shining- 
through a chrystal glass, so her excellency 
shining through her weakness of sex, might 
show the glory of the workman." He 
quoted also what the biographer of one of 
the St. Catharines says, "that such a woman 
ought not to be called a woman, but rather 
an earthly Angel, or a heavenly homo : hcec 
fcemina, sed potius Angelus terrestris, vel si 
malueris, homo caelestis dicenda erat, quam 
familial In like manner the Hungarians 
thinking it infamous for a nation to be 
governed by a woman — and yet perceiving 
the great advantage of preserving the suc- 



cession, when the crown fell to a female, 
they called her King Mary, instead of 
Queen. 

And Queen Elizabeth, rather than be ac- 
counted of the feminine gender, claimed it 
as her prerogative to be of all three. " A 
prime officer with a White Staff coming into 
her presence " she willed him to bestow a 
place then vacant upon a person whom she 
named. " May it please your Highness 
Madam," said the Lord, "the disposal of 
that place pertaineth to me by virtue of this 
White Staff." " True," replied the Queen, 
"yet I never gave you your office so ab- 
solutely, but that I still reserved myself of 
the Quorum" " Of the Quarum 1 Madam," 
returned the Lord, presuming, somewhat 
too far, upon her favour. — Whereat she 
snatched the staff in some anger out of his 
hand, and told him " he should acknowledge 
her of the Quorum. Quarum, Quorum before 
he had it again." 

It was well known indeed to Philosophers, 
he said, that the female is an imperfection 
or default in nature, whose constant design 
is to form a male ; but where strength and 
temperament are wanting — a defective pro- 
duction is the result. Aristotle therefore 
calls Woman a Monster, and Plato makes it 
a question whether she ought not to be 
ranked among irrational creatures. There 
were Greek Philosophers, who (rightly in 
his judgment) derived the name of 'AQ^vi] 
from QijXvQ and alpha privativa, as im- 
plying that the Goddess of wisdom, though 
Goddess, was nevertheless no female, having 
nothing of female imperfection. And a 
book unjustly ascribed to the learned Aci- 
dalius was published in Latin, and after- 
wards in French, to prove that women were 
not reasonable creatures, but distinguished 
from men by this specific difference, as well 
as in sex. 

Mahomet too was not the only person 
who has supposed that women have no souls. 
In this Christian and reformed country, the 
question was propounded to the British 
Apollo whether there is now, or will be at 
the resurrection any females in Heaven — 
since, says the questioner, there seems to be 



554 



THE DOCTOR. 



no need of them there ! The Society of 
Gentlemen who, (in imitation of John 
Dunton, his brother-in-law the elder Wesley, 
and their coadjutors,) had undertaken in 
this Journal to answer all questions, re- 
turned a grave reply, that sexes being 
corporeal distinctions there could be no 
such distinction among the souls which are 
now in bliss ; neither could it exist after the 
resurrection, for they who partook of 
eternal life neither marry nor are given in 
marriage. 

That same Society supposed the Devil to 
be an Hermaphrodite, for though by his 
roughness they said he might be thought of 
the masculine gender, they were led to that 
opinion because he appeared so often in 
petticoats. 



CHAPTER CCVII. 

FRACAS WITH THE GENDER FEMININE. 
THE DOCTOR'S DEFENCE. 

If there sit twelve women at the table, let a dozen of 
them be — as they are. Timon of Athens. 

" Papp-paah ! " says my daughter. 

" You intolerable man ! " says my wife. 

" You abominable creature ! " says my 
wife's eldest sister, " you wicked wretch ! " 

" Oh Mr. Author," says Miss Graveairs, 
" I did not expect this from you." 

" Yery well, Sir, very well ! This is like 
you ! " says the Bow-Begum. 

" Was there ever such an atrocious libel 
upon the sex ? " says the Lady President of 
the Celestial Blues. 

The Ladies of the Stocking unanimously 
agree in the sentence of condemnation. 

Let me see, who do I know among them ? 
There is Mrs. Lapis Lazuli and her daughter 
Miss Ultramarine, — there is Mrs. Bluestone, 
the most caustic of female critics, and her 
friend Miss Gentian, — Heaven protect me 
from the bitterness of her remarks, — there 
is Lady Turquoise, Lady Celestina Sky, the 
widow Bluebeard, Miss Mazarine, and that 
pretty creature Serena Cerulean, it does me 
good to look at her, she is the blue-bell of 



the party. There is Miss Sapphire, Miss 
Priscilla Prussian, Mrs. Indigo, and the 
Widow Woad. And Heaven knows who 
beside. Mercy on me — it were better to 
be detected at the mysteries of the Bona 
Dea, than be found here ! Hear them how 
they open in succession — 

" Infamous ! " 

" Shameful ! " 

" Intolerable ! " 

" This is too bad." 

" He has heaped together all the slanderous 
and odious things that could be collected from 
musty books." 

" Talk of his Wife and Daughter. I do not 
believe any one who had wife and daugh- 
ter would have composed such a Chapter 
as that. An old bachelor I warrant him, 
and mustier than his books." 

" Pedant ! " 

" Satirist !" 

" Libeller ! " 

" Wretch ! " 

"Monster!" 

And Miss Virginia Yinegar compleats 
the climax by exclaiming with peculiar em- 
phasis, " Man ! " 

All Indigo-land is in commotion ; and Ur- 
gand the Unknown would be in as much 
danger proh- Jupiter ! from the Stockingers, 
if he fell into their hands, as Orpheus from 
the Maenades. Tantcene animis ccelestibus 
irce ? 

" Why Ladies ! dear Ladies ! good Ladies ! 
gentle Ladies ! merciful Ladies ! hear me, — 
hear me ! In justice, in compassion, in cha- 
rity, hear me ! For your own sakes, and for 
the honour of feminality, hear me ! " 

" What has the wretch to say ? " 

" What can he say ?" 

" What indeed can be said ? Nevertheless 
let us hear him, so bad a case must always 
be made worse by any attempt at defend- 
ing it." 

" Hear him ! hear him !" 

"Englishwomen, countrywomen, and love- 
lies, — lovelies, I certainly may call you, if 
it be not lawful for me to say lovers, — hear 
me for your honour, and have respect to 
your honour that you may believe, censure 



THE DOCTOK. 



555 



me in your wisdom, and awake your senses 
that you may be better judges. W ho is here 
so unfeminine that would be a male crea- 
ture ? if any, speak; for her have I offended. 
Who is here so coarse that would not be a 
woman? if any, speak; for her have I 
offended. Who is here so vile that will 
not love her sex ? if any speak ; for her 
have I offended. I can have offended none 
but those who are ashamed of their woman- 
hood, if any such there be, which I am far 
from thinking." 

Gentle Ladies, do you in your conscience 
believe that any reasonable person could 
possibly think the worse of womankind, for 
any of the strange and preposterous opinions 
which my lamented and excellent friend 
used to repeat in the playfulness of an eccen- 
tric fancy ? Do you suppose that he was 
more in earnest when he brought forward 
these learned fooleries, than the Devil's 
Advocate when pleading against a suit for 
canonisation in the Papal Court ? 

Questo negro inchiostro, ch' io dispenxo 
Non fit per dare, o donne, a i vostri nasi, 
Ingrato odore, o d' altro che d' incenzo.* 

Hear but to the end, and I promise you 
on the faith of a true man, a Red Letter 
Chapter in your praise ; not a mere pane- 
gyric in the manner of those who flatter 
while they despise you, but such an honest 
estimate as will bear a scrutiny, — and which 
you will not like the worse because it may 
perhaps be found profitable as well as 
pleasing. 

Forgive me, sacred sex of woman, that, 

In thought or syllable, I have declaim'd 

Against your goodness ; and 1 will redeem it 

With such religious honouring your names, 

That when I die, some never thought-stain'd virgin 

Shall make a relic of my dust, and throw 

My ashes, like a charm, upon those men 

Whose faiths they hold suspected. f 



t Shiiu.t.y. 



CHAPTER CCVIII. 

VALUE OF WOMEN AMONG THE AFGHAUNS. 
ligon's HISTORY OF BARBADOES, and a 
FAVOURITE STORY OF THE DOCTOR'S 

THEREFROM. ceaude seissel, and the 

SALIC LAW. JEWISH THANKSGIVING. ETY- 
MOLOGY OF MULIER, WOMAN, AND LASS ; 

FROM WHICH IT MAY BE GUESSED HOW 

MUCH IS CONTAINED IN THE LIMBO OF 
ETYMOLOGY. 

If thy name were known that writest in this sort, 

By womankind, unnaturally, giving evil report, 

Whom all men ought, both young and old, defend with all 

their might, 
Considering what they do deserve of every living wight, 
I wish thou should exiled be from women more and less, 
And not without just cause thou must thyself confess. 
Edward More. 

It would have pleased the Doctor when he 
was upon this topic if he had known how 
exactly the value of women was fixed among 
the Afghauns, by whose laws twelve young 
women are given as a compensation for the 
slaughter of one man, six for cutting off a 
hand, an ear, or a nose ; three for breaking a 
tooth, and one for a wound of the scalp. 

By the laws of the Venetians as well as of 
certain Oriental people, the testimony of two 
women was made equivalent to that of one 
man. And in those of the Welsh King 
Hywel Dda, or Howel Dha, " the satisfac- 
tion for the murder of a woman, whether 
she be married or not, is half that of her 
brother," which is upon the same standard 
of relative value. By the same laws a 
woman was not to be admitted as bail for a 
man, nor as witness against him. 

He knew that a French Antiquarian 
(Claude Seissel) had derived the name of the 
Salic law from the Latin word Sal, comme 
une loy pleine de sel, c'est a dire pleine de 
sapience J, and this the Doctor thought a far 
more rational etymology than what some one 
proposed either seriously or in sport, that 
the law was called Salique because the words 
Si aliquis and Si aliqua were of such fre- 
quent occurrence in it. " To be born a man- 
child," says that learned author who first 
composed an Art of Rhetoric in the English 



% BltANIOME. 



556 



THE DOCTOR. 



tongue, " declares a courage, gravity and 
constancy. To be born a woman, declares 
weakness of spirit, neshenes of body, and 
fickleness of mind." * Justin Martyr, after 
saying that the Demons by whom according 
to him the system of heathen mythology was 
composed, spake of Minerva as the first 
Intelligence and the daughter of Jupiter, 
makes this observation ; " now this we con- 
sider most absurd, to carry about the image 
of Intelligence in a female form ! " The 
Father said this as thinking with the great 
French comic poet that a woman never 
could be anything more than a woman. 

Car, voyez-vous, lafemme est, comme on dit, mon maitre, 
Un certain animal difficile a connoitre, 
Et de qui la nature est fort encline au mal; 
El comme un animal est toujours animal. 
Et ne sera jamais qu 'animal, quand sa vie 
Dureroit cent mille ans ; aussi, sans repartie, 
Lafemrne est toujours femme , et jamais ne sera 
Quefemme, tant qu'entier le monde durera. 

A favourite anecdote with our Philosopher 
was of the Barbadoes Planters, one of whom 
agreed to exchange an English maid servant 
with the other for a bacon pig, weight for 
weight, four-pence per pound to be paid for 
the overplus, if the balance should be in 
favour of the pig, sixpence if it were on the 
Maid's side. But when they were weighed 
in the scales, Honour who was " extreme 
fat, lazy and good for nothing," so far out- 
weighed the pig, that the pig's owner re- 
pented of his improvident bargain, and 
refused to stand to it. Such a case Ligon 
observes, when he records this notable story, 
seldom happened ; but the Doctor cited it as 
showing what had been the relative value of 
women and pork in the West Indies. And 
observe, he would say, of white women, Eng- 
lish, Christian women, — not of poor heathen 
blacks, who are considered as brutes, bought 
and sold like brutes, worked like brutes — 
and treated worse than any Government 
ought to permit even brutes to be treated. 

However, that women were in some re- 
spects better than men, he did not deny. He 
doubted not but that Cannibals thought 
them so ; for we know by the testimony of 
such Cannibals as happen to have tried both, 



Wilson. 



that white men are considered better meat 
than negroes, and Englishmen than French- 
men, and there could be little doubt that, 
for the same reason, women would be pre- 
ferred to men. Yet this was not the case 
with animals, as was proved by buck veni- 
son, ox beef, and wether mutton. The 
tallow of the female goat would not make 
as good candles as that of the male. Nature 
takes more pains in elaborating her nobler 
work ; and that the male, as being the nobler, 
was that which Nature finished with great- 
est care must be evident, he thought, to 
any one who called to mind the difference 
between cock and hen birds, a difference 
discoverable even in the egg, the larger and 
finer eggs, with a denser white and a richer 
yolk, containing male chicks. Other and 
more curious observations had been made 
tending to the same conclusion, but he omit- 
ted them, as not perhaps suited for general 
conversation, and not exactly capable of the 
same degree of proof. It was enough to 
hint at them. 

The great Ambrose Parey, (the John 
Hunter and the Baron Larrey of the six- 
teenth century,) has brought forward many 
instances wherein women have been changed 
into men, instances which are not fabulous : 
but he observes, "you shall find in no 
history, men that have degenerated into 
women ; for nature always intends and goes 
from the imperfect to the more perfect, but 
never basely from the more perfect to the 
imperfect." It was a rule in the Roman law, 
that when husband and wife overtaken by 
some common calamity perished at the same 
time, and it could not be ascertained which 
had lived the longest, the woman should 
be presumed to have expired the first, as 
being by nature the feeblest. And for the 
same reason if it had not been noted whether 
brother or sister being twins came first in 
the world, the legal conclusion was that the 
boy being the stronger was the first born. 

And from all these facts he thought the 
writer must be a judicious person who 
published a poem entitled the Great Birth 
of Man, or Excellence of his Creation over 
Woman. 



THE DOCTOR. 



557 



Therefore according to the Bramins, the 
widow who burns herself with the body of 
her husband, will in her next state be born 
a male ; but the widow, who refuses to make 
this self-sacrifice, will never be anything 
better than a woman, let her be born again 
as often as she may. 

Therefore it is that the Jew at this day 
begins his public prayer with a thanksgiving 
to his Maker, for not having made him a 
woman ; — an escape for which the Greek 
philosopher was thankful. One of the things 
which shocked a Moor who visited England 
was to see dogs, women, and dirty shoes, 
permitted to enter a place of worship, the 
Mahometans, as is well known, excluding all 
three from their Mosques. Not that all 
Mahometans believe that women have no 
souls. There are some who think it more 
probable they have, and these more liberal 
Mussulmen hold that there is a separate 
Paradise for them, because they say, if the 
women were admitted into the Men's Pa- 
radise, it would cease to be Paradise, — 
there would be an end of all peace there. 
It was probably the same reason which 
induced Origen to advance an opinion that 
after the day of Judgment women will be 
turned into men. The opinion has been 
condemned among his heresies; but the 
Doctor maintained that it was a reasonable 
one, and almost demonstrable upon the sup- 
position that we are all to be progressive in 
a future state. " There was, however," he 
said, " according to the Jews a peculiar pri- 
vilege and happiness reserved for them, that 
is for all those of their chosen nation, during 
the temporal reign of the Messiah, for every 
Jewish woman is then to lie in every day ! " 

" I never," says Bishop Reynolds, " read 
of more dangerous falls in the Saints than 
were Adam's, Samson's, David's, Solomon's, 
and Peter's ; and behold in all these, either 
the first enticers, or the first occasioners, 
are women. A weak creature may be a 
strong tempter : nothing too impotent or 
useless for the Devil's service." Fuller 
among his Good Thoughts has this pa- 
ragraph : — "I find the natural Philosopher 
making a character of the Lion's disposition, 



amongst other his qualities, reporteth, first, 
that the Lion feedeth on men, and after- 
wards (if forced with extremity of hunger, 
on women. Satan is a roaring Lion seeking 
whom he may devour. Only he inverts the 
method, and in his bill of fare takes the 
second first. Ever since he over-tempted 
our grandmother Eve, encouraged with suc- 
cess he hath preyed first on the weaker sex." 

" Sit not in the midst of women," saith the 
son of Sirach in his Wisdom, " for from 
garments cometh a moth, and from women 
wickedness." " Behold, this have I found, 
saith the Preacher, counting one by one to 
find out the account ; which yet my soul 
seeketh, but I find not : one man among a 
thousand have I found ; but a woman among 
all those have I not found." 

"It is a bad thing," said St. Augustine, "to- 
look upon a woman, a worse to speak to her, 
and to touch her is worst of all." John 
Bunyan admired the wisdom of God for 
making him shy of the sex, and boasted that 
it was a rare thing to see him "carry it 
pleasant towards a woman." " The common 
salutation of women," said he, "I abhor, 
their company alone I cannot away with ! " 
John, the great Tinker, thought with the 
son of Sirach, that " better is the churlish- 
ness of a man, than a courteous woman, a 
woman which bringeth shame and reproach." 
And Menu the lawgiver of the Hindoos 
hath written that " it is the nature of women 
in this world to cause the seduction of men." 
And John Moody in the play, says, " I ha' 
seen a little of them, and I find that the 
best, when she's minded, won't ha' much 
goodness to spare." A wife has been called 
a daily calamity, and they who thought least 
unfavourably of the sex have pronounced it 
a necessary evil. 

" Mulier, quasi mollior^ saith Varro * ; 
a derivation upon which Dr. Featley thus 
commenteth : "Women take their name in 



* The Soothsayer in Cymbeline was of a like opinion 

with Varro ! 

The piece of tender air, thy virtuous daughter, 
Which we call mollis acr ; and mollis acr 
We term it mulier. 

Southey's favourite play upon the stage was C3-mbeline, 

and next to it, As you like it. 



558 



THE DOCTOR. 



Latin from tenderness or softness, because 
they are usually of a softer temper than 
men, and much more subject to passions, 
especially of fear, grief, love, and longing ; 
their fear is almost perpetual, their grief 
immoderate, their love ardent, and their 
longing most vehement. They are the 
weaker vessels, not only weaker in body 
than men, and less able to resist violence, 
but also weaker in mind and less able to 
hold out in temptations ; and therefore the 
Devil first set upon the woman as conceiving 
it a matter of more facility to supplant her 
than the man." And they are such dis- 
semblers, says the Poet, 

As if their mother had been made 
Only of all the falsehood of the man, 
Disposed into that rib. 

" Look indeed at the very name," said the 
Doctor, putting on his gravest look of pro- 
vocation to the ladies. — "Look at the very 
name — Woman, evidently meaning either 
man's woe — or abbreviated from woe to man, 
because by woman was woe brought into the 
world." 

And when a girl is called a lass, who does 
not perceive how that common word must 
have arisen ? "Who does not see that it may 
be directly traced to a mournful interjection, 
alas! breathed sorrowfully forth at the 
thought the girl, the lovely and innocent 
creature upon whom the beholder has fixed 
his meditative eye, would in time become a 
woman, — a woe to man! 

There are other tongues in which the 
name is not less significant. The two most 
notoriously obstinate things in the world are 
a mule and a pig. N"ow there is one lan- 
guage in which pige means a young woman : 
and another in which woman is denoted by 
the word mulier : which word, whatever 
grammarians may pretend, is plainly a com- 
parative, applied exclusively and with pecu- 
liar force to denote the only creature in nature 
which is more mulish than a mule. Comment, 
says a Frenchman, pourroit-on aymer les 
Dames, puis qiielles se nomment ainsi du dam 
et dommage quelles apportent aux hommes I* 



INTERCHAPTER XXIV. 

A TRUE STORY OF THE TERRIBLE KNITTERS 
e' DENT WHICH WILE BE READ WITH 
INTEREST BY HUMANE MANUFACTURERS, 
AND BY MASTERS OF SPINNING JENNIES 
WITH A SMILE. BETTY YEWDALE. THE 

EXCURSION AN EXTRACT FROM, AND AN 

ILLUSTRATION OF. 

voi ck' avete gV intclletti sani, 

Mirate la dottrina, che s' asconde 

Sotto 7 velame degli versi strani. Dante. f 

"It was about six an' fifty year sen, in 
June, when a woman cam fra' Dent at see a 
Nebbor of ours e' Langdon.| They er 
terrible knitters e' Dent § — sea my Fadder 
an' Mudder sent me an' my lile Sister, 
Sally, back we' her at larn at knit. I was 
between sebben an' eight year auld, an' Sally 
twea year younger — T' Woman reade on 
ya Horse, we Sally afore her — an' I on 
anudder, we a man walking beside me — 
whiles he gat up behint an' reade — Ee' 
them Days Fwoak dud'nt gang e' Carts — 
but Carts er t'best — I'd rader ride e' yan 
than e' onny Carriage — I us't at think if I 
was t' Leady, here at t' Ho ||,' how I wad 
tear about int' rwoads — but sen I hae 
ridden in a Chaise I hate t' nwotion ont' 
warst of ought — for t' Tree3 gang fleeing 
by o' ya side, an t' Wa'as ^[ on tudder, an' 
gars yan be as seek as a peeate.** 

" Weel, we dud'nt like Dent at a' — nut 
that they wer bad tull us — but ther way o' 
leeving — it was round Meal — an' they 
stoult it int' frying pan, e' keaeks as thick as 
my fing-er. — Then we wer stawed^ we' sae 



t By an oversight, this quotation has occurred before. 
Seep. 410. 

% The valley of Langdale, near Ambleside. The 
Langdale Pikes are known to all tourists. 

§ Dent is a chapelry in the Parish and Union of Sed- 
bergh, W. Division of the wapentake of Staincliffe and 
Ewcross, W. Riding of the County of York, sixteen miles 
E. from Kendal. — Lewis's Topog. Diet. 

|| i. e. at the Hall. 

If Wa'as, i. e. Walls, as in p. 560. 

** Quaere, does this mean pet, as in the Taming of the 
Shrew ? 

_-" A pretty peat ! 'tis best 
Put finger in the eye, — an we knew why." 

Act. i. Sc. 1. 

ft i- e. cloyed, saturated, fatigued. Brockett's Glos- 
sary of North Country words. 



THE DOCTOR. 



559 



mickle knitting — We went to a Skeul about 
a mile off — ther was a Maister an' Mistress 
— they larnt us our Lessons, yan a piece — 
an then we o' knit as hard as we cud drive, 
striving whilk cud knit t' hardest yan again 
anudder — we hed our Darracks * set afore 
we com fra' Heam int' mwornin ; an' if we 
dud'nt git them duun we warrant to gang 
to our dinners — They hed o' macks o' con- 
trivances to larn us to knit swift — T' 
Maister wad wind 3 or 4 clues togedder, for 
3 or 4 Bairns to knitt off — thaf at knit 
slawest raffled tudders yarn, an' than she 
gat weel thumpt (but ther was baith Lasses 
an' Lads 'at learnt at knit) — Than we ust 
at sing a mack of a sang, whilk we wer at 
git at t'end on at every needle, ca'ing ower 
t' Neams of o' t' fwoak in t' Deaal — but 
Sally an me wad never ca' Dent Fwoak — 
sea we ca'ed Langdon Fwoak — T' Sang 
was — 

Sally an' I, Sally an' I, 

For a good pudding pye, 

Taa hoaf wheat, an' tudder hoaf rye, 

Sally an' I, for a good pudding pye. 

We sang this (altering t' neams) at every 
needle : and when we com at t' end cried 
" off" an' began again, an' sea we strave on 
o' t' day through. 

" We wer staived, as I telt yea — o' t' 
pleser we hed was when we went out a bit 
to beat t' fire for a nebbor 'at was baking — 
that was a grand day for us ! — At Kursmas 
teea, ther was t' maskers — an' on Kursmas 
day at mworn they gav' us sum reed stuff 
to' t' Breakfast — I think it maun ha' been 
Jocklat — but we dud'nt like 't at a', 't 
ommost puzzened us ! — an' we cared for 
nought but how we wer to git back to 
Langdon — Neet an' Day ther was nought 
but this knitting ! T' Nebbors ust at gang- 
about fra' house to house, we' ther wark, — 
than yan fire dud, ye knaw, an' they cud 
hev a better — they hed girt lang black 
peeats — an' set them up an hed in a girt 
round we' a whol at top — an a' t' Fwoak sat 
about it. When ony o' them gat into a 
bubble we' ther wark, they shouted out 



* i. e. Days-works. So the Derwent is called the 
Darron. 



" turn a Peeat" — an' them 'at sat naarest 
t' fire turnt yan, an' meaad a low\ — for 
they nivver hed onny cannal. — We knat 
quorse wosset stockings — some gloves — an' 
some neet caps, an' wastecwoat breests, an' 
petticwoats. I yance knat a stocking, for 
mysell, e' six hours — Sally yan e' sebben — 
an' t'woman's Doughter, 'at was aulder than 
us e' eight — an' they sent a nwote to our 
Fwoak e' Langdon at tell them. 

" Sally an' me, when we wer by our sells, 
wer always contrivin how we wer at git 
away, when we sleept by oursells we talk't 
of nought else — but when t' woman's 
Doughter sleept we' us we wer qwhite mum 

— summat or udder always happent at 
hinder us, till yan day, between Kursmas an' 
Cannahnas, when t' woman's Doughter stait 
at heaam, we teuk off. Our house was four 
mile on 'todder side o' Dent's Town — whor, 
efter we hed pass t' Skeul, we axed t' way 
to Kendal — It hed been a hard frost, an' 
ther was snaw on t' grund — but it was 
beginnin to thow, an' was varra sloshy an' 
cauld — but we poted alang leaving our lile 
footings behint us — we hed our cloggs on 

— for we durst'nt change them for our 
shoon for fear o' being fund out — an' we 
had nought on but our hats, an' bits o' blue 
bedgowns, an' brats — see ye may think we 
cuddent be varra heeat — I hed a sixpence 
e' my pocket, an' we hed three or four 
shilling mare in our box, 'at our Fwoak hed 
ge'en us to keep our pocket we' — but, lile 
mafflinsj as we wer, we thought it wad be 
misst an' durst'nt tak ony mare. 

" Afore we gat to Sebber § we fell hun- 
gry ; an' ther was a fine, girt, reed house 
nut far off t' rwoad, whar we went an' begged 
for a bit o' breead — but they wadd'nt give 
us ought — sea we trampt on, an com to a 
lile theakt house, an' I said — ' Sally thou 

t i. e. a flame; it is an Icelandic word. See Haldorson's 
Lexicon. At loga, ardere, and Logo, flamma. So in St. 
George for England, 

As timorous larks amazed are 
With light, and with a /ow-bell. 
t Maffting— a state of perplexity. — Brockett. Maffled, 
mazed, and maisled (as used a little further on) have all a 
line sense. 
§ i. e. Sedbergh. 



560 



THE DOCTOR. 



sail beg t' neesht — thou's less than me, an' 
mappen they'll sarra us' — an' they dud — 
an' gav us a girt shive * o' breead — at last 
we gat to Scotch Jins, as they ca' t' public 
House about three mile fra Sebber (o' this 
side) — a Scotch woman keept it. — It was 
amaist dark, sea we axt her at let us stay o' 
neet — she teuk us in, an' gav us sum boilt 
milk and breead — an' suun put us to bed 

— we telt her our taael ; an' she sed we wer 
int' reet at run away. 

" Neesht mwornin she gav us sum mare 
milk an' breead, an' we gav her our sixpence 

— an' then went off-sledding away amangt' 
snaw, ower that cauld moor (ye ken' 't weel 
enough) naarly starved to deeath, an' maisled 

— sea we gat on varra slawly, as ye may 
think — an' 't rain'd tua. We begged again 
at anudder lile theakt house, on t' Hay Fell 

— there was a woman an' a heap of raggeltly 
Bairns stannin round a Teable — an' she 
gave us a few of their poddish, an' put a 
lock of sugar into a sup of cauld tea tull 
them. 

" Then we trailed on again till we com to 
t' Peeat Lane Turnpike Yat — they teuk us 
in there, an' let us warm oursells, an' gav us 
a bit o' breead. They sed had duun re'et to 
com away ; for Dent was t' poorest plaace in 
t' warld, and we wer seafe to ha' been hun- 
gert — an' at last we gat to Kendal, when 't 
was naar dark — as we went up t' streat we 
met a woman, an' axt t' way to Tom Posts — 
(that was t' man at ust te bring t' Letters 
fra' Kendal to Ammelsid an' Hawksheead 
yance a week — an' baited at his house when 
we com fra' Langdon) — she telt us t' way an' 
we creept on, but we leaked back at her 
twea or three times — an' she was still stan- 
ning, leuking at us — then she com back an' 
quiesed us a deal, an' sed we sud gang heam 
with her — We telt her whor we hed cum 
fra' an' o' about our Tramp 'at we hed hed. 

— She teuk us to her house — it was a varra 
poor yan — down beside t' brig at we had 
cum ower into t' Town — Ther was nea fire 
on — but she went out, an' brought in sam 

* i. e. a slice. So in Titus Andronicus. 
" Easy it is 
Of a cut loaf to steal a shive we know." 



eliding f (for they can buy a pennerth, or sea, 
o' quols or Peeats at onny time there) an' 
she set on a good fire — an' put on t' kettle 
— then laitedj up sum of her awn claes, an' 
tiet them on us as weel as she cud, an' dried 
ours — for they wer as wet as thack — it hed 
rained a' t' way — Then she me'ead us sum 
tea — an' as she hedden't a bed for us in her 
awn house she teuk us to a nebbors — Ther 
was an auld woman in a Bed naar us that 
flaed us sadly — for she teuk a fit int' neet 
an' her feace turnt as black as a cwol — we 
laid trimmiling, an' hutched oursells ower 
heead e' bed — Fwoks com an' steud round 
her — an' we heeard them say 'at we wer 
asleep — sea we meade as if we wer asleep, 
because we thought if we wer asleep they 
waddn't kill us — an' we wisht oursells e' t' 
streets again, or onny whor — an' wad ha' 
been fain to ha' been ligging under a Dyke. 
" Neesht mwornin we hed our Brekfast, 
an' t' woman gav us baith a hopenny Keack 
beside (that was as big as a penny 'an now) 
to eat as we went — an' she set us to t' top 
o' t' House o' Correction Hill — It was freez- 
ing again, an' t' rwoad was terrible slape ; 
sea we gat on varra badly — an' afore we 
com to Staavley (an' that was but a lile bit 
o' t' rwoad) we fell hung'ry an' began on our 
keacks — then we sed we wad walk sea far, 
an' then tak a bite — an' then on again an' 
tak anudder — and afore we gat to t' Ings 
Chapel they wer ©' gane — Every now an' 
than we stopped at reest — an' sat down, 
an' grat §, under a hedge or wa'a crudled up 
togedder, taking haud o' yan anudder's hands 
at try at warm them, for we were fairly 
maizled wi' t' cauld — an' when we saw onny 
body cumming we gat up an' walked away 



t Fire-elding, — the common term for fuel. Ild in 
Danish \sjire. Such words were to be expected in Cum- 
berland. The commencement of Landor's lines to 
Southey, 1833, will explain why — 
Indweller of a peaceful vale, 
Ravaged erewhile by white-hair'd Dane, &c. 

% To late or leat is to seek out. See Brocket!'. It is 
from the Icelandic at leyta, quaerere. Cf. Haldorson 
in v. 

§ i. e. wept, from the old word greet, common to all the 
Northern languages. Chaucer, Spenser, &c, use it. See 
Specimen Glossarii in Edda Stemundar hinns Froda V. 
Grcetr, ploratus, at grtela, plorare : hence grief , &c. 



THE DOCTOR. 



561 



— but we duddn't meet monny Fvvoak — I 
dunnat think Fwoak warr sea mickle in t' 
rwoads e' them Days. 

"We scraffled* on t' this fashion — an' it 
was quite dark afore we gat to Ammelsid 
Yat — our feet warr sare an' we warr naarly 
dune for — an' when we turnt round Win- 
dermer Watter heead, T' waves blasht sea 
dowly j" that we warr fairly heart-brossen — 
we sat down on a cauld steane an' grat sare 

— but when we hed hed our belly-full o' 
greeting we gat up, an feelt better % fort' an' 
sea dreed on again — slaw enough ye may 
be sure — but we warr e' bent rwoads — an' 
now when I gang that gait I can nwote o' t' 
sports whor we reested — for them lile bye 
lwoans erent sea micklealtert, as t' girt 
rwoads, fra what they warr. At Clappers- 
gait t' Fwoak wad ha' knawn us, if it hed- 
dent been dark, an' o' ther duirs steeked §, 
an geen us a relief, if we hed begged there 

— but we began at be flate j| 'at my Fadder 
an' Mudder wad be angert at us for running 
away. 

" It was twea o'clock int' mworning when 
we gat to our awn Duir — I c'aed out 
' Fadder ! Fadder ! — Mudder ! Mudder !' 
ower an' ower again — She hard us, an' sed 
— ' That's our Betty's voice' — ' Thou's 
nought but fancies, lig still,' said my Fadder 

— but she waddent ; an' sea gat up, an' 
opent' Duir and there warr we stanning 
doddering ^f — an' daized we' cauld, as deer 
deead as macks nea matter — When she so 
us she was mare flate than we — She brast 
out a crying — an' we grat — an' my Fadder 
grat an' a' — an' they duddent flight**, nor 
said nought tull us, for cumming away, — 



* i. e. struggled on. Brockett in v. 

t i. e. lonely, melancholy. Ibid. 

% The scholar will call to mind the oXcolo rira^SJfx.nrdix. 
yioio of the Iliad, xxiii. 98., with like expressions in the 
Odyssey, e. g. xi. 211, xix. 213, and the reader of the 
Pseudo Ossian will remember the words of Fingal : 
» Strike the harp in my hall, and let Fingal hear the song. 
Pleasant is the joy of grief." See Adam Littleton's Ser- 
mons : part ii. p. 263. 

§ " Steek the heck," — i. e. shut the door. Brockett. 

|| From the verb " Flay," to frighten. 

% We still speak of Dodder or Quaker's grass, — a 
word, by the way, older than the Sect. 

** A. S. Flitan — to scold. 



they warrant a bit angert — an' my Fadder 
sed we sud nivver gang back again. 

" T' Fwoaks e' Dent nivver mist us, tilt' 
Neet — because they thought 'at we hed 
been keept at dinner time 'at finish our tasks 

— but when neet com, an' we duddent cum 
heam, they set off efter us to Kendal — an' 
mun ha' gane by Scotch Jins when we warr 
there — how they satisfied thersells, I knan't, 
but they suppwosed we hed gane heam — 
and sea they went back — My Fadder wasn't 
lang, ye may be seur, o' finding out' T' 
Woman at Kendal 'at was sea good tull us 

— an' my Mudder put her doun a pot o' 
Butter, an' meead her a lile cheese an' 
sent her." 

Interpolation. 

The above affecting and very simple story, 
Reader, was taken down from the mouth of 
Betty Yevvdale herself, the elder of the two 
children, — at that time an old woman, but 
with a bright black eye that lacked no lustre. 
A shrewd and masculine woman, Reader, 
was Betty Yewdale, — fond of the Nicotian 
weed and a short pipe so as to have the full 
flavour of its essence, — somewhat, sooth be 
said, too fond of it, for the pressure of the 
pipe produced a cancer in her mouth, which 
caused her death. — Knowest thou, gentle 
Reader, that most curious of all curious 
books — (we stop not to inquire whether 
Scarron be indebted to it, or it to Scarron) 
— the Anatomy of Melancholy by Democritus 
Junior, old Burton to wit ? — Curious if 
thou art, it cannot fail, but that thou knowest 
it well, — curious or not, hear what he says 
of Tobacco, poor Betty Yewdale's bane ! 

" Tobacco, divine, rare, super-excellent 
tobacco, which goes far beyond all their 
panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's 
stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases. 
A good vomit, I confesse, a vertuous herb, 
if it be well qualified, opportunely taken. 
and medicinally used ; but, as it is commonly 
abused by most men, which take it as tinkers 
do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent 
purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, 
devilish and damned tobacco, the mine and 
overthrow of body and soul.' 



562 



THE DOCTOR. 



Gentle Reader ! if thou knowest not the 
pages of honest old Burton — we speak not 
of his melancholy end, which melancholy 
may have wrought, but of his honesty of 
purpose, and of his life, — thou wilt not be 
unacquainted with that excellent Poem of 
Wordsworth's, — " The Excursion, being a 
Portion of the Recluse." — If any know not 
the wisdom contained in it, forthwith let them 
study it! — Acquainted with it or not, it is 
Betty Yewdale that is described in the fol- 
lowing lines, as holding the lanthorn to guide 
the steps of old Jonathan, her husband, on 
his return from working in the quarries, if 
at any time he chanced to be beyond his 
usual hour. They are given at length; — 
for who will not be pleased to read them 
decies repetita ? 

Much was I pleased, the grey-haired wanderer said, 

When to those shining fields our notice first 

You turned ; and yet more pleased have from your lips, 

Gathered this fair report of them who dwell 

In that retirement ; whither, by such course 

Of evil hap and good as oft awaits 

A lone wayfaring man, I once was brought. 

Dark on my road the autumnal evening fell 

While I was traversing yon mountain pass, 

And night succeeded with unusual gloom ; 

So that my feet and hands at length became 

Guides better than mine eyes —until a light 

High in the gloom appeared, too high, methought, 

For human habitation, but 1 longed 

To reach it destitute of other hope. 

I looked with steadiness as sailors look, 

On the north-star, or watch-tower's distant lamp, 

And saw the light — now fixed — and shifting, now — 

Not like a dancing meteor ; but in line 

Of never varying motion, to and fro. 

It is no night fire of the naked hills, 

Thought I, some friendly covert must be near. 

With this persuasion thitherward my steps 

I turn, and reach at last the guiding light ; 

Joy to myself! but to the heart of Her 

Who there was standing on the open hill, 

(The same kind Matron whom your tongue hath praised) 

Alarm and disappointment ! The alarm 

Ceased, when she learned through what mishap I came, 

And by what help had gained those distant fields. 

Drawn from her Cottage, on that open height, 

Bearing a lantern in her hand she stood 

Or paced the ground, — to guide her husband home, 

By that unwearied signal, kenned afar ; * 

An anxious duty 1 which the lofty Site, 

Traversed but by a few irregular paths, 

Imposes, whensoe'er untoward chance 

Detains him after his accustomed hour 

When night lies black upon the hills. ' But come, 

Come,' said the Matron,—' to our poor abode ; 

Those dark rocks hide it ! Entering, I beheld 

A blazing fire — beside a cleanly hearth 

Sate down ; and to her office, with leave asked, 

The Dame returned.— Or ere that glowing pile 



Of mountain turf required the builder's hand 

Its wasted splendour to repair, the door 

Opened, and she re-entered with glad looks, 

Her Helpmate following. Hospitable fare, 

Frank conversation, make the evening's treat: 

Need a bewildered Traveller wish for more? 

But more was given ; I studied as we sate 

By the bright fire, the good Man's face — composed 

Of features elegant ; an open brow 

Of undisturbed humanity ; a cheek 

Suffused with something of a feminine hue ; 

Eyes beaming courtesy and mild regard : 

But in the quicker turns of his discourse, 

Expression slowly varying, that evinced 

A tardy apprehension. From a fount 

Lost, thought I, in the obscurities of time, 

But honour'd once, those features and that mien 

May have descended, though I see them here, 

In such a man, so gentle and subdued, 

Withal so graceful in his gentleness. 

A race illustrious for heroic deeds, 

Humbled, but not degraded, may expire. 

This pleasing fancy (cherished and upheld 

By sundry recollections of such fall 

From high to low, ascent from low to high, 

As books record, and even the careless mind 

Cannot but notice among men and things,) 

Went with me to the place of my repose. 

Book V. The Pastor. 

*#* Miss Sarah Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, 
and Mrs. Warter took down the story from the old 
woman's lips, and Southey laid it by for the Doctor, &c. 
She then lived in a cottage at Rydal, where I afterwards 
saw her. Of the old man it was told me — (for I did not 
see him) — " He is a perfect picture, — like those we meet 
with in the better copies of Saints in our old Prayer 
Books." 

There was another comical History intended for an 
Interchapter to the Doctor, &c. of a runaway match to 
Gretna Green by two people in humble life,— but it was 
not handed over to me with the MS. materials. It was 
taken down from the mouth of the old woman who was 
one of the parties — and it would probably date back some 
sixty or seventy years. 



CHAPTER CCIX. 

EARLY APPROXIMATION TO THE DOCTOR^ 
THEORY. GEORGE FOX. ZACHARIAH BEN 
MOHAMMED. COWPER. INSTITUTES OF 
MENU. BARDIC PHILOSOPHY. MILTON. 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 

There are distinct degrees of Reing as there are degrees 
of Sound ; and the whole world is but as it were a greater 
Gamut, or scale of music. Nonius. 

Certain theologians, and certain theo- 
sophists, as men who fancy themselves in- 
spired sometimes affect to be called, had 
approached so nearly to the Doctor's hypo- 
thesis of progressive life, and propensities 



THE DOCTOR. 



563 



continued in the ascending scale, that he 
appealed to them as authorities for its sup- 
port. They saw the truth, he said, as far as 
they went; but it was only to a certain 
point : a step farther and the beautiful theory 
would have opened upon them. " How can 
we choose, said one, but remember the mercy 
of God in this our land in this particular, 
that no ravenous dangerous beasts do range 
in our nation, if men themselves would not 
be wolves, and bears, and lions one to 
another ! " And why are they so, observed 
the Doctor commenting upon the words of 
the old Divine ; why are they so, but be- 
cause they have actually been lions, and 
bears, and wolves ? Why are they so, but 
because, as the wise heathen speaks, more 
truly than he was conscious of speaking, sub 
hominum effigie latet ferinus animus. The 
temper is congenital, the propensity innate ; 
it is bred in the bone ; and what Theo- 
logians call the old Adam, or the old Man, 
should physiologically, and perhaps therefore 
preferably, be called the old Beast. 

That wise and good man William Jones, 
of Xayland, has, in his sermon upon the 
nature and oeconomy of Beasts and Cattle, a 
passage which, in elucidating a remarkable 
part of the Law of Moses, may serve also as 
a glose or commentary upon the Doctor's 
theory. 

" The Law of Moses, in the xith chapter 
of Leviticus, divides the brute creation into 
two grand parties, from the fashion of their 
feet, and their manner of feeding, that is, 
from the parting of the hoof, and the chew- 
ing of the cud ; which properties are indica- 
tions of their general characters, as wild or 
tame. For the dividing of the hoof and the 
chewing of the cud are peculiar to those 
cattle which are serviceable to man's life, as 
sheep, oxen, goats, deer, and their several 
kinds. These are shod by the Creator for 
a peaceable and inoffensive progress through 
life ; as the Scripture exhorts us to be shod 
in like manner with the preparation of the 
Gospel of Peace. They live temperately 
upon herbage, the diet of students and 
saints ; and after the taking of their food, 
chew it deliberate! v over a^ain for better 



digestion ; in which act they have all the 
appearance a brute can assume of pensive- 
ness or meditation ; which is, metaphorically, 
called rumination *, with reference to this 
property of certain animals. 

" Such are these : but when we compare 
the beasts of the field and the forest, they, 
instead of the harmless hoof, have feet 
which are swift to shed blood, (Rom. iii. 15.) 
sharp claws to seize upon their prey, and 
teeth to devour it ; such as lions, tigers, 
leopards, wolves, foxes, and smaller vermin. 

" Where one of the Mosaic marks is found, 
and the other is wanting, such creatures are 
of a middle character between the wild and 
the tame ; as the swine, the hare, and some 
others. Those that part the hoof afford us 
wholesome nourishment ; those that are shod 
with any kind of hoof may be made useful to 
man ; as the camel, the horse, the ass, the 
mule ; all of which are fit to travel and carry 
burdens. But when the foot is divided into 
many parts, and armed with claws, there is but 
small hope of the manners ; such creatures 
being in general either murderers, or hun- 
ters, or thieves ; the malefactors and felons 
of the brute creation : though among the 
wild there are all the possible gradations of 
ferocity and evil temper. 

" Who can review the creatures of God, 
as they arrange themselves under the two 
great denominations of wild and tame, with- 
out wondering at their different dispositions 
and ways of life ! sheep and oxen lead a 
sociable as well as a peaceful life ; they are 
formed into flocks and herds ; and as they 
live honestly they walk openly in the day. 
The time of darkness is to them, as to the 
virtuous and sober amongst men, a time of 
rest. But the beast of prey goeth about in 

* Pallentes ruminat herbas. — Virgil. 

Dum jacet, et lentd revocatas rummat herbas — Ovid. 

It were hardly necessary to recal to an English reader's 
recollection the words of Brutus to Cassias, 

Till then, my noble friend, chcic upon this. — 

Julius C«sah. 

or those of Agrippa in Antony and Cleopatra, 
Pardon what I have Bpoke ; 
For 'tis a studied, not a present thought, 
By duty ruminated. 

00 2 



564 



THE DOCTOR. 



solitude ; the time of darkness is to him the 
time of action ; then he visits the folds of 
sheep, and stalls of oxen, thirsting for their 
blood ; as the thief and the murderer visits 
the habitations of men, for an opportunity 
of robbing, and destroying, under the con- 
cealment of the night. When the sun 
ariseth the beast of prey retires to the covert 
of the forest ; and while the cattle are 
spreading themselves over a thousand hills 
in search of pasture, the tyrant of the desert 
is laying himself down in his den, to sleep 
off the fumes of his bloody meal. The ways 
of men are not less different than the ways 
of beasts ; and here we may see them repre- 
sented as on a glass ; for, as the quietness 
of the pasture, in which the cattle spend 
their day, is to the howlings of a wilderness 
at night, such is the virtuous life of honest 
labour to the life of the thief, the oppressor, 
the murderer, and the midnight gamester, 
who live upon the losses and sufferings of 
other men." 

But how would the Doctor have delighted 
in the first Lesson of that excellent man's 
Book of Nature, — a book more likely to be 
useful than any other that has yet been 
written with the same good intent. 

The Beasts. 

" The ass hath very long ears, and yet 
he hath no sense of music, but brayeth with 
a frightful noise. He is obstinate and un- 
ruly, and will go his own way, even though 
he is severely beaten. The child who will 
not be taught is but little better ; he has 
no delight in learning, but talketh of his 
own folly, and disturbeth others with his 
noise. 

" The dog barketh all the night long, and 
thinks it no trouble to rob honest people of 
their rest. 

" The fox is a cunning thief, and men, 
when they do not fear God, are crafty and 
deceitful. The wolf is cruel and blood- 
thirsty. As he devoureth the lamb, so do 
bad men oppress and tear the innocent and 
helpless. 

" The adder is a poisonous snake, and 
hath a forked double tongue ; and so men 



speak lies, and utter slanders against their 
neighbours, when the poison of asps is under 
their lips. The devil, who deceiveth with 
lies, and would destroy all mankind, is the 
old serpent, who brought death into the 
world by the venom of his bite. He would 
kill me, and all the children that are born, if 
God would let him ; but Jesus Christ came 
to save us from his power, and to destroy the 
works of the Devil. 

" Lord, thou hast made me a man for thy 
service : O let me not dishonour thy work, 
by turning myself into the likeness of some 
evil beast : let me not be as the fox, who is 
a thief and a robber : let me never be cruel, 
as a wolf, to any of thy creatures ; especially 
to my dear fellow-creatures, and my dearer 
fellow Christians ; but let me be harmless 
as the lamb ; quiet and submissive as the 
sheep ; that so I may be fit to live, and be 
fed on thy pasture, under the good shepherd, 
Jesus Christ. It is far better to be the 
poorest of his flock, than to be proud and 
cruel, as the lion or the tiger, who go about 
seeking what they may devour." 

The Questions. 

" Q. What is the child that will not learn ? 

" A. An ass, which is ignorant and unruly. 

" Q. What are wicked men, who hurt and 
cheat others ? 

" A. They are wolves, and foxes, and 
blood-thirsty lions. 

" Q. What are ill-natured people, who 
trouble their neighbours and rail at them ? 

" A. They are dogs, who bark at every- 
body. 

" Q. But what are good and peaceable 
people ? 

" A. They are harmless sheep ; and little 
children under the grace of God, are inno- 
cent lambs. 

" Q. But what are liars ? 

" A. They are snakes and vipers, with 
double tongues and poison under their lips. 

" Q. Who is the good shepherd ? 

*' A. Jesus Christ." 

There is a passage not less apposite in 
Donne's Epistle to Sir Edward, afterwards 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury. 



THE DOCTOR. 



565 



Man is a lump where all beasts kneaded be ; 

"Wisdom makes him an Ark where all agree. 

The fool in whom these beasts do live at jar, 

Is sport to others and a theatre ; 

Nor 'scapes he so, but is himself their prey, 

All that was man in him is ate away ; 

And now his beasts on one another feed, 

Yet couple in anger and new monsters breed. 

How happy he which hath due place assign'd 

To his beasts, and disaforested his mind, 

Empaled himself to keep them out, not in ; 

Can sow and dares trust corn where they have been, 

Can use his horse, goat, wolf and every beast, 

And is not ass himself to all the rest. 

To this purport the Patriarch of the 
Quakers writes, where he saith " now some 
men have the nature of Swine, wallowing in 
the mire : and some men have the nature of 
Dogs, to bite both the sheep and one 
another : and some men have the nature of 
Lions, to tear, devour, and destroy : and 
some men have the nature of Wolves, to 
tear and devour the lambs and sheep of 
Christ : and some men have the nature of 
the Serpent (that old destroyer) to sting, 
e venom, and poison. He that hath an ear to 
hear, let him hear, and learn these things 
within himself. And some men have the 
natures of other beasts and creatures, mind- 
ing nothing but earthly and visible things, 
and feeding without the fear of God. Some 
men have the nature of a Horse, to prance 
and vapour in their strength, and to be 
swift in doing evil. And some men have 
the nature of tall sturdy Oaks, to nourish 
and spread in wisdom and strength, who are 
strong in evil, which must perish and come 
to the fire. Thus the Evil one is but one in 
all, but worketh many ways ; and what- 
soever a Man's or Woman's nature is ad- 
dicted to that is outward, the Evil one will 
fit him with that, and will please his nature 
and appetite, to keep his mind in his in- 
ventions, and in the creatures from the 
Creator." 

To this purport the so-called Clemens 
writes in the Apostolical Constitutions when 
he complains that the flock of Christ was 
devoured by Demons and wicked men, or 
rather not men, but wild beasts in the shape 
of men, Trovripolq di'Opunroig, paWov de ovk 
dvQpioTWig, dWd Srjpioig dvQpioTrofiSecriv, by 
Heathens, Jews and godless heretics. 



With equal triumph, too, did he read a 
passage in one of the numbers of the Con- 
noisseur, which made him wonder that the 
writer, from whom it proceeded in levity, 
should not have been led on by it to the 
clear perception of a great truth. " The 
affinity," says that writer, who is now known 
to have been no less a person than the author 
of the Task, " the affinity between chatter- 
ers and monkeys, and praters and parrots, 
is too obvious not to occur at once. Grun- 
ters and growlers may be justly compared 
to hogs. Snarlers are curs that continually 
shew their teeth, but never bite ; and the 
spit-fire passionate are a sort of wild cats, 
that will not bear stroking, but will purr 
when they are pleased. Complainers- are 
screech-owls ; and story-tellers, always re- 
peating the same dull note, are cuckoos. 
Poets, that prick up their ears at their own 
hideous braying, are no better than asses ; 
critics in general are venomous serpents, that 
delight in hissing ; and some of them, who 
have got by heart a few technical terms, 
without knowing their meaning, are no bet- 
ter than magpies." 

So, too, the polyonomous Arabian philoso- 
pher Zechariah Ben Mohammed Ben Mah- 
mud Al Camuni Al Cazvini. "Man," he 
says, " partakes of the nature of vegetables, 
because, like them, he grows and is nourished ; 
he stands in this further relation to the 
irrational animals, that he feels and moves ; 
by his intellectual faculties he resembles the 
higher orders of intelligences, and he par- 
takes more or less of these various classes, 
as his inclination leads him. If his sole wish 
be to satisfy the wants of existence, then he 
is content to vegetate. If he partakes more 
of the animal than the vegetable nature, we 
find him fierce as the lion, greedy as the 
bull, impure as the hog, cruel as the leopard, 
or cunning as the fox ; and if, as is some- 
times the case, he possesses all these bad 
qualities, he is then a demon in human 
shape." 

Gratifying as these passages were to him, 
some of them being mere sports of wit, and 
others only the produce of fancy, he would 
have been indeed delighted if he had known 



566 



THE DOCTOR. 



what was in his days known by no European 
scholar, that in the Institutes of Menu, his 
notion is distinctly declared as a revealed 
truth ; there it is said, " In whatever occu- 
pation the Supreme Lord first employed 
any vital soul, to that occupation the same 
soul attaches itself spontaneously, when it 
receives a new body again and again. What- 
ever quality, noxious or innocent, harsh or 
mild, unjust or just, false or true, he con- 
ferred on any being at its creation, the 
same quality enters it of course on its future 
births." * 

Still more would it have gratified him if 
he had known (as has before been curso- 
rily observed) how entirely his own theory 
coincided with the Druidical philosophy, a 
philosophy which he would rather have 
traced to the Patriarchs, than to the Canaan- 
ites. Their doctrine, as explained by the 
Welsh translator of the Paradise Lost, in 
the sketch of Bardism which he has prefixed 
to the poems of Lly ware the Aged, was that 
" the whole animated creation originated in 
the lowest point of existence, and arrived by 
a regular train of gradations at the proba- 
tionary state of humanity, the intermediate 
stages being all necessarily evil, but more 
or less so as they were removed from the 
beginning, which was evil in the extreme. 
In the state of humanity, good and evil were 
equally balanced, consequently it was a state 
of liberty, in -which, if the conduct of the 
free agent preponderated towards evil, death 
gave but an awful passage whereby he re- 
turned to animal life, in a condition below 
humanity equal to the degree of turpitude 
to which he had debased himself, when free 
to choose between good and evil : and if his 
life were desperately wicked, it was possible 
for him to fall to his original vileness, in the 
lowest point of existence, there to recom- 
mence his painful progression through the 
ascending series of brute being. But if he 
had acted well in this his stage of proba- 
tion, death was then to the soul thus tried 
and approved, what the word by which in 
the language of the Druids it is denoted, 

* Sir W. Jones. 



literally means, enlargement. The soul was 
removed from the sphere wherein evil hath 
any place, into a state necessarily good ; not 
to continue there in one eternal condition 
of blessedness, eternity being what no in- 
ferior existence could endure, but to pass 
from one gradation to another, gaining at 
every ascent increase of knowledge, and 
retaining the consciousness of its whole pre- 
ceding progress through all. For the good 
of the human race, such a soul might again 
be sent on earth, but the human being of 
which it then formed the life, was inca- 
pable of falling." In this fancy the Bardic 
system approached that of the Bramins, this 
Celtic avatar of a happy soul, corresponding 
to the twice-born man of the Hindus. And 
the Doctor would have extracted some con- 
firmation for the ground of the theory from 
that verse of the Psalm which speaks of us 
as " curiously wrought in the lowest parts 
of the earth." 

Young, he used to say, expressed uncon- 
sciously this system of progressive life, when 
he spoke of man as a creature 

From different natures marvellously mix'd ; 
Connection exquisite of distant worlds ; 
Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain, 
Midway from nothing to the Deity. 

It was more distinctly enounced by Aken- 
side. 

The same paternal hand 
From the mute shell-fish gasping on the shore 
To men, to angels, to celestial minds 
Will ever lead the generations on 
Through higher scenes of being : while, supplied 
From day to day with his enlivening breath, 
Inferior orders in succession rise 
To fill the void below. As flame ascends, 
As vapours to the earth in showers return, 
As the pois'd ocean toward the attracting moon 
Swells, and the ever listening planets charmed 
By the Sun's call their onward pace incline, 
So all things which have life aspire to God, 
Exhaustless fount of intellectual day ! 
Centre of souls ! nor doth the mastering voice 
Of nature cease within to prompt aright 
Their steps ; nor is the care of heaven withheld 
From sending to the toil external aid, 
That in their stations all may persevere 
To climb the ascent of being, and approach 
For ever nearer to the Life Divine. 

The Bardic system bears in itself intrinsic 
evidence of its antiquity ; for no such philo- 
sophy could have been devised among any 
Celtic people in later ages ; nor could the 



THE DOCTOR. 



567 



Britons have derived any part of it from 
any nation with whom they had any oppor- 
tunity of intercourse, at any time within 
reach of history. The Druids, or rather 
the Bards, (for these, according to those by 
whom their traditionary wisdom has been 
preserved, were the superior order,) deduced 
as corollaries from the theory of Progressive 
Existence, these beautiful Triads.* 

"There are three Circles of Existence; 
the Circle of Infinity, where there is nothing 
but God, of living or dead, and none but 
God can traverse it ; . the Circle of Inchoa- 
tion, where all things are by nature derived 
from Death, — this Circle hath been tra- 
versed by man ; and the Circle of happiness, 
where all things spring from life, — this man 
shall traverse in heaven. 

" Animated beings having three states of 
Existence ; that of Inchoation in the Great 
Deep, or lowest point of Existence ; that of 
Liberty in the State of Humanity ; and 
that of Love, which is the Happiness of 
Heaven. 

"All animated Beings are subject to three 
Necessities ; beginning in the Great Deep ; 
Progression in the Circle of Inchoation ; and 
Plenitude in the Circle of Happiness. With- 
out these things nothing can possibly exist 
but God. 

" Three things are necessary in the Circle 
of Inchoation ; the least of all, Animation, 



* Originally quoted in the notes to Madoc to illustrate 
the lines which follow. 

"Let the Bard, 
Exclaim'd the King, give his accustom'd lay: 
For sweet, I know, to Madoc is the song 
He loved in earlier years. 

Then strong of voice, 
The officer proclaim'd the sovereign will, 
Bidding the hall be silent ; loud he spake 
And smote the sounding pillar with his wand 
And hush'd the banqueters. The chief of Bards 
Then raised the ancient lay. 

Thee, Lord, he smig, 
Father ! Thee, whose wisdom, Thee, whose power, 
Whose love, — all love, all power, all wisdom, Thou ! 
Tongue cannot utter, nor can heart conceive. 
He in the loivest depth of Being J rained 
The imperishable mind ; in every change 
Through the great circle of progressh<e life, 
He guides and guards, till evil shall be lenown, 
And being known as evil cease to be ; 
And the pure soul emancipate by death, 
The Enlarge); shall attain its end prcdoom'd, 
The eternal newness of eternal joy. 



and thence beginning ; the materials of all 
things, and thence Increase, which cannot 
take place in any other state ; the formation 
of all tilings out of the dead mass, and 
thence Discriminate Individuality. 

" Three things cannot but exist towards 
all animated Beings from the nature of 
Divine Justice: Co- sufferance in the Circle 
of Inchoation, because without that none 
could attain to the perfect knowledge of 
anything ; Co-participation in the Divine 
Love ; and Co-ultimity from the nature of 
God's Power, and its attributes of Justice 
and Mercy. 

" There are three necessary occasions of 
Inchoation : to collect the materials and 
properties of every nature; to collect the 
knowledge of everything ; and to collect 
power towards subduing the Adverse and 
the Devastative, and for the divestation of 
Evil. Without this traversing every mode 
of animated existence, no state of animation, 
or of anything in nature, can attain to 
plenitude." 

" By the knowledge of three things will 
all Evil and Death be diminished and sub- 
dued; their nature, their cause, and their 
operation. This knowledge will be obtained 
in the Circle of Happiness." 

" The three Plenitudes of Happiness : — 
Participation of every nature, with a pleni- 
tude of One predominant; conformity to 
every cast of genius and character, possessing 
superior excellence in one : the love of all 
Beings and Existences, but chiefly concen- 
tred in one object, which is God ; and in 
the predominant One of each of these, will 
the Plenitude of Happiness consist." 

Triads, it may be observed, are found in 
the Proverbs of Solomon : so that to the 
evidence of antiquity which these Bardic 
remains present in their doctrines, a pre- 
sumption is to be added from the peculiar 
form in which they are conveyed. 

Whether Sir Philip Sydney had any such 
theory in his mind or not, there is an ap- 
proach to it in that fable which he says old 
Lanquet taught him of the Beasts desiring 
from Jupiter, a King, Jupiter consented, but 
on condition that they should contribute the 



568 



THE DOCTOR. 



qualities convenient for the new and superior 
creature. 

Full glad they were, and took the naked sprite, 
Which straight the Earth yclothed in her flay ; 

The Lion heart, the Ounce gave active might ; 
The Horse, good shape ; the Sparrow lust to play ; 
Nightingale, voice enticing songs to say ; 

Elephant gave a perfect memory, 

And Parrot, ready tongue that to apply. 

The Fox gave craft ; the Dog gave Battery ; 
Ass, patience; the Mole, a working thought ; 

Eagle, high look ; Wolf, secret cruelty ; 
Monkey, sweet breath ; the Cow, her fair eyes brought : 
The Ermine, whitest skin, spotted with nought. 

The Sheep, mild-seeming face ; climbing the Bear, 

The Stag did give his harm-eschewing fear. 

The Hare, her slights ; the Cat, her melancholy; 

Ant, industry ; and Coney, skill to build ; 
Cranes, order ; Storks, to be appearing holy ; 

Cameleons, ease to change ; Duck, ease to yield ; 

Crocodile, tears which might be falsely spill'd; 
Ape, great thing gave, tho' he did mowing stand, 
The instrument of instruments, the hand. 

Thus Man was made, thus Man their Lord became. 

At such a system he thought Milton 
glanced when his Satan speaks of the in- 
fluences of the heavenly bodies, as 

Productive in herb, plant, and nobler birth 

Of creatures animate with gradual life 

Of growth, sense, reason, all sumrn'd up in man : 

for that the lines, though capable of another 
interpretation, ought to be interpreted as 
referring to a scheme of progressive life, ap- 
pears by this fuller developement in the 
speech of Rafael ; 

O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom 

All things proceed, and up to him return, 

If not deprav'd from good, created all 

Such to perfection, one first matter all, 

Indued with various forms, various degrees 

Of substance, and in things that live, of life ; 

But more retin'd, more spiritous, and pure, 

As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending 

Each in their several active spheres assign'd, 

Till body up to spirit work, in bounds 

Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root 

Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves 

More aery, last the bright consummate flower 

Spirits odorous breathes : flow'rs and their fruit, 

Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed, 

To vital spirits aspire, to animal, 

To intellectual ; give both life and sense 

Fancy and understanding ; whence the soul 

Reason received, and reason is her being 

Discursive, or intuitive ; discourse 

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, 

Differing but in degree, of kind the same.* 

Whether that true philosopher, in the 
exact import of the word, Sir Thomas 



* Spenser in his " Ilymne of Heavenly Beautie " falls 
into a similar train of thought, as is observed by Thyer :— 



Browne, had formed a system of this kind, 
or only threw out a seminal idea from which 
it might be evolved, the Doctor, who dearly 
loved the writings of this most meditative 
author, would not say. But that Sir Thomas 
had opened the same vein of thought ap- 
pears in what Dr. Johnson censured in " a 
very fanciful and indefensible section" of 
his Christian Morals ; for there, and not 
among his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, that is 
to say, Vulgar Errors, the passage is found. 
Our Doctor would not only have deemed it 
defensible, but would have proved it to be 
so by defending it. " Since the brow," says 
the Philosopher of Norwich, " speaks often 
truth, since eyes and noses have tongues, 
and the countenance proclaims the heart 
and inclinations ; let observation so far in- 
struct thee in physiognomical lines, as to be 
some rule for thy distinction, and guide 
for thy affection unto such as look most like 
men. Mankind, methinks, is comprehended 
in a few faces, if we exclude all visages 
which any way participate of symmetries 
and schemes of look common unto other 
animals. For as though man were the 
extract of the world, in whom all were in 
coagulate, which in their forms were in 
soluto, and at extension, we often observe 
that men do most act those creatures whose 
constitution, parts and complexion, do most 
predominate in their mixtures. This is a 
corner-stone in physiognomy, and holds 
some truth, not only in particular persons, 
but also in whole nations." "}* 

But Dr. Johnson must cordially have as- 
sented to Sir Thomas Browne's inferential 
admonition. " Live," says that Religious 
Physician and Christian Moralist, — " live 
unto the dignity of thy nature, and leave it 
not disputable at last whether thou hast 



By view whereof it plainly may appeare 

That still as every thing doth upward tend, 

And further is from earth, so still more cleare 

Andfaire it grows, till to his perfect end 

Of purest beautie it at last ascend ; 

Ayre more than water, lire much more than ayre, 

And heaven than fire, appeares more pure and fayre. 

But these are somewhat of Pythagorean speculations- 
caught up by Lucretius and Virgil, 
t Part ii. Section 9. 



THE DOCTOR. 



569 



been a man, or since thou art a composition 
of man and beast, how thou hast predomi- 
nantly passed thy days, to state the deno- 
mination. Un-man not, therefore, thyself 
by a bestial transformation, nor realize old 
fables. Expose not thyself by fourfooted 
manners unto monstrous draughts and ca- 
ricature representations. Think not after 
the old Pythagorean concert what beast 
thou mayest be after death. Be not under 
any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest 
and walkest about erectly under that scheme 
of man. In thine own circumference, as in 
that of the earth, let the rational horizon be 
larger than the sensible, and the circle of 
reason than of sense : let the divine part be 
upward, and the region of beast below : 
otherwise it is but to live invertedly, and 
with thy head unto the heels of thy antipodes. 
Desert not thy title to a divine particle and 
union with invisibles. Let true knowledge 
and virtue tell the lower world thou art a 
part of the higher. Let thy thoughts be of 
things which have not entered into the 
hearts of beasts ; think of things long past, 
and long to come ; acquaint thyself with the 
choragium of the stars, and consider the 
vast expansion beyond them. Let intel- 
lectual tubes give thee a glance of things 
which visive organs reach not. Have a 
glimpse of incomprehensible, and thoughts 
of things, which thoughts but tenderly 
touch. Lodge immaterials in thy head, 
ascend unto invisibles ; fill thy spirit with 
spirituals, with the mysteries of faith, the 
magnalities of religion, and thy life with the 
honour of God; without which, though 
giants in wealth and dignity, we are but 
dwarfs and pygmies in humanity, and may 
hold a pitiful rank in that triple division of 
mankind into heroes, men and beasts. For 
though human souls are said to be equal, 
yet is there no small inequality in their 
operations ; some maintain the allowable 
station of men, many are far below it ; and 
some have been so divine as to approach 
the apogeum of their natures, and to be in 
the confinium of spirits." 



CHAPTER CCX. 

A QUOTATION TROM BISHOP BERKELEY, AND 
A HIT AT THE SMAEL CRITICS. 

Plusic?irs blameront Ventassement de passages que Von 
vienidc voir; faiprevu leurs dedains, leurs degu&ls, et 
lews censures magistrates ; et n'ai pas voulu y avoir 
igard. Bayle. 

Here I shall inform the small critic, what it 
is, " a thousand pounds to one penny," as 
the nursery song says, or as the newspaper 
reporters of the Ring have it, Lombard 
Street to a China Orange, — no small critic 
already knows, whether he be diurnal, 
hebdomadal, monthly or trimestral, — that a 
notion of progressive Life is mentioned in 
Bishop Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, not 
as derived from any old system of philosophy 
or religion, but as the original speculation 
of one who belonged to a club of Free- 
thinkers. Another member of that worship- 
ful society explains the system of his ac- 
quaintance, thus : 

" He made a threefold partition of the 
human species into Birds, Beasts and Fishes, 
being of opinion that the Road of Life lies 
upwards in a perpetual ascent, through the 
scale of Being : in such sort, that the souls 
of insects after death make their second 
appearance in the shape of perfect animals, 
Birds, Beasts or Fishes ; which upon their 
death are preferred into human bodies, and 
in the next stage into Beings of a higher 
and more perfect kind. This man we con- 
sidered at first as a sort of heretic, because 
his scheme seemed not to consist with our 
fundamental tenet, the Mortality of the 
Soul: but he justified the notion to be 
innocent, inasmuch as it included nothing of 
reward or punishment, and was not proved 
by any argument which supposed or implied 
either incorporeal spirit, or Providence, 
being only inferred, by way of analogy, from 
what he had observed in human afiairs, the 
Court, the Church, and the Army, wherein 
the tendency is always upwards, from lower 
posts to higher. According to this system, 
the Fishes are those men who swim in plea- 
sure, such as petits maitres, bons vhmns, and 



570 



THE DOCTOR. 



honest fellows. The Beasts are dry, 
drudging, covetous, rapacious folk, and all 
those addicted 'to care and business like 
oxen, and other dry land animals, which 
spend their lives in labour and fatigue. 
The Birds are airy, notional men, En- 
thusiasts, Projectors, Philosophers, and such 
like ; in each species every individual re- 
taining a tincture of his former state, which 
constitutes what is called genius." 

The quiet reader who sometimes lifts his 
eyes from the page (and closes them per- 
haps) to meditate upon what he has been 
reading, will perhaps ask himself wherefore 
I consider it to be as certain that no small 
critic should have read the Minute Phi- 
losopher, as that children cannot be drowned 
while "sliding on dry ground?" — My 
reason for so thinking is, that small critics 
never read anything so good. Like town 
ducks they dabble in the gutter, but never 
purify themselves in clear streams, nor take 
to the deep waters. 



CHAPTER CCXI. 

SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON. 
CUDWORTH. JACKSON OP OXFORD AND 
NEWCASTLE. A BAXTERIAN SCRUPLE. 

S'ily a des lecteurs qui se soucient peu de cela, on les 
prie de se souvenir qrfun auteur ri'est pas oblige' a ne rien 
dire que ce qui est de leur gout. Bayle. 

Had my ever-by-me-to-be-lamented friend, 
and from this time forth, I trust, ever-by-the- 
public-to-be-honoured philosopher, been a 
Welshman ; or had he lived to become ac- 
quainted with the treasures of Welsh lore 
which Edward Williams, William Owen, and 
Edward Davies, the Curate of Olveston, 
have brought to light ; he would have be- 
lieved in the Bardic system as heartily as the 
Glamorganshire and Merionethshire Bards 
themselves, and have fitted it, without any 
apprehension of heresy, to his own religious 
creed. And although he would have per- 
ceived with the Curate of Olveston (worthy 
of the best Welsh Bishoprick for his labours: 
O George the Third, why did no one tell 



thee that he was so, when he dedicated to 
thee his Celtic Researches ?), — although (I 
say) he would have perceived that certain of 
the Druidical rites were derived from an ac- 
cursed origin, — a fact authenticated by 
their abominations, and rendered certain by 
the historical proof that the Celtic language 
affords in both those dialects wherein any 
genuine remains have been preserved, — that 
knowledge would still have left him at liberty 
to adopt such other parts of the system as 
harmonised with his own speculations, and 
were not incompatible with the Christian 
faith. How he would have reconciled them 
shall be explained when I have taken this 
opportunity of relating something of the late 
Right Reverend Father in God, Richard 
Watson, Lord Bishop of LlandafF, which is 
more to his honour than anything that he 
has related of himself. He gave the Curate 
of Olveston, upon George Hardinge's recom- 
mendation, a Welsh Rectory, which, though 
no splendid preferment, placed that patient, 
and learned, and able and meritorious poor 
man, in a respectable station, and conferred 
upon him (as he gratefully acknowledged) 
the comfort of independence. 

My friend had been led by Cudworth to 
this reasonable conclusion that there was a 
theology of divine tradition, or revelation, 
or a divine cabala, amongst the Hebrews first, 
and from them afterward communicated to 
the Egyptians and other nations. He had 
learned also from that greater theologian 
Jackson of Corpus (whom the Laureate 
Southey (himself to be commended for so 
doing) loses no opportunity of commend- 
ing) * that divine communion was not con- 
fined to the Israelites before their distinc- 
tion from other nations, and that " idolatry 
and superstition could not have increased so 
much in the old world, unless there had been 
evident documents of a divine power in ages 
precedent ; " for " strange fables and lying 

* Since Southey's death, Jackson's Works, to the much 
satisfaction of all sound theologians, have been reprinted 
at the Clarendon Press. I once heard Mr. Parker the 
Bookseller — the uncle of the present Mr. Parker — say, 
that he recollected the sheets of the Folio Edition being 
used as wrappers in the shops ! Alexander's dust as a 
bung to a beer-barrel, quotha ! 



THE DOCTOR. 



571 



wonders receive being from notable and ad- 
mirable decayed truths, as baser creatures 
do life from the dissolution of more noble 
bodies." These were the deliberate opinions 
of men not more distinguished among their 
contemporaries and eminent above their 
successors, for the extent of their erudition, 
than remarkable for capacity of mind and 
sobriety of judgment. And with these the 
history of the Druidical system entirely ac- 
cords, It arose " from the gradual or acci- 
dental corruption of the patriarchal religion, 
by the abuse of certain commemorative 
honours which were paid to the ancestors of 
the human race, and by the admixture of 
Sabscan idolatry ;" and on the religion thus 
corrupted some Canaanite abominations were 
engrafted by the Phoenicians. But as in 
other apostacies, a portion of original truth 
was retained in it. 

Indeed just as remains of the antediluvian 
world are found everywhere in the bowels 
of the earth, so are traces not of scriptural 
history alone, but of primaeval truths, to be 
discovered in the tradition of savages, their 
wild fables, and their bewildered belief; as 
well as in the elaborate systems of heathen 
mythology and the principles of what may 
deserve to be called divine philosophy. The 
farther our researches are extended, the 
more of these collateral proofs are collected, 
and consequently the stronger their collec- 
tive force becomes. Research and reflection 
lead also to conclusions as congenial to the 
truly christian heart as they may seem start- 
ling to that which is christian in everything 
except in charity. Impostors acting only 
for their own purposes have enunciated holy 
truths, which in many of their followers 
have brought forth fruits of holiness. True 
miracles have been worked in false religions. 
Nor ought it to be doubted that prayers 
which have been directed to false Gods in 
erring, but innocent, because unavoidable 
misbelief, have been heard and accepted by 
that most merciful Father, whose eye is over 
all his creatures, and who hateth nothing 
that he hath made. — Here, be it remarked, 
that Baxter has protested against this fine 
expression in that paper of exceptions 



against the Common Prayer which he pre- 
pared for the Savoy Meeting, and which his 
colleagues were prudent enough to set aside, 
lest it should give offence, they said, but pro- 
bably because the more moderate of them 
were ashamed of its frivolous and captious 
cavillings ; the Collect in which it occurs, he 
said, hath no reason for appropriation to the 
first day of Lent, and this part of it is un- 
handsomely said, being true only in a for- 
mal sense qua talis, for " he hateth all the 
works of iniquity." Thus did he make ini- 
quity the work of God, a blasphemy from 
which he would have revolted with just ab- 
horrence if it had been advanced by another 
person : but dissent had become in him a 
cachexy of the intellect. 



CHAPTER CCXII. 

SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOC- 
TOR'S THEORY. DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES. 

Voilct bien des mysteres, dira-t-on j fen conviens ; aussi 
le sujet le merite-t-il bien. Au reste, il est certain que 
ces mysteres ne cachent rien de mauvais. Gomgam. 

But although the conformity of the Bardic 
system to his own notions of progressive 
existence would have appeared to the Doctor 

— confirmation strong 
As proof of holy writ, — 

he would have assented to that system no 
farther than such preceding conformity ex- 
tended. Holding it only as the result of his 
own speculations, — as hypothesis, — a mere 
fancy, — a toy of the mind, — a plaything 
for the intellect in its lighter moments, and 
sometimes in its graver ones the subject of a 
dream, — he valued it accordingly. And yet 
the more he sported with it, and the farther 
he pursued it in his reveries, the more 
plausible it appeared, and the better did it 
seem to explain some of the physical pheno- 
mena, and some of the else seemingly inex- 
plicable varieties of human nature. It was 
Henry More's opinion that the Pre-existence 
of the Soul, which is so explicit and fre- 
quent a doctrine of the Platonists, " was a 
tenet for which there are many plausible 



572 



THE DOCTOR. 



reasons, and against which there is nothing 
considerable to be alleged ; being a key," he 
said, "for some main mysteries of Providence 
which no other can so handsomely unlock." 
More however, the Doctor thought, might be 
advanced against that tenet, than against his 
own scheme, for to that no valid objection 
could be opposed. But the metempsychosis 
in a descending scale as a scheme of punish- 
ment would have been regarded by him as 
one of those corruptions which the Bards 
derived from the vain philosophy or false 
religions of the Levant. 

Not that this part of their scheme was 
without a certain plausibility on the surface, 
which might recommend it to inconsiderate 
minds. He himself would have thought that 
no Judge ever pronounced a more just deci- 
sion than the three Infernal Lord Chancellors 
of the dead would do, if they condemned his 
townsman the pettyfogger to skulk upon 
earth again as a pole-cat, creep into holes as 
an earwig, and be flattened again between 
the thumbnails of a London chambermaid, 
or exposed to the fatal lotion of Mr. Tiffin, 
bug-destroyer to his Majesty. It was fitting, 
he thought, that every keen sportsman, for 
once at least, should take the part of the in- 
ferior creature in those amusements of the 
field which he had followed so joyously, and 
that he should be winged in the shape of a 
partridge, run down in the form of a hare by 
the hounds, and Acta3onised in a stag : that 
the winner of a Welsh main should be the 
cock of one, and die of the wounds received 
in the last fight ; that the merciless post- 
master should become a post-horse at his 
own inn ; and that they who have devised, 
or practised, or knowingly permitted any 
wanton cruelty for the sake of pampering 
their appetites, should in the next stage of 
their existence feel in their own person the 
effect of those devices, which in their human 
state they had only tasted. And not being 
addicted himself to " the most honest, in- 
genuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling," 
(forgive him Sir Humphrey Davy ! forgive 
him Chantrey ! forgive him, thou best of all 
publishers, John Major, who mightest write 
Ne plus ultra upon thy edition of any book 



which thou delightest to honour,) he allowed 
that even Izaak Walton of blessed memory 
could not have shown cause for mitigation 
of the sentence, if Rhadamanthus and his 
colleagues in the Court below, had con- 
demned him to be spitted upon the hook of 
some dear lover and ornament of the art, in 
the shape of " a black snail with his belly 
slit to shew the white ;" or of a perch, which 
of fish, he tells us, is the longest lived on a 
hook ; or sewed him metempsycho-sized into 
a frog, to the arming iron, with a fine needle 
and silk, with only one stitch, using him in 
so doing, according to his own minute direc- 
tions, as if he loved him, that is, harming 
him as little as he possibly might, that he 
might live the longer. 

This would be fitting, he thought, and 
there would have been enough of purgatory 
in it to satisfy the sense of vindictive justice, 
if any scheme of purgatory had been recon- 
cilable with his scriptural belief. Bishop 
Hall has a passage in his Choice Helps for a 
Pious Spirit, which might be taken in the 
sense of this opinion, though certainly no 
such meaning was intended by the writer. 
" Man," he says, " as he consists of a double 
nature, flesh and spirit, so is he placed in a 
middle rank, betwixt an angel, which is a 
spirit, and a beast, which is flesh : partaking 
of the qualities and performing the acts of 
both. He is angelical in his understanding, 
in his sensual affections bestial ; and to 
whether of these he most incline and com- 
forteth himself, that part wins more of the 
other, and gives a denomination to him ; so 
as he that was before half angel, half beast, 
if he be drowned in sensuality, hath lost the 
angel and is become a beast ; if he be wholly 
taken up with heavenly meditations, he hath 
quit the beast, and is improved angelical. It 
is hard to hold an equal temper, either he 
must degenerate into a beast, or be advanced 
to an angel." 

Had the Doctor held this opinion accord- 
ing to the letter, and believed that those 
who brutalised their nature in the stage of 
humanity, were degraded to the condition 
of brutes after death, he could even have 
persuaded himself that intelligible indica- 



THE DOCTOR. 



573 



tions of such a transmigration might be dis- 
covered in the eyes of a dog when he looks 
to some hard master for mercy, or to some 
kind one for notice, and as it were for a 
recognition of the feelings and thoughts 
which had no other means of expression. 
But he could not have endured to think it 
possible that the spaniel who stood beside 
him in mute supplication, with half-erected 
ears, looking for a morsel of food, might be 
a friend or relation ; and that in making a 
troublesome or a thievish cur slink away 
with his tail between his legs, he might be 
hurting the feelings of an old acquaintance. 
And indeed on the whole it would have 
disturbed his sense of order, to think that 
while some inferior creatures were in- 
nocently and unconsciously ascending in the 
scale of existence through their appointed 
gradations, others were being degraded to a 
condition below humanity for their sins 
committed in the human state. Punishment 
such degradation could not be deemed, 
unless the soul so punished retained its 
consciousness ; and such consciousness would 
make it a different being from those who 
were externally of its fellow kind, and thus 
would the harmony of nature be destroyed : 
and to introduce discord there were to bring 
back Chaos. Bad enough, as he saw, is the 
inequality which prevails among mankind, 
though without it men would soon be all 
upon the dead level of animal and ferine 
life : But what is it to that which would 
appear in the lower world, if in the same 
species some individuals were guided only 
by their own proper instincts, and others 
endued with the consciousness of a human 
and reasonable mind ? 

The consequences also of such a doctrine 
where it was believed could not but lead to 
pitiable follies, and melancholy superstitions. 
Has humanity ever been put to a viler use 
than by the Banians at Surat, who support 
a hospital for vermin in that city, and 
regale the souls of their friends who are 
undergoing penance in the shape of fleas, or 
in loathsome pedicular form, by hiring 
beggars to go in among them, and afford 
them pasture for the night ! 



Even from his own system consequences 
followed which he could not reconcile to his 
wishes. Fond as he was of animals, it would 
have been a delight to him if he could have 
believed with the certainty of faith that he 
should have with him in Heaven all that he 
had loved on earth. But if they were only 
so many vehicles of the living spirit during 
its ascent to humanity, — only the egg, the 
caterpillar and the aurelia from which the 
human but immortal Psyche was to come 
forth at last, then must their uses be at an 
end in this earthly state : and Paradise he 
was sometimes tempted to think would want 
something if there were no beautiful insects 
to hover about its flowers, no birds to 
warble in its groves or glide upon its waters, 
— would not be the Paradise he longed for 
unless the lion were there to lie down with 
the lamb, and the antelope reclined its 
gentle head upon the leopard's breast. 
Fitting, and desirable, and necessary he con- 
sidered the extinction of all noxious kinds, 
all which were connected with corruption, 
and might strictly be said to be of the earth 
earthly. But in his Paradise he would fain 
have whatever had been in Eden, before 
Paradise was lost, except the serpent. 

" I can hardly," says an English officer 
who was encamped in India near a lake 
overstocked with fish, " I can hardly censure 
the taste of the Indians, who banish from a 
consecrated pond the net of the fisher, the 
angler's hook and the fowler's gun. Shoals 
of large fish giving life to the clear water of 
a large lake covered with flocks of aquatic 
birds, afford to the sight a gratification 
which would be ill exchanged for the mo- 
mentary indulgence of appetite." My ex- 
cellent friend would heartily have agreed 
with this Englishman ; but in the waters of 
Paradise he would have thought, neither did 
the fish prey upon each other, nor the birds 
upon them, death not being necessary there 
as the means of providing aliment for life. 

That there are waters in the Regions of 
the Blessed, Bede, it is said, assures us for 
this reason, that they are necessary there to 
temper the heat of the Sun. And Cornelius 
a, Lapide has found out a most admirable 



574 



THE DOCTOR 



use for them above the firmament, — which 
is to make rivers, and fountains, and water- 
works for the recreation of the souls in bliss, 
whose seat is in the Empyrean Heaven. 

" If an herd of kine," says Fuller, "should 
meet together to fancy and define happiness, 
— (that is to imagine a Paradise for them- 
selves,) — they would place it to consist in 
fine pastures, sweet grass, clear water, 
shadowy groves, constant summer; but if 
any winter, then warm shelter and dainty 
hay, with company after their kind, counting 
these low things the highest happiness, 
because their conceit can reach no higher. 
Little better do the heathen poets describe 
Heaven, paving it with pearl and roofing it 
with stars, filling it with Gods and God- 
desses, and allowing them to drink, (as if 
without it, no poet's Paradise,) nectar and 
ambrosia." 



CHAPTER CCXIII. 

BIRDS OF PARADISE. THE ZIZ. STORY OF 

the abbot of st. salvador de villar. 
holy Colette's nondescript pet. the 
animalcular world. giordano bruno. 

And so I came to Fancy's meadows, strow'd 

With many a flower ; 
Fain would I here have made abode, 
But I was quickened by my hour. Herbert. 

Hindoos and Mahommedans have stocked 
their heavens not only with mythological 
monsters but with beautiful birds of celestial 
kind. They who have read Thalaba will 
remember the 

Green warbler of the bowers of Paradise : 
and they who will read the history of the 
Nella-Iiajah, — which whosoever reads or 
relates shall (according to the author) enjoy 
all manner of happiness and planetary bliss, 
— that is to say, all the good fortune that 
can be bestowed by the nine great lumi- 
naries which influence human events, — 
they who read that amusing story will find 
that in the world of Daivers, or Genii, there 
are milk-white birds called Aunnays, re- 
markable for the gracefulness of their walk, 



wonderfully endowed with knowledge and 
speech, incapable of deceit, and having 
power to look into the thoughts of men. 

These creatures of imagination are con- 
ceived in better taste than the Rabbis have 
displayed in the invention of their great 
bird Ziz, whose head when he stands in the 
deep sea reaches up to Heaven ; whose 
wings when they are extended darken the 
sun ; and one of whose eggs happening to 
fall crushed three hundred cedars, and 
breaking in the fall, drowned sixty cities in 
its yolk. That fowl is reserved for the dinner 
of the Jews in heaven, at which Leviathan 
is to be the fish, and Behemoth the roast 
meat. There will be cut and come again at 
all of them ; and the carvers, of whatever 
rank in the hierarchy they may be, will 
have no sinecure office that day. 

The monks have given us a prettier tale ; 
— praise be to him who composed, — but 
the liar's portion to those who made it pass 
for truth. There was an Abbot of S. 
Salvador de Villar who lived in times when 
piety flourished, and Saints on earth enjoyed 
a visible communion with Heaven. This 
holy man used in the intervals of his litur- 
gical duties to recreate himself by walking 
in a pine forest near his monastery, em- 
ploying his thoughts the while in divine 
meditations. One day when thus engaged 
during his customary walk, a bird in size 
and appearance resembling a blackbird 
alighted before him on one of the trees, and 
began so sweet a song, that in the delight of 
listening the good Abbot lost all sense of 
time and place, and of all earthly things, 
remaining motionless and in extasy. He 
returned not to the Convent at his accus- 
tomed hour, and the Monks supposed that 
he had withdrawn to some secret solitude ; 
and would resume his office when his in- 
tended devotion there should have been 
compleated. So long a time elapsed without 
his reappearance that it was necessary to 
appoint a substitute for him pro tempore ; 
his disappearance and the forms observed 
upon this occasion being duly registered. 
Seventy years passed by, during all which 
time no one who entered the pine forest ever 



THE DOCTOR. 



575 



lighted upon the Abbot, nor did he think of 
anything but the bird before him, nor hear 
anything but the song which filled his soul 
with contentment, nor eat, nor drink, nor 
sleep, nor feel either want, or weariness, or 
exhaustion. The bird at length ceased to 
sing and took flight : and the Abbot then, as 
if he had remained there only a few minutes, 
returned to the monastery. He marvelled 
as he approached at certain alterations about 
the place, and still more when upon entering 
the house, he knew none of the brethren 
whom he saw, nor did any one appear to 
know him. The matter was soon explained, 
his name being well known, and the manner 
of his disappearance matter of tradition 
there as well as of record : miracles were not 
so uncommon then as to render any proof 
of identity necessary, and they proposed 
to reinstate him in his office. But the 
holy man was sensible that after so great a 
favour had been vouchsafed him, he was not 
to remain a sojourner upon earth ; so he 
exhorted them to live in peace with one 
another, and in the fear of God, and in the 
strict observance of their rule, and to let 
him end his days in quietness ; and in a few 
days, even as he expected, it came to pass, 
and he fell asleep in the Lord. 

The dishonest monks who, for the honour 
of their Convent and the lucre of gain, 
palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was) 
upon their neighbours as a true legend, 
added to it, that the holy Abbot was in- 
terred in the cloisters ; that so long as the 
brethren continued in the observance of 
their rule, and the place of his interment 
was devoutly visited, the earth about it 
proved a certain cure for many maladies, but 
that in process of time both church and 
cloisters became so dilapidated through decay 
of devotion, that cattle strayed into them, 
till the monks and the people of the vicinity 
were awakened to a sense of their sin and of 
their duty, by observing that every animal 
which trod upon the Abbot's grave fell and 
broke its leer.* The relics therefore were 



* Superstition is confined to no country, but is spread, 
more or less, over all. The classical reader will call to 
mind what Herodotus tells happened in the territory of 



translated with due solemnity, and deposited 
in a new monument, on which the story of 
the miracle, in perpetuam rei memoriam, was 
represented in bas-relief. 

The Welsh have a tradition concerning 
the Birds of Rhianon, — a female personage 
who hath a principal part in carrying on the 
spells in Gwlad yr Hud, or the Enchanted 
Land of Pembrokeshire. Whoso happened 
to hear the singing of her birds stood seven 
years listening, though he supposed the 
while that only an hour or two had elapsed. 
Owen Pughe could have told us more of 
these Birds. 

Some Romish legends speak of birds which 
were of no species known on earth and who 
by the place and manner of their appear- 
ances were concluded to have come from 
Paradise, or to have been celestial spirits in 
that form. Holy Colette of portentous 
sanctify, the Reformeress of the Poor Clares, 
and from whom a short-lived variety of the 
Franciscans were called Colettines, was 
favoured, according to her biographers, with 
frequent visits by a four-footed pet, which 
was no mortal creature. It was small, re- 
sembling a squirrel in agility, and an ermine 
in the snowy whiteness of its skin, but not 
in other respects like either ; and it had this 
advantage over all earthly pets, that it was 
sweetly and singularly fragrant. It would 
play about the saint, and invite her at- 
tention by its gambols. Colette felt a 
peculiar and mysterious kind of pleasure 
when it showed itself; and for awhile not 
supposing that there was anything super- 
natural in its appearance, endeavoured to 
catch it, for she delighted in having lambs 
and innocent birds to fondle : but though 
the Nuns closed the door, and used every 
art and effort to entice or catch it, the little 
nondescript always either eluded them, or 
vanished ; and it never tasted of any food 
which they set before it. This miracle 
being unique in its kind is related with 
becoming admiration by the chroniclers of 
the Seraphic Order ; as it well may, for, 
for a monastic writer to invent a new 



Agyllaei. Clio. C. 167, iviviro $ia.<rr{o<?x. xxi sut^« 
ocxotX^xto., o/^oia; rrjo,3«T<3t xcli IfcoXSiynx. xxi av^i«re/. 



576 



THE DOCTOR. 



miracle of any kind evinces no ordinary 
power of invention. 

If this story be true, and true it must be 
unless holy Colette's reverend Roman Ca- 
tholic biographers are liars, its truth cannot 
be admitted sans tirer a consequence ; and it 
would follow as a corollary not to be dis- 
puted, that there are animals in the world of 
Angels. And on the whole it accorded with 
the general bearing of the Doctor's notions 
(notions rather than opinions he liked to call 
them where they were merely speculative) 
to suppose that there may be as much 
difference between the zoology of that world, 
and of this, as is found in the zoology and 
botany of widely distant regions here, ac- 
cording to different circumstances of climate: 
and rather to imagine that there were ce- 
lestial birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, 
exempt from evil, and each happy in its kind 
to the full measure of its capacity for hap- 
piness, than to hold the immortality of 
brutes. Cudworth's authority had some 
weight with him on this subject, where the 
Platonical divine says that as " human souls 
could not possibly be generated out of 
matter, but were some time or other created 
by the Almighty out of nothing preexisting, 
either in generations, or before them," so if 
it be admitted that brute animals are " not 
mere machines, or automata, (as some seem 
inclinable to believe,) but conscious and 
thinking beings ; then, from the same prin- 
ciple of reason, it will likewise follow, that 
their souls cannot be generated out of 
matter neither, and therefore must be de- 
rived from the fountain of all life, and 
created out of nothing by Him ; who, since 
he can as easily annihilate as create, and 
does all for the best, no man need at all to 
trouble himself about their permanency, or 
immortality." 

Now though the Doctor would have been 
pleased to think, with the rude Indian, that 
when he was in a state of existence wherein 
no evil could enter, 

His faithful dog should bear him company, 

he felt the force of this reasoning ; and he 
perceived also that something analogous to 
the annihilation there intended might be 



discerned in his own hypothesis. For in 
what may be called the visible creation he 
found nothing resembling that animalcular 
world which the microscope has placed 
within reach of our senses ; nothing like 
those monstrous and prodigious forms which 
Leeuwenhoeck, it must be believed, has 
faithfully delineated. — Bishop has a beau- 
tiful epigram upon the theme koXci Trtyavrcu : 

When thro' a chink*, a darkened room 

Admits the solar beam, 
Down the long light that breaks the gloom, 

Millions of atoms stream. 

In sparkling agitation bright, 

Alternate dyes they bear ; 
Too small for any sense but sight, 

Or any sight, but there. 

Nature reveals not all her store 

To human search, or skill ; 
And when she deigns to shew us more 

She shows us Beauty still. 

But the microscopic world affords us excep- 
tions to this great moral truth. The forms 
which are there discovered might well be 
called 

Abominable, inutterable, and worse 

Than fables yet have feign'd/or fear conceiv'd, 

Gorgons and Hydras, and Cnimaeras dire. 

Such verily they would be, if they were in 
magnitude equal to the common animals by 
which we are surrounded. But Nature has 
left all these seemingly misformed creatures 
in the lowest stage of existence, — the circle 
of inchoation ; neither are any of the hide- 
ous forms of insects repeated in the higher 
grades of animal life; the sea indeed contains 
creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly, 
beaucoup plus de monstres, sans comparaison, 
que la terre, and the Sieur de Brocourt, who 
was as curious in collecting the opinions of 
men as our philosopher, though no man could 



* The reader may not be displeased to read the fol- 
lowing beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor. 

" If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare 
fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the 
economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the 
curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those 
little images and reflexes of himself from those pretty 
mirrors, which, like a crevice in the wall, through a nar- 
row perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency : 
much rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the 
glasses of our obedience, in the emissions of our will and 
understanding; these being rational and apt instruments 
to express him, far better than the natural, as being near 
communications of himself." — Invalidity of a late or 
Death-bed Repentance, vol. v. p. 4G4. 



THE DOCTOR. 



577 



make more dissimilar uses of their know- 
ledge, explains it a cause de la facilite de la 
generation qui est en elle, dont se procreent si 
diverses figures, a raisonde la grande chaleur 
qui se trouve en la mer, Vhumeur y estant gras, 
et V aliment abondant; toute generation sefai- 
sant par chaleur et humidite, qui produisent 
toutes choses. With such reasoning our Doc- 
tor was little satisfied ; it was enough to 
know that as the sea produces monsters, so 
the sea covers them, and that fish are evi- 
dently lower in the scale of being than the 
creatures of earth and air. It is the system 
of Nature then that whatever is unseemly 
should be left in the earliest and lowest 
stages ; that life as it ascends should cast off 
all deformity, as the butterfly leaves its 
exuvice when its perfect form is developed ; 
and finally, that whatever is imperfect should 
be thrown off, and nothing survive in im- 
mortality but what is beautiful as well as 
good. 

He was not acquainted with the specula- 
tion, or conception (as the Philotheistic phi- 
losopher himself called it) of Giordano Bruno, 
that def omnium animalium forma, formosce 
sunt in ccelo. 'Nor would he have assented 
to some of the other opinions which that 
pious and high-minded victim of papal in- 
tolerance connected with it. That metallo- 
rum in se non lucentium formce, lucent in 
planetis suis, he might have supposed, if he 
had believed in the relationship between 
metals and planets. And if Bruno's remark 
applied to the Planets only, as so many other 
worlds, and did not regard the future state 
of the creatures of this our globe, the Doc- 
tor might then have agreed to his assertion 
that non enim homo, nee animalia, nee metalla 
ut hie sunt, illic existunt. But the Philotheist 
of Nola, in the remaining part of this his 
twelfth Conceptus Idearum soared above the 
Doctor's pitch : Quod nempe hie discurrit, 
he says, illic actu viget, discursione superiori. 
Virtutes enim quae versus materiam explican- 
tur : versus actum primum uniuntur, et com- 
plicantur. Unde patet quod dicunt Platonici, 
ideam quamlibet rerum etiam non viventium, 
vitam esse et intelligentiam quandam. Item et 
in Prima Mente unam esse rerum omnium 



ideam. Illuminando igitur, vivificando, et 
uniendo est quod te superioribus agentibus con- 
formans, in conceptionem et retentionem spe- 
cierum efferaris. Here the Philosopher of 
Doncaster would have found himself in the 
dark, but whether because " blinded by 
excess of light," or because the subject is 
within the confines of uttermost darkness, is 
not for me his biographer to determine. 



CHAPTER CCXIV. 

FURTHER DIFFICULTIES. QUESTION CONCERN- 
ING INFERIOR APPARITIONS. BLAKE THE 
PAINTER, AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA. 

In amplisshna causa, quasi magno mari,pluribus ventis 
sumus vecti. Plin\. 

There was another argument against the 
immortality of brutes, to which, it may be, 
he allowed the more weight, because it was 
of his own excogitating. Often as he had 
heard of apparitions in animal forms, all 
such tales were of some spirit or hobgoblin 
which had assumed that appearance; as, for 
instance, that simulacrum admodum monstru- 
osum, that portentous figure in which Pope 
Gregory the Ninth after his death was met 
roaming about the woods by a holy hermit : 
it was in the form of a wild beast with the 
head of an ass, the body of a bear, and the 
tail of a cat. Well might the good hermit 
fortify himself with making the sign of the 
cross when he beheld this monster : he ap- 
proved himself a courageous man by speak- 
ing to the apparition, which certainly was 
not "in such a questionable shape" as to 
invite discourse : and we are beholden to 
him for having transmitted to posterity the 
bestial Pope's confession, that because he 
had lived an unreasonable and lawless life, 
it was the will of God and of St. Peter whose 
chair he had defiled by all kinds of abomina- 
tions, that he should thus wander about in 
a form of ferine monstrosity. 

He had read of such apparitions, and been 
sufficiently afraid of meeting a barguest * in 

* A northern word, used in Cumberland and Yorkshire. 

Brocket and Grose neither of them seem aware that this 



578 



THE DOCTOR. 



his boyish days ; but in no instance had he 
ever heard of the ghost of an animal. Yet 
if the immaterial part of such creatures sur- 
vived in a separate state of consciousness, 
why should not their spirits sometimes have 
been seen as well as those of our departed 
fellow creatures? No cock or hen ghost 
ever haunted its own barn door ; no child 
was ever alarmed by the spirit of its pet 
lamb ; no dog or cat ever came like a shadow 
to visit the hearth on which it rested when 
living. It is laid down as a certain truth 
deduced from the surest principles of de- 
monology by the Jesuit Thyraeus, who had 
profoundly studied that science, that when- 
ever the apparition of a brute beast or mon- 
ster was seen, it was a Devil in that shape. 
Quotie scum que sub brutorum animantium for- 
ma conspiciuntur spiritus, quotiescumque mon- 
stra exhibentur dubium non est, autoprosopos 
adesse Dcemoniorum spiritus. For such 
forms were not suitable for human spirits, 
but for evil Demons they were in many 
respects peculiarly so : and such apparitions 
were frequent. 

Thus the Jesuit reasoned, the possibility 
that the spirit of a brute might appear 
never occurring to him, because he would 
have deemed it heretical to allow that there 
was anything in the brute creation partak- 
ing of immortality. No such objection oc- 
curred to the Doctor in his reasonings upon 
this point. His was a more comprehensive 
creed ; the doubt which he felt was not 
concerning the spirit of brute animals, but 
whether it ever existed in a separate state 
after death, which the Ghost of one, were 
there but one such appearance well attested, 
would sufficiently prove. 

He admitted, indeed, that for every au- 
thenticated case of an apparition, a peculiar 
cause was to be assigned, or presumed ; but 
that for the apparition of an inferior animal, 
there could in general be no such cause. 
Yet cases are imaginable wherein there 



spirit or dasmon had the form of the beast. Their deri- 
vations are severally " Berg, a hill, and geest, ghost ; " — 
" Bar, a gate or style, and gheist." 

The locality of the spirit will suggest a reference to the 
Icelandic Berserkr. In that^ language Bera and Bersi 
both signify a bear. 



might be such peculiar cause, and some final 
purpose only to be brought about by such 
preternatural means. The strong affection 
which leads a dog to die upon his master's 
grave, might bring back the spirit of a dog 
to watch for the safety of a living master. 
That no animal ghosts should have been 
seen afforded, therefore, in this judgment no 
weak presumption against their existence. 

O Dove, " my guide, philosopher, and 
friend ! " that thou hadst lived to see what I 
have seen, the portrait of the Ghost of a 
Flea, engraved by Varley, from the original 
by Blake ! The engraver was present when 
the likeness was taken, and relates the cir- 
cumstances thus in his Treatise on Zodiacal 
Physiognomy. 

" This spirit visited his imagination in 
such a figure as he never anticipated in an 
insect. As I was anxious to make the most 
correct investigation in my power of the 
truth of these visions, on hearing of this 
spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him 
if he could draw for me the resemblance of 
what he saw. He instantly said, 'I see 
him now before me.' I therefore gave him 
paper and a pencil, with which he drew the 
portrait of which a fac-simile is given in 
this number. I felt convinced by his mode 
of proceeding, that he had a real image 
before him; for he left off, and began on 
another part of the paper to make a separate 
drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the 
spirit having opened, he was prevented from 
proceeding with the first sketch till he had 
closed it. During the time occupied in 
compleating the drawing, the Flea told him 
that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of 
such men as were by nature blood-thirsty 
to excess, and were therefore providentially 
confined to the size and form of insects ; 
otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the 
size of a horse, he would depopulate a great 
portion of the country. He added that if 
in attempting to leap from one island to 
another he should fall into the sea, he could 
swim, and should not be lost." 

The Ghost of the Flea spoke truly when 
he said what a formidable beast he should 
be, if with such power of leg and of pro- 



THE DOCTOR. 



boscis, and such an appetite for blood, he 
were as large as a horse. And if all things 
came by chance, it would necessarily follow 
from the laws of chance that such monsters 
there would be : but because all things are 
wisely and mercifully ordered, it is, that 
these varieties of form and power which 
would be hideous, and beyond measure 
destructive upon a larger scale, are left in 
the lower stages of being ; the existence of 
such deformity and such means of destruc- 
tion there, and their non-existence as the 
scale of life ascends, alike tending to prove 
the wisdom and the benevolence of the 
Almighty Creator. 



CHAPTER CCXV. 

FACTS AND FANCIES CONNECTING THE DOC- 
TOR'S THEORY WITH THE VEGETABLE 
WORLD. 

We will not be too peremptory herein : and build 
standing structures of bold assertions on so uncertain a 
foundation ; rather with the Rechabites we will live in 
tents of conjecture, which on better reason we may easily 
alter and remove. Fuller. 

It may have been observed by the attentive 
reader — (and all my readers will be atten- 
tive, except those who are in love,) — that 
although the Doctor traced many of his 
acquaintance to their prior allotments in 
the vegetable creation, he did not discover 
such symptoms in any of them as led 
him to infer that the object of his specula- 
tions had existed in the form of a tree ; — 
crabbed tempers, sour plums, cherry-cheeks, 
and hearts of oak being nothing more than 
metaphorical expressions of similitude. But 
it would be a rash and untenable deduction 
were we to conclude from the apparent 
omission that the arboreal world was ex- 
cluded from his system. On the contrary! 
the analogies between animal and vegetable 
life led him to believe that the Archeus of 
the human frame received no unimportant 
part of his preparatory education in the 
woods. 

Steele in a playful allegory has observed 
" that there is a sort of vegetable principle 



in the mind of every man when he comes 
into the world. In infants, the seeds lie 
buried and undiscovered, till after a while 
they sprout forth in a kind of rational 
leaves, which are words ; and in due season 
the flowers begin to appear in variety of 
beautiful colours, and all the gay pictures of 
youthful fancy and imagination ; at last the 
fruit knits and is formed, which is green 
perhaps at first, sour and unpleasant to the 
taste, and not fit to be gathered ; till, ripened 
by due care and application, it discovers 
itself in all the noble productions of phi- 
losophy, mathematics, close reasoning, and 
handsome argumentation. I reflected fur- 
ther on the intellectual leaves before men- 
tioned, and found almost as great a variety 
among them as in the vegetable world." In 
this passage, though written only as a sport 
of fancy, there was more, our speculator 
thought, than was dreamed of in Steele's 
philosophy. 

Empedocles, if the fragment which is 
ascribed to him be genuine, pretended to 
remember that he had pre-existed not only 
in the forms of maiden and youth, fowl and 
fish, but of a shrub also ; 

"HSri ya.% nor' \yo> yivouY.v xov^/s ti v.bgo: rs, 
®M t uvos t', oimos ts, xot) tit oiXi iWoiro; IxBui. 

But upon such authority the Doctor placed as 
little reliance as upon the pretended recollec- 
tions of Pythagoras, whether really asserted 
by that philosopher or falsely imputed to him 
by fablers in prose or verse. When man shall 
have effected his passage from the mortal and 
terrestrial state into the sphere where there 
is nothing that is impure, nothing that is 
evil, nothing that is perishable, then in- 
deed it is a probable supposition thai he 
may look back into the lowest (loop from 
whence he hath ascended, recal to mind his 
progress step by stop, through every Btage of 
the ascent, and understand the process by 
which it had boon appointed for him, (ap- 
plying to Plato's words a different meaning 
from that in which they wore intended}) 
in ttoWio)' fc'va y&yov6ra ti'Cmi:. 
to become of many creatures, one happy 
one. In that sphere such a retrospect would 
enlarge the knowledge, and consequently the 



580 



THE DOCTOR. 



happiness also, of the soul which has there 
attained the perfection of its nature — the 
end for which it was created and redeemed. 
But any such consciousness of pre- existence 
would in this stage of our mortal being be so 
incompatible with the condition of huma- 
nity, that the opinion itself can be held only 
as a speculation, of which no certainty can 
ever have been made known to man, because 
that alone has been revealed, the knowledge 
of which is necessary : the philosophers 
therefore who pretended to it, if they were 
sincere in the pretension (which may be 
doubted) are entitled to no more credit, than 
the poor hypochondriac who fancies himself 
a bottle or a tea-pot. 

Thus our philosopher reasoned, who either 
in earnest or in jest, or in serious sportive- 
ness, vaiZ,hw teal airovcaXojv u/j-a^ was careful 
never to lean more upon an argument than 
it would bear. Sometimes he pressed the lame 
and halt into his service, but it was with a 
clear perception of their defects, and he placed 
them always in positions where they were 
efficient for the service required for them, 
and where more valid ones would not have 
been more available. He formed, therefore, 
no system of dendranthropology, nor at- 
tempted any classification in it ; there were 
not facts enough whereon to found one. Yet 
in more than one circumstance which obser- 
vant writers have recorded, something he 
thought might be discerned which bore upon 
this part of the theory, — some traces of 

those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 

on which Wordsworth (in whose mystic 
strains he would have delighted) dwells. 
Thus he inferred that the soul of Xerxes 
must once have animated a plane tree, and 
retained a vivid feeling connected with his 
arboreal existence, when he read in Evelyn 
how that great king " stopped his prodigious 
army of seventeen hundred thousand soldiers 
to admire the pulchritude and procerity of 
one of those goodly trees ; and became so 
fond of it, that spoiling both himself, his 
concubines, and great persons of all their 
jewels, he covered it with gold, gems, neck- 
laces, scarfs and bracelets, and infinite riches; 



in sum, was so enamoured of it, that for 
some days, neither the concernment of his 
grand expedition, nor interest of honour, 
nor the necessary motion of his portentous 
army, could persuade him from it. He stiled 
it his mistress, his minion, his goddess ; and 
when he was forced to part from it, he 
caused the figure of it to be stamped on a 
medal of gold, which he continually wore 
about him." 

" That prudent Consul Passianus Crispus" 
must have been influenced by a like feeling, 
when he " fell in love with a prodigious 
beech of a wonderful age and stature, used 
to sleep under it, and would sometimes re- 
fresh it with pouring wine at the root." Cer- 
tainly, as Evelyn has observed, " a goodly 
tree was a powerful attractive" to this per- 
son. The practice of regaling trees with 
such libations was not uncommon among the 
wealthy Romans ; they seem to have sup- 
posed that because wine gladdened their own 
hearts, it must in like manner comfort the 
root of a tree : and Pliny assures us that it 
did so, compertum id maxime prodesse radi- 
cibus, he says, docuimusque etiam arbores vina 
potare. If this were so, the Doctor reasoned 
that there would be a peculiar fitness in fer- 
tilising the vine with its own generous juice, 
which it might be expected to return with 
increase in richer and more abundant clus- 
ters : forgetting, ignoring, or disregarding 
this opinion which John Lily has recorded 
that the vine watered (as he calls it) with 
wine is soon withered. He was not wealthy 
enough to afford such an experiment upon 
that which clothed the garden-front of his 
house, for this is not a land flowing with 
wine and oil ; but he indulged a favourite 
apple-tree (it was a Ribstone pippin) with 
cider ; and when no sensible improvement in 
the produce could be perceived, he imputed 
the disappointment rather to the parsimo- 
nious allowance of that congenial liquor, 
than to any error in the theory. 

But this has led me astray, and I must 
return to Xerxes the Great King. The pre- 
dilection or passion which he discovered for 
the plane, the sage of Doncaster explained 
by deriving it from a dim reminiscence of 



THE DOCTOR 



581 



his former existence in a tree of the same 
kind ; or which was not less likely in the 
wanton ivy which had clasped one, or in the 
wild vine which had festooned its branches 
with greener leaves, or even in the agaric 
which had grown out of its decaying sub- 
stance. And he would have quoted Words- 
worth if the Sage of Eydal had not been of 
a later generation : 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 
The soul that rises with us,'our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar. 

Other examples of men who have doated 
upon particular trees he accounted for by 
the same philosophy. But in the case of the 
Consul Crispus he was more inclined to hold 
the first supposition, — to wit, that he had 
been a beech himself, and that the tree which 
he loved so dearly had sprung from his own 
mast, so that the feeling with which he re- 
garded it was a parental one. For that man 
should thus unconsciously afford proof of his 
relationship to tree, was rendered more pro- 
bable by a singular, though peradventure 
single fact, in which a tree so entirely re- 
cognised its affinity with man, that a slip 
accidentally grafted on the human subject, 
took root in the body, grew there, nourished, 
blossomed and produced fruit after its kind. 
" A shepherd of Tarragon had fallen into a 
sloe tree, and a sharp point thereof having 
run into his breast, in two years time it took 
such root, that, after many branches had 
been cut off, there sprang up some at last 
which bare both flowers and fruit." 
" Peiresc," as Gassendi the writer of his life 
assures us, " would never be quiet till Car- 
dinal Barberino procured the Archbishop of 
that place to testify the truth of the story ; 
and Putean the knight received not only 
letters testifying the same, but also certain 
branches thereof, which he sent unto him." 



CHAPTER CCXVI. 

A SPANISH AUTHORESS. HOW THE DOCTOR 
OBTAINED HER WORKS EROM MADRID. 
THE PLEASURE AND ADVANTAGES WHICH 
THE AUTHOR DERIVES EROM HIS LAND- 
MARKS IN THE BOOKS WHICH HE HAD 
PERUSED. 

Alex. Quel es D. Diego aquel Arbol, 

que tiene la copa en tierra 

y las raizes arriba ? 
Dieg. El hombre. El Letrado del Cielo. 

Man is a Tree that hath no top in cares, 
No root in comforts.* 

This is one of the many poetical passages in 
which the sound is better than the sense ; — 
yet it is not without its beauty. The same 
similitude has been presented by Henry More 
in lines which please the ear less, but satisfy 
the understanding. 

The lower man is nought but a fair plant 
Whose grosser matter is from the base ground. 

" A plant," says Jones of Nayland, " is a 
system of life, but insensitive and fixed to a 
certain spot. An animal hath voluntary 
motion, sense, or perception, and is capable 
of pain and pleasure. Yet in the construc- 
tion of each there are some general prin- 
ciples which very obviously connect them. 
It is literally as well as metaphorically true, 
that trees have limbs, and an animal body 
branches. A vascular system is also common 
to both, in the channels of which life is 
maintained and circulated. "When the 
trachea, with its branches in the lungs, or 
the veins and arteries, or the nerves, are 
separately represented, we have the figure 
of a tree. The leaves of trees have a 
fibrous and fleshy part ; their bark is a 
covering which answers to the skin in 
animals. An active vapour pervades them 
both, and perspires from both, which is 
necessary for the preservation of health and 
vigour. The vis vita, or involuntary, me- 
chanical force of animal life, is kept up by 
the same elements which act upon plants for 
their growth and support." f 



* Chapman. 
t The reader of Berkeley will naturally turn to the 



582 



THE DOCTOR. 



" Plants," says Novalis, " are Children of 
the Earth ; we are Children of the iEther. 
Our lungs are properly our root ; we live 
when we breathe ; we begin our life with 
breathing." Plato also compared man to a 
Tree, but his was a physical similitude, he 
likened the human vegetable to a tree in- 
verted, with the root above and the branches 
below. Antonio Perez allegorised the simi- 
litude in one of his epistles to Essex, thus, 
Unde credis liominem inversam arborem ap- 
pellari ? Inversam nostris oculis humanis et 
terrenis; rectam verb vere, viridemque, si 
radicem defixam habuerit in suo naturali loco, 
ccelo, unde orta. And Rabelais pursues the 
resemblance farther, saying that trees differ 
from beasts in this, QiCelles ont la teste, c'est 
le tronc, en has ; les cheveulx, ce sont les 
ratines, en terre ; et les pieds, ce sont les 
rameaulx, contremont ; comme si un homme 
faisoit le chesne fourchu. 

The thought that man is like a tree arose 
in the Doctors mind more naturally when 
he first saw the representation of the veins 
and arteries in the old translation of Am- 
brose Pare's works. And when in course of 
time he became a curious inquirer into the 
history of her art, he was less disposed to 
smile at any of the fancies into which Dona 
Oliva Sabuco Barrera had been led by this 
resemblance, than to admire the novelty and 
ingenuity of the theory which she deduced 
from it. 

Bless ye the memory of this Spanish 
Lady, all ye who bear, or aspire to, the 
honour of the bloody hand as Knights of 
Esculapius ! For from her, according to 
Father Feyjoo, the English first, and after- 
wards the physicians of other countries, 
learned the theory of nervous diseases ; — 
never, therefore, did any other individual 
contribute so largely to the gratification of 
fee-feeling fingers ! 

Feyjoo has properly enumerated her 
among the women who have done honour to 
their country: and later Spaniards have 



Siris of that author — called by Southcy in his life of 
Wesley "one of the best, wisest, and greatest men whom 
Ireland, with all its fertility of genius, has produced." 
Vol. ii. 2G0., 2nd Edit. 



called her the immortal glory not of Spain 
alone, but of all Europe. She was born, 
and dwelt in the city of Alcaraz, and 
flourished in the reign of Philip II. to whom 
she dedicated in 1587 her "New Philosophy 
of the Nature of Man," * appealing to the 
ancient law of chivalry, whereby great 
Lords and high-born Knights were bound 
always to favour women in their adventures. 
In placing under the eagle wings of his 
Catholic Majesty this child which she had 
engendered, she told the King that he was 
then receiving from a woman greater service 
than any that men had rendered him, with 
whatever zeal and success they had exerted 
themselves to serve him. The work which 
she laid before him would better the world, 
she said, in many things, and if he could not 
attend to it, those who came after him per- 
adventure would. For though there were 
already all too-many books in the world, yet 
this one was wanting. 

The brief and imperfect notices of this 
Lady's system, which the Doctor had met 
with in the course of his reading, made him 
very desirous of procuring her works : this 
it would not be easy to do in England at 
this time, and then it was impossible. He 
obtained them, however, through the kindness 
of Mason's friend, Mr. Burgh, whom he 
used to meet at Mr. Copley's at Netterhall, 
and who in great or in little things was 
always ready to render any good office in his 
power to any person. Burgh procured the 
book through the Rev. Edward Clarke, 
(father of Dr. Clarke the traveller,) then 
Chaplain to the British Embassador in 
Spain. The volume came with the des- 
patches from Madrid, it was forwarded to 
Mr. Burgh in an official frank, and the 
Doctor marked with a white stone the day 
on which the York carrier delivered it at 
his house. That precious copy is now in 
my possession f ; my friend has noted in it, 



* It should seem by her name, as suffixed to the Carta 
Dedicatorie, that she was of French or Breton extraction, 
for she signs herself, Oliva de Nantes, Sabuco Barera. 
— R. S. 

t This curious book I unluckily missed at the Sale of 
Southey's Library. I was absent at the time, and it 
passed into private hands. It sold for thirteen shillings 



THE DOCTOR. 



583 



as was his custom, every passage that seemed 
worthy of observation, with the initial of his 
own name — a small capital, neatly written 
in red ink. Such of his books as I have 
been able to collect are full of these marks, 
showing how carefully he had read them. 
These notations have been of much use to 
me in my perusal, leading me to pause 
where he had paused, to observe what he 
had noted, and to consider what had to him 
seemed worthy of consideration. And 
though I must of necessity more frequently 
have failed to connect the passages so noted 
with my previous knowledge as he had done, 
and for that reason to see their bearings in 
the same point of view, yet undoubtedly I 
have often thus been guided into the same 
track of thought which he had pursued 
before me. Long will it be before some of 
these volumes meet with a third reader ; 
never with one in whom these vestiges of 
their former owner can awaken a feeling 
like that which they never fail to excite in 
me ! 

But the red letters in this volume have 
led me from its contents ; and before I pro- 
ceed to enter upon them in another chapter, 
I will conclude this, recurring to the simili- 
tude at its commencement, with an extract 
from one of Yorick's Sermons. " It is very 
remarkable," he says, " that the Apostle St. 
Paul calls a bad man a wild olive tree, not 
barely a branch," — (as in the opposite case 
where our Saviour told his disciples that 
He was the vine, and that they were only 
branches.) — " but a Tree, which having a 
root of its own supports itself, and stands 
in its own strength, and brings forth its own 
fruit. And so does every bad man in 
respect of the wild and sour fruit of a vicious 
and corrupt heart. According to the re- 
semblance, if the Apostle intended it, he is 
a Tree, — has a root of his own, and fruit- 
fulness such as it is, with a power to bring 
it forth without help. But in respect of 
religion and the moral improvements of 



only. See Catalogue, No. 3453. The title is as follows : 
— Sabuco {Olivia) Nueva Filosqfia de la Naluralcxa del 
hombre, no conocida ni alcangada de los Grandcs Filosofos 
Antiguos. First Edition. Madrid, 1587. 



virtue and goodness, the Apostle calls us, 
and reason tells us, we are no more than a 
branch, and all our fruitfulness, and all our 
support, depend so much upon the influence 
and communications of God, that without 
Him we can do nothing, as our Saviour 
declares." 



CHAPTER, CCXVIL 

SOME ACCOUNT OF D. OLIVA SABTJCO's ME- 
DICAL THEORIES AND PRACTICE. 

Yo — volvere 

A nueva diligencia y paso largo, 

Que es breve el tiempo, 's grande la memoria 

Que para darla al mundo estd a mi cargo. 

Balbuena. 

Carew the poet speaking metaphorically of 
his mistress calls her foot, 

the precious root 
On which the goodly cedar grows. 

Dona Oliva on the contrary thought that 
the human body might be called a tree 
reversed, the brain being the root, and the 
other the bark. She did not know what 
great authority there is for thinking that 
trees stand upon their heads, for though 
we use vulgarly but improperly to call the 
uppermost of the branches the top of a tree, 
we are corrected, the learned John Gregory 
tells us, by Aristotle in his books De Anima*, 
where we are taught to call the root the 
head, and the top the feet. 

The pia mater according to her theory 
diffuses through this bark by the nerves 
that substance, moisture, sap, or white chyle 
which, when it flows in its proper course, 
preserves the human vegetable in a state of 
well being, but when its course is reverted 
it becomes the cause of diseases. This 
nervous fluid, the brain derived principally 
from the air, which she held to be water in 
a state of rarefaction, air being the chyle 
of the upper world, water of the inferior, 
and the Moon with air and water, as with 
milk, feeding like a nursing mother, all 

* Quaere? Lib. ii. c. ii. § 6. etl Ss pitou ™ crri/xxn 
avockoyov x. t. I. 



584 



THE DOCTOK. 



sublunary creatures, and imparting moisture 
for their increase, as the Sun imparteth 
heat and life. Clouds are the milk of the 
Moon, from which, if she may so express 
herself, she says it rains air and wind as well 
as water, wind being air, or rarefied water rare- 
fied still farther. The mutation or rarefac- 
tion of water into air takes place by day, the 
remutation or condensation of air into water 
by night : this is shown by the dew, and by 
this the ebbing and flowing of the sea are 
caused. 

In the brain, as in the root of the animal 
tree, all diseases, according to Dona Oliva, 
had their origin. From this theory she 
deduced a mode of practice, which if it did 
not facilitate the patient's recovery, was at 
least not likely to retard it; and tended in 
no way to counteract, or interfere with the 
restorative efforts of nature. And although 
fanciful in its foundation, it was always so 
humane, and generally so reasonable, as in a 
great degree to justify the confidence with 
which she advanced it. She requested that 
a board of learned men might be appointed, 
before whom she might defend her system 
of philosophy and of therapeutics, and that 
her practice might be tried for one year, 
that of Hippocrates and Galen having been 
tried for two thousand, with what effect was 
daily and miserably seen, when of a thousand 
persons there were scarcely three who 
reached the proper termination of life and 
died by natural decay, the rest being cut off 
by some violent disease. For, according to 
her, the natural termination of life is pro- 
duced by the exhaustion of the radical 
moisture, which in the course of nature is 
dried, or consumed, gradually and imper- 
ceptibly ; death therefore, when that course 
is not disturbed, being an easy passage to 
eternity. This gradual desiccation it is 
which gives to old age the perfection of 
judgment that distinguishes it; and for the 
same reason the children of old men are 
more judicious than others, young men 
being deficient in judgment by reason of 
the excess of radical moisture, children still 
more BO. 

She had never studied medicine, she said; 



but it was clear as the light of day that the 
old system was erroneous, and must needs 
be so, because its founders were ignorant of 
the nature of man, upon which being rightly 
understood the true system must, of neces- 
sity, be founded. Hope is what supports 
health and life ; fear, the worst enemy of 
both. Among the best preservatives and 
restoratives she recommended therefore 
cheerfulness, sweet odours, music, the 
country, the sound of woods and waters, 
agreeable conversation, and pleasant pas- 
times. Music, of all external things, she 
held to be that which tends most to comfort, 
rejoice and strengthen the brain, being as it 
were a spiritual pleasure in which the mind 
sympathises ; and the first of all remedies, 
in this, her true system of medicine, was to 
bring the mind and body into unison, re- 
moving thus that discord which is occasioned 
when they are ill at ease ; this was to be 
done by administering cheerfulness, content, 
and hope to the mind, and in such words 
and actions as produced these, the best 
medicine was contained. Next to this it 
imported to comfort the stomach, and to 
cherish the root of man, that is to say the 
brain, with its proper corroborants, espe- 
cially with sweet odours and with music. 
For music was so good a remedy for me- 
lancholy, so great an alleviator of pain, such 
a soother of uneasy emotions, and of passion, 
that she marvelled wherefore so excellent a 
medicine should not be more in use, seeing 
that undoubtedly many grievous diseases, as 
for example epilepsy, might be disarmed 
and cured by it ; and it would operate with 
the more effect if accompanied with hopeful 
words and with grateful odours, for Dona 
Oliva thought with Solomon that " pleasant 
words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the 
soul, and health to the bones." 

Consequently unpleasant sounds and ill 
smells were, according to her philosophy, 
injurious. The latter she confounded with 
noxious air, which was an error to be 
expected in those days, when nothing con- 
cerning the composition of the atmosphere 
had been discovered. Thus she thought it 
was by their ill odour that limekilns and 



THE DOCTOR. 



585 



charcoal-fires occasioned death ; and that 
owing to the same cause horses were fre- 
quently killed when the filth of a stable was 
removed, and men who were employed in 
cleaning vaults. Upon the same principle, 
in recommending perfumes as alexipharmic, 
she fell in with the usual practice. The 
plague, according to her, might be received 
not by the breath alone, but the eyes also, 
for through the sight there was ready access 
to the brain ; it was prudent therefore to 
close the nostrils when there might be reason 
to apprehend that the air was tainted ; and 
when conversing with an infected person, 
not to talk face to face, but to avert the 
countenance. In changing the air, with the 
hope of escaping an endemic disease, the 
place to go to should be that from whence 
the pestilence had come, rather than one 
whither it might be going. 

Ill sounds were noxious in like manner, 
though not in like degree, because no 
discord can be so grating as to prove fatal ; 
but any sound which is at once loud and 
discordant she held to be unwholesome, and 
that to hear any one sing badly, read ill, or 
talk importunately like a fool was sufficient 
to cause a defiuxion from the brain ; if this 
latter opinion were well founded, no Speaker 
of the House of Commons could hold his 
office for a single Session without being 
talked to death. With these she classed the 
sound of a hiccup, the whetting of a saw, 
and the cry of bitter lamentation. 

Dona Oliva, it may be presumed, was en- 
dued with a sensitive ear and a quick per- 
ception of odours, as well as with a cheerful 
temper, and an active mind. Her whole 
course of practice was intended to cheer and 
comfort the patient, if that was possible. She 
allowed the free use of water, and fresh air, 
and recommended that the apartments of 
the sick should be well ventilated. She pre- 
scribed refreshing odours, among others that 
of bread fresh from the oven, and that wine 
should be placed near the pillow, in order 
to induce sleep. She even thought that 
cheerful apparel conduced to health, and that 
the fashion of wearing black, which pre- 
vailed in her time, was repugnant to reason. 



Pursuing her theory that the brain was the 
original seat of disease, she advised that the 
excessive moisture which would otherwise 
take a wrong course from thence should be 
drawn off through the natural channels by 
sneezing powders, or by pungent odours 
which provoke a discharge from the eyes and 
nostrils, by sudorifics also, exercise, and 
whatever might cause a diversion to the 
skin. When any part was wounded, or pain- 
ful, or there was a tumour, she recommended 
compression above the part affected, with a 
woollen bandage, tightly bound, but not so 
as to occasion pain. And to comfort the 
root of the animal tree she prescribes scratch- 
ing the head with the fingers, or combing it 
with an ivory comb, — a general and ad- 
mirable remedy she calls this, against which 
some former possessor of the book, who 
seems to have been a practitioner upon the 
old system, and has frequently entered his 
protest against the medical heresies of the 
authoress, has written in the margin " bad 
advice." She recommended also cutting the 
hair, and washing the head with white wine, 
which as it were renovated the skin, and im- 
proved the vegetation. 

But Don a Oliva did not reject more ac- 
tive remedies ; on the contrary she advised 
all such as men had learned from animals, and 
this included a powerful list, for she seems 
to have believed all the fables with which 
natural history in old times abounded, and 
of which indeed it may almost be said to 
have consisted. More reasonably she ob- 
served that animals might teach us the utility 
of exercise, seeing how the young lambs 
sported in the field, and dogs played with 
each other, and birds rejoiced in the air. 
When the stomach required clearing she 
prescribed a rough practice, that the patient 
should drink copiously of weak wine and 
water, and of tepid water with a few drops 
of vinegar and an infusion of camomile 
flowers ; and that he shoidd eat also things 
difficult of digestion, such as radishes, figs, 
carrots, onions, anchovies, oil and vinegar, 
with plenty of Indian pepper, and with some- 
thing acid the better to cut the phlegm 
which was to be trot rid of: having thus 



586 



THE DOCTOR. 



stored the stomach well for the expenditure 
which was to be required from it, the patient 
was then to lay himself on a pillow across a 
chair, and produce the desired effect either 
by his fingers or by feathers dipped in oil. 
After this rude operation, which was to re- 
fresh the brain and elevate the pia mater, 
the stomach was to be comforted. 

To bathe the whole body with white wine 
was another mode of invigorating the pia 
mater ; for there it was that all maladies 
originated, none from the liver ; the nature 
of the liver, said she, is that it cannot err ; 
es docta sin doctor. 

The latter treatises in her book are in 
Latin, but she not unfrequently passes, as if 
unconsciously, into her own language, writ- 
ing always livelily and forcibly, with a clear 
perception of the fallacy of the established 
system, and with a confidence, not so well 
founded, that she had discovered the real 
nature of man, and thereby laid the founda- 
tion of a rational practice, conformable to it. 



CHAPTER CCXVIII. 

THE MUNDANE SYSTEM AS COMMONLY HELD 
IN D. OLIVA'S AGE. MODERN OBJECTIONS 
TO A PLURALITY OF WORLDS BY THE REV. 
JAMES MILLER. 

Un cerchio immaginatoci bisogna, 

A vuler ben In spera contemplare ; 
Cosi cki intender questa storia agogna 

Conviensi altro per altro immaginare j 
Perche qui non si canta, efinge, e sogna ; 

Venuto e il tempo dafilosofare. Pulci. 

One of Dona Oliva's treatises is upon the 
Compostura del Mundo, which may best be 
interpreted the Mundane System; herein 
she laid no claim to the merit of discovery, 
only to that of briefly explaining what had 
been treated of by many before her. The 
mundane system she illustrates by compar- 
ing it to a large ostrich's egg, with three 
whites and eleven shells, our earth being the 
yolk. The water, which according to this 
theory surrounded the globe, she likened to 
the first or innermost album,en ; the second 
and more extensive was the air ; the third 



and much the largest consisted of fire. The 
eleven shells were so many leaves one in- 
closing the other, circle within circle, like a 
nest of boxes. The first of these was the 
first heaven, wherein the Moon hath her ap- 
pointed place, the second that of the planet 
Mercury, the third that of Venus ; the 
fourth was the circle of the Sun ; Mars, 
Jupiter and Saturn moved in the fifth, sixth 
and seventh ; the eighth was the starry sky ; 
the ninth the chrystalline ; the tenth the 
primum mobile, which imparted motion to 
all ; and the eleventh was the immobile, or 
empyreum, surrounding all, containing all, 
and bounding all ; for beyond this there was 
no created thing, either good or evil. 

A living writer of no ordinary powers 
agrees in this conclusion with the old philo- 
sophers whom Dona Oliva followed ; and in 
declaring his opinion he treats the men of 
science with as much contempt as they be- 
stow upon their unscientific predecessors in 
astronomy. 

Reader, if thou art capable of receiving 
pleasure from such speculations, (and if thou 
art not, thou art little better than an Oran- 
Otang,) send for a little book entitled the 
" Progress of the Human Mind, its objects, 
conditions and issue : with the relation 
which the Progress of Religion bears to the 
general growth of mind ; by the Rev. James 
Miller." Send also for the " Sibyl's Leaves, 
or the Fancies, Sentiments and Opinions of 
Silvanus, miscellaneous, moral and religious," 
by the same author, the former published in 
1823, the latter in 1829. Very probably 
you may never have heard of either : but if 
you are a buyer of books, I say unto you, 
buy them both. 

"Infinity," says this very able and ori- 
ginal thinker, "is the retirement in which 
perfect love and wisdom only dwell with 
God. 

" In Infinity and Eternity the sceptic sees 
an abyss in which all is lost : I see in them 
the residence of Almighty Power, in which 
my reason and my wishes find equally a firm 
support. — Here holding by the pillars of 
Heaven, I exist — I stand fast. 

" Surround our material system with a 



THE DOCTOR. 



587 



void, and mind itself becoming blind and 
impotent in attempting to travel through it, 
will return to our little lights, like the dove 
which found no rest for the sole of her foot. 
But when I find Infinity filled with light, 
and life, and love, I will come back to you 
with my olive branch : follow me, or fare- 
well ! you shall shut me up in your cabins 
no more. 

" In stretching our view through the wide 
expanse which surrounds us, we perceive a 
system of bodies receding behind one an- 
other, till they are lost in immeasureable 
distance. This region beyond, though to us 
dark and unexplored, from the impossibility 
of a limit, yet gives us its infinity as the 
most unquestionable of all principles. But 
though the actual extent to which this in- 
finite region is occupied by the bodies of 
which the universe is composed, is far be- 
yond our measure and our view, and though 
there be nothing without to compel us any- 
where to stop in enlarging its bounds, Nature 
herself gives us other principles not less 
certain, which prove that she must have 
limits, and that it is impossible her frame 
can fill the abyss which surrounds her. Her 
different parts have each their fixed place, 
their stated distance. You may as well 
measure infinity by mile-stones as fill it 
with stars. To remove any one from an in- 
finite distance from another, you must, in 
fixing their place, set limits to the infinity 
you assume. You can advance from unity 
as far as you please, but there is no actual 
number at an infinite distance from it. You 
may, in the same manner, add world to world 
as long as you please, only because no 
number of them can fill infinity, or approach 
nearer to fill it. We have the doctrine of 
Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum ; it is from 
a plenum like this she shrinks, as from a 
region in which all her substance would be 
dissipated into nothing. Her frame is com- 
posed of parts which have each their certain 
proportion and relation. It subsists by 
mutual attractions and repulsions, lessening 
and increasing with distance ; by a circula- 
tion which, actually passing through every 
part, rejects the idea of a space which it could 



never pervade. Infinity cannot revolve ; 
the circulation of Nature cannot pervade in- 
finity. The globe we inhabit, and all its 
kindred planets, revolve in orbits which em- 
brace a common power in the centre which 
animates and regulates their motions, and 
on the influence of which their internal 
energies evidently depend. That we may 
not be lost in looking for it in the boundless 
regions without, our great physical power is 
all within, in the bosom of our own circle ; 
and the same facts which prove the great- 
ness of this power to uphold, to penetrate, 
to enliven at such a distance, shew in what 
manner it might at last become weak, — 
become nothing. Whatever relations we 
may have to bodies without, or whatever 
they may have to one another, their in- 
fluence is all directed to particular points, — 
to given distances. Material Nature has no 
substance, can make no effort, capable of 
pervading infinity. The light itself of all 
her powers the most expansive, in diffusing 
itself through her own frame, shews most of 
all her incapacity to occupy the region be- 
yond, in which (as the necessary result of its 
own effort) it soon sinks, feeble and faint, 
where all its motion is but as rest, in an ex- 
tent to which the utmost possible magnitude 
of Nature is but a point." 

The reader will now be prepared for the 
remarks of this free thinker upon the Plura- 
lity of Worlds. Observe I call him free 
thinker not in disparagement, but in honour ; 
he belongs to that service in which alone is 
perfect freedom. 

" Perceiving," he says, " as it is easy to 
do, the imperfection of our present system, 
instead of contemplating the immense pro- 
spect opened to our view in the progress of 
man, in the powers and the means he 
possesses, the philosopher sees through his 
telescope worlds and scales of being to his 
liking. By means of these, without the 
least reference to the Bible, or the human 
heart, Pope, the pretty talking parrot of 
Bolingbroke, with the assistance of his pam- 
pered goose, finds it easy to justify the ways 
of God to man. From worlds he never saw, 
he proves ours is as it should be. 



THE DOCTOR. 



" To form the children of God for himself, 
to raise them to a capacity to converse with 
him, to enjoy all his love, this grand scenery 
is not unnecessary, — not extravagant. A 
smaller exhibition would not have demon- 
strated his wisdom and power. You would 
make an orrery serve perhaps ! By a plura- 
lity of Gods, error degraded the Supreme 
Being in early ages ; by a plurality of worlds 
it would now degrade his children, deprive 
them of their inheritance. 

" What are they doing in these planets ? 
Peeping at us through telescopes ? We may 
be their Yenus or Jupiter. They are per- 
haps praying to us, sending up clouds of in- 
cense to regale our nostrils. Hear them, 
far-seeing Herschel! gauger of stars. I 
will pray to One only, who is above them 
all ; and if your worlds come between me and 
Him, I will kick them out of my way. In 
banishing your new ones, I put more into 
the old than is worth them all put together. 

" These expanding heavens, the residence 
of so many luminous bodies of immeasurable 
distance and magnitude, and which the phi- 
losopher thinks must be a desert if devoted 
to man, at present possessing but so small a 
portion of his own globe, shall yet be too 
little for him, — the womb only in which the 
infant was inclosed, incapable of containing 
the mature birth. 

" We shall yet explore all these celestial 
bodies more perfectly than we have hitherto 
done our own globe, analyse them better than 
the substances we can shut up in our retorts, 
count their number, tell their measure. 

" As nature grows, mind grows. It grows 
to God, and in union with him shall fill, 
possess all. 

" Our rank among worlds is indeed in- 
significant if we are to receive it from the 
magnitude of our globe compared with 
others, compared with space. Put Herschel 
with his telescope on Saturn, he would 
scarcely think us worthy of the name of even 
a German prince. We may well be the sport 
of Jupiter, the little spot round which Mars 
and Venus coquette with one another. 
Little as it is, however, — pepper-corn, clod 
of clay as it is, with its solitary satellite, and 



all its spots and vapours, I prefer it to them 
all. I am glad I was born in it, I love its 
men, and its women, and its laws. It's 
people shall be my people ; it's God shall be 
my God. Here I am content to lodge and 
here to be buried. What Abanas and Phar- 
phars may flow in these planets I know not : 
here is Jordan, here is the river of life. 
From this world I shall take possession of 
all these; while those, who in quest of strange 
worlds have forsaken God, shall be desolate. 

"This globe is large enough to contain 
man ; man will yet grow large enough to fill 
Heaven. 

" Fear not, there is no empty space in the 
universe, none in eternity : nothing lost. 
God possesses all, and there is room for 
nothing but the objects of his affections." 



CHAPTER CCXIX. 



THE ARGUMENT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 
DRAWN FROM A PLURALITY OF WORLDS 
SHOWN TO BE FUTILE : REMARKS ON THE 
OPPOSITE DISPOSITIONS BY WHICH MEN 
ARE TEMPTED TO INFIDELITY. 



— ascolta 
Siccome suomo di verace lingua 
E porgimi Vorecchio. 



Chiabrera. 



The extracts with which the preceding 
Chapter concludes will have put thee in a 
thoughtful mood, Reader, if thou art one of 
those persons whose brains are occasionally 
applied to the purpose of thinking upon such 
subjects as are worthy of grave consideration. 
Since then I have thee in this mood, let us 
be serious together. Egregiously is he 
mistaken who supposes that this book con- 
sists of nothing more than 
Fond Fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought.* 

Everywhere I have set before thee what 
Bishop Reynolds calls verba desiderii, — 
" pleasant, delightful, acceptable words, such 
as are worthy of all entertainment, and may 
minister (not a few of them) comfort and 
refreshment to the hearers." I now come 

* Sir P. Sidney. 



THE DOCTOR. 



589 



to thee with verba rectitudinis — " equal and 
right words ; not loose, fabulous, amorous, 
impertinent, which should satisfy the itch 
of ear, or tickle only a wanton fancy ; but 
profitable and wholesome words, — so to 
please men as that it may be unto edification 
and for their profit : words written to make 
men sound and upright ; — to make their 
paths direct and straight, without falseness 
or hypocrisy." Yea they shall be verba 
veritatis, — " words of truth, which will not 
deceive or misguide those that yield up 
themselves to the direction of them : a truth 
which is sanctifying and saving, and in these 
respects most worthy of our attention and 
belief." 

Make up your mind then to be Tremayned 
in this chapter. 

The benevolent reader will willingly do 
this, he I mean who is benevolent to himself 
as well as towards me. The so-called phi- 
losopher or man of liberal opinions, who 
cannot be so inimical in thought to me, as 
they are indeed to themselves, will frown at 
it; one such exclaims pshaw, or pish, ac- 
cording as he may affect the forte manner, 
or the fine, of interjecting his contemptuous 
displeasure ; another already winces, feeling 
himself by anticipation touched upon a sore 
place. To such readers it were hopeless to 
say favete, Numquid ceger laudat medicum 
secantem ? But I shall say with the Roman 
Philosopher of old, who is well entitled to 
that then honourable designation, tacete, — et 
prcebete vos curationi : etiam si exclainaveritis, 
non aliter audiam, quam si ad factum vitiorum 
vestrorum ingemiscatis* 

My own observation has led me to be- 
lieve with Mr. Miller, that some persons are 
brought by speculating upon a Plurality of 
Worlds to reason themselves out of their 
belief in Christianity : such Christianity in- 
deed it is as has no root, because the soil on 
which it has fallen is shallow, and though the 
seed which has been sown there springs up, 
it soon withers away. Thus the first system 
of superstition, and the latest pretext for 
unbelief, have both been derived from the 

* Seneca. 



contemplation of the heavenly bodies. The 
former was the far more pardonable error, 
being one to which men, in the first ages, 
among whom the patriarchal religion had 
not been carefully preserved, were led by 
natural piety. The latter is less imputable 
to the prevalence of unnatural impiety, than 
to that weakness of mind and want of 
thought which renders men as easily the 
dupe of the infidel propagandist in one age, 
as of the juggling friar in another. These 
objectors proceed upon the gratuitous as- 
sumption that other worlds are inhabited by 
beings of the same kind as ourselves, and 
moreover in the same condition ; that is 
having fallen, and being therefore in need 
of a Redeemer. Ask of them upon what 
grounds they assume this, and they can 
make no reply. 

Too many, alas ! there are who part with 
their heavenly birth-right at a viler price 
than Esau ! It is humiliating to see by what 
poor sophistries they are deluded, — by what 
pitiable vanity they are led astray ! And it 
is curious to note how the same evil effect is 
produced by causes the most opposite. The 
drunken pride of intellect makes one man 
deny his Saviour and his God : another, 
under the humiliating sense of mortal in- 
significancy, feels as though he were " a 
worm and no man," and therefore concludes 
that men are beneath the notice, still more 
beneath the care of the Almighty. " When 
I consider thy Heavens, the work of thy 
fingers, the Moon and the Stars, which thou 
hast ordained ; what is man that thou art 
mindful of him ? and the son of man that 
thou visitest him ? " Of those who pursue 
this feeling to a consequence as false as it is 
unhappy, there is yet hope; for the same 
arguments (and they are all-sufficient) by 
which the existence of the Deity is proved, 
prove also his infinite goodness ; and he who 
believes in that goodness, if he but feelingly 
believe, is not far from trusting in it, 

— trv 5s xiv piot, 'xu.vt' Itro^trctn 

Ai' XiV TSr,s OiUTOvA 

It is a good remark of Mr. Riland's, in his 
t Orpheus. 



590 



THE DOCTOR. 



Estimate of the Religion of the Times, that 
men quarrel with the Decalogue rather than 
with the Creed. But the quarrel that begins 
with one, generally extends to the other ; 
we may indeed often perceive how mani- 
festly men have made their doctrines con- 
form to their inclinations : A! aKpoaaug Karh 
ra e9?j vvp,[3alvovcriv' wg yap slu)6apev, ovTcog 
dXiov/Asv Xkye<x9ai* They listen only to what 
they like, as Aristotle has observed, and would 
be instructed to walk on those ways only which 
they choose for themselves. But if there 
be many who thus make their creed conform 
to their conduct, and are led by an immoral 
life into irreligious opinions, there are not 
a few whose error begins in the intellect, 
and from thence proceeds to their practice 
in their domestic and daily concerns. Thus 
if unbelief begins not in the evil heart, it 
settles there. But perhaps it is not so 
difficult to deal with an infidel who is in 
either of these predicaments, as with one 
whose disposition is naturally good, whose 
course of life is in no other respect blameless, 
or meritorious, but who, owing to unhappy 
circumstances, has either been allowed to 
grow up carelessly in unbelief, or trained in it 
systematically, or driven to seek for shelter in 
it from the gross impostures of popery, or 
the revolting tenets of Calvinism, the cant 
of hypocrisy, or the crudities of cold So- 
cinianism. Such persons supposing them- 
selves whole conclude that they have no 
need of a physician, and are thus in the 
fearful condition of those righteous ones of 
whom our Lord said that he came not to 
call them to repentance ! The sinner, brave 
it as he may, feels inwardly the want of a 
Saviour, and this is much, though not enough 
to say with the poet 

Pars sanitatis velle sanari fuit; t 
nor with the philosopher, Et hoc multum est 
velle servari: nor with the Father, 'O to Trpiorov 
Sovg Kai to devrepov duxrti. For if this be re- 
jected, then comes that "penal induration, 
as the consequent of voluntary and con- 

* Bp. Reynolds quotes this same passage in his Sermon 
on " Brotherly Reconciliation," and applies it in the same 
way. Works, vol. v. p. 158. 

t Seneca in IIippol. 



tracted induration," which one of our own 
great Christian philosophers pronounces to 
be "the sorest judgement next to hell itself." 
Nevertheless it is much to feel this self-con- 
demnation and this want. But he who con- 
fides in the rectitude of his intentions, and 
in his good works, and in that confidence 
rejects so great salvation, is in a more aweful 
state, just as there is more hope of him who 
suffers under an acute disease, than of a 
patient stricken with the dead palsy. 



CHAPTER CCXX. 

DONA OLIVA'S PHILOSOPHY, AND VIEWS OP 
POLITICAL REFORMATION. 

Non vi par adunque eke habbiamo ragionato a bastanxa 
di questo f — A bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparj 
par desidero to d'intendere qualche particolarita anchor. 

Castiglione. 

According to Dona Oliva's philosophy, the 
quantity of water is ten times greater than 
that of earth, air in like manner exceeding 
water in a tenfold degree, and fire in the 
same proportion out-measuring air. From 
the centre of the earth to the first heaven 
the distance by her computation is 36,292 
leagues of three miles each and two thousand 
paces to the mile. From the surface of the 
earth to its centre, that centre being also 
the central point of the Infernal regions, her 
computed distance is 117,472 leagues. How 
far it is to the confines has not been ascer- 
tained by discovery, and cannot be computed 
from any known data. 

Pliny has preserved an anecdote in geo- 
logical history, which relates to this point, 
and which, not without reason, he calls 
exemplum vanitatis Grcecce maximum. It 
relates to a certain philosopher, Dionysio- 
dorus by name, who was celebrated for his 
mathematical attainments, and who it seems 
retained his attachment to that science after 
death, and continued the pursuit of it. For 
having died in a good old age, and received 
all fitting sepulchral rites, he wrote a letter 
from Hades to the female relations who had 
succeeded to his property, and who probably 



THE DOCTOR. 



►91 



were addicted to the same studies as himself, 
for otherwise he would not have commu- 
nicated with them upon such a subject. 
They found the letter in his sepulchre, 
wherein he had deposited it as at a post- 
office " till called for ; " and whither he 
knew they would repair for the due per- 
formance of certain ceremonies, among 
others that of pouring libations through the 
perforated floor of the Tomb-chamber upon 
the dust below. The purport of his writing 
was not to inform them of his condition in 
the Shades, nor to communicate any infor- 
mation concerning the World of Spirits, but 
simply to state the scientific fact, that having 
arrived in the depths of the earth, he had 
found the distance from the surface to be 
42,000 stadia. The philosophers to whom 
this post-mortem communication was im- 
parted, reasonably inferred that he had 
reached the very centre, and measured from 
that point ; they calculated upon the data 
thus afforded them, and ascertained that the 
globe was exactly 250,000 stadia in circum- 
ference. Pliny, however, thought that this 
measurement was 12,000 stadia short of the 
true amount. Harmonica ratio, he says, 
quae cogit rerum naturam sibi ipsam congruere, 
addit hide mensurce stadia xii. millia; ter- 
ramque nonagesimam sextam totius mundi 
partem facit. 

"What is the centre of the earth?" says 
the melancholy Burton. " Is it pure element 
only as Aristotle decrees ? Inhabited, as 
Paracelsus thinks, with creatures whose 
chaos is the earth ? Or with Faeries, as 
the woods and waters, according to him, are 
with Nymphs? Or, as the air, with 
Spirits? Dionysiodorus," he adds, "might 
have done well to have satisfied all these 
doubts." 

But the reason, according to Doiia Oliva, 
wherefore the place of punishment for sinful 
souls has been appointed in the centre of 
this our habitable earth, is this ; the soul 
being in its essence lighter than air, fire, or 
any of the ten spheres, has its natural place 
in the Empyreum or Heaven of Heavens, 
where the Celestial Court is fixed, and 
whither it would naturally ascend when set 



free from the body, as to its natural and 
proper place of rest. The punishment, 
therefore, is appropriately appointed in the 
place which is most remote from its native 
region, and most repugnant to its own 
nature ; the pain, therefore, must needs be 
fort et dure which it endures when confined 
within that core of the earth, to which all 
things that are heaviest gravitate. 

In these fancies she only followed or ap- 
plied the received opinions of the middle 
ages. A more remarkable part of her works, 
considering the time and place in which 
they were composed, is a Colloquy * upon 
the means by which the World and the 
Governments thereof might be improved. 
Having in her former treatises laid down a 
better system for treating the infirmities of 
the human microcosm, she enters nothing 
loth, and nothing doubting her own capacity, 
upon the maladies of the body politic. 

The first evils which occurred to her were 
those of the law, its uncertainty and its 
delays, by which properties were wasted, 
families ruined, and hearts broken. " What 
barbarity it is," she says, " that a cause should 
continue forty years in the Courts ! that one 
Counsellor should tell you the right is on 
your side, and another should say the same 
thing to your adversary; that one decision 
should be given in one place, and another to 
revoke it in that ; and in a third a different 
one from either, and all three perhaps 
equally wide of the truth and justice of the 
case, and yet each such as can be maintained 
by legal arguments, and supported by legal 
authorities ! " The cause of all this she 
ascribes to the multiplicity of laws and of 
legal books, which were more than enough 
to load twenty carts, and yet more were 
continually added, and all were in Latin. 
Could any folly exceed that of those law- 
givers who presumed to prescribe laws for 
all possible contingencies, and for the whole 
course of future generations ! She was 
therefore for reducing the written laws to a 
few fundamentals in the vernacular tongue, 
and leaving everything else to be decided 



* Colloquio dc las Cosas que mcjoraran cstc Mundo // 
sus Ilcpublicas. — U.S. 



592 



THE DOCTOR. 



by men of good conscience and sincere un- 
derstanding ; by which the study of juris- 
prudence as a science would be abolished, 
and there might be an end to those nu- 
merous costly professorships for which so 
many chairs and universities had been 
founded. Ten short commandments com- 
prised the law of God ; but human laws by 
their number and by the manner in which 
they were administered occasioned more 
hurt to the souls of men than even to their 
lives and fortunes ; for in courts of law it 
was customary, even if not openly permitted, 
to bear false witness against your neighbour, 
to calumniate him in writing, and to seek 
his destruction or his death. Laws which 
touched the life ought to be written, be- 
cause in capital cases no man ought to be 
left to an uncertain sentence, nor to the will 
of a Judge, but all other cases should be 
left to the Judges, who ought always to be 
chosen from Monasteries, or some other 
course of retired life, and selected for their 
religious character. This she thought, with 
the imposition of a heavy fine for any direct 
falsehood, or false representation advanced 
either in evidence, or in pleading, and for 
denying the truth, or suppressing it, would 
produce the desired reformation. 

Next she considered the condition of the 
agricultural labourers, a class which had 
greatly diminished, and which it was most 
desirable to increase. Their condition was 
to be bettered by raising their wages and 
consequently the price of produce, and 
exempting their cattle, their stores and their 
persons from being taken in execution. She 
would also have them protected against their 
own imprudence, by preventing them from 
obtaining credit for wedding-garments, that 
being one of the most prevalent and ruinous 
modes of extravagance in her days. In this 
rank of life it sometimes happened, that a 
shopkeeper not only seized the garments 
themselves, but the peasant's cattle also, to 
make up the payment of a debt thus con- 
tracted. 

She thought it a strange want of policy 
that in a country where the corn failed for 
want of rain, the waters with which all 



brooks and rivers were filled in winter 
should be allowed to run to waste. There- 
fore she advised that great tanks and reser- 
voirs should be formed for the purposes of 
irrigation, and that they should be rendered 
doubly profitable by stocking them with 
fish, such as shad, tench and trout. She 
advised also that the seed should frequently 
be changed, and crops raised in succession, 
because the soil loved to embrace new pro- 
ducts : and that new plants should be intro- 
duced from the Indies ; where hitherto the 
Spaniards had been more intent upon intro- 
ducing their own, than in bringing home 
from thence others to enrich their own 
country; the cacao in particular she re- 
commended, noticing that this nut for its 
excellence had even been used as money. 

Duels she thought the Christian Princes 
and the Pope might easily prevent, by 
erecting a Jurisdiction which should take 
cognisance of all affairs of honour. She 
would have had them also open the road to 

j distinction for all who deserved it, so that no 
person should be debarred by his birth from 

| attaining to any office or rank ; " this," she 
said, "wast he way to have more Rolands and 
Cids, more Great Captains, more Hannibals 



and Tamerlanes." 

Such were Dona Oliva's views of political 
reformation, the wretched state of law and 
of medicine explaining satisfactorily to her 

j most of the evils with which Spain was 
afflicted in the reign of Philip II. Sire 
considered Law and Physic as the two great 

| plagues of human life, according to the 
Spanish proverb, 

A quicn yo quiero mal. 
Be le Dius pleyto y orinal. 

L T pon these subjects and such as these the 
Spanish lady might speculate freely ; if she 
had any opinions which " savoured of the 
frying-pan," she kept them to herself. 



TILE DOCTOB. 



593 



CHAPTER CCXXI. 

THE DOCTORS OPINION OP DO>"A OUYA's 
PEACT1CE A>~D HTMA>TTT. 



Che la materia e tanto plena etjolta, 
Che mm se m eerrebhe a capo mai, 
Dwaqwefia bmo mo cK io ittoni a raccolta. 

Fe. SiNSovrso. 

The Doctor's opinion of Dona divas prac- 
tice was that no one would be killed by it. 
but that many would be allowed to die 
whom a more active treatment might have 
saved. It would generally fail to help the 
patient, but it would never exasperate the 
Esease ] md therefore in her age it was an 
improvement, for better is an inert treatment 
than a mischievous one. 

He liked her similitude of the tree, but 
wondered that she had not noted as much 
resemblance to the trunk and branch^ in 
the bones and muscles, as in the vascular 
system. He admired the rational part of 
her practice, and was iffif wed to think some 
parts of it not irrational which might seem 
merely fanciful to merely practical men. 

She was of pinion that more persons 
were killed by affections of the mind, than [ 
bv intemperance, or. by the sword : this she 
attempts to explain by some weak reasoning 
from a baseless theory : but the proofs 
which she adduces in support of the asser- 



~ho in her own time had fallen under 
the King's displeasure, or even received a 
harsh word from him, had taken to their 
nd died." I: was not uncommon for 
who loved their husbands dearly, to 
die a : liter, them: two such in- 

stances had occurred within the same week 
in the town in which she resided : and she 
adds the more affecting fact that the female 
of the better kind (esclavas abiles), 
meaning perhaps those upon whom a:v 
had been bestowed, were frequently observed 
to pine away as they grew up, and perish ; 
and that this was > frequent with 

those who had a child born to an inheritance 
.: slavery. Mortified ambition, irremedi- 
I able grief, and hopeless misery, had within 



her observation produced the same fatal 
effect. The general fact is supported by 
Harvey's testimony. That eminent man 
said to Bishop Hacket that during the Great 
Kebellion, more persons whom he had seen 
in the course of his practice died of grief of 
mind than of any other disease. In France 
it was observed not only that nervous 
diseases of every kind became much more 
frequent during the revolution but cases of 
cancer also, — moral causes producing in 
women a predisposition to that most dread- 
ful disease. 

Our friend was fortunate enough to live 
in peaceful times, when there were no public 
calamities to increase the sum of human 
suffering. Yet even then, and within the 
limits of his own not extensive circle, he 
saw cases enough to teach him that it is 
difficult to minister to a mind diseased, but 
thai for a worm in the core there is no 
remedy within the power of man. 

He liked Dona Oliva for the humanity 
which her observations upon this subject 
implies. He liked her also for following the 
indications of nature in part of her practice ; 
much the better he liked her for prescribing 
all soothing circumstances and all induce- 
ments to cheerfulness that were possible ; 
and nothing the worse for having carried 
some of her notions to a whimsical extent. 
He had built an Infirmary in the air himself, 
"others," he said, "might build Castles there." 

It was not such an Infirmary as the great 
Hospital at Malta, where the Knights 
attended in rotation and administered to the 
patients, and where every culinary utensil 
was made of solid silver, such was the 
ostentatious magnificence of the establish- 
ment. The doctor provided better attend- 
ance, for he had also built a Beguinage in 
the air, as an auxiliary institution; and 
as to the utensils, he was of opinion that 
careful milium was very much better than 
useless splendour. But here he would have 
given Dona diva's soothing system a fair 
trial, and have surrounded the patier.'- 
all circumstances that could minister to the 
comfort or alleviation of either a body or a 
mind diseased. u The principal remedy in 



594 



THE DOCTOR. 



true medicine," said that Lady practitioner, 
"is to reconcile the mind and body, or to 
bring them in accord with each other, — 
(componer el anima con el cuerpo : ) to effect 
this you must administer contentment and 
pleasure to the mind, and comfort to the 
stomach and to the brain : the mind can 
only be reached by judicious discourse and 
pleasing objects ; the stomach is to be com- 
forted by restoratives ; the brain by sweet 
odours and sweet sounds." The prospect of 
groves and gardens, the shade of trees, the 
flowing of water, or its gentle fall, music and 
cheerful conversation, were things which she 
especially advised. How little these circum- 
stances would avail in the fiercer forms of 
acute diseases, or in the protracted evils of 
chronic suffering, the Doctor knew but too 
well. But he knew also that medical art 
was humanely and worthily employed, when 
it alleviated what no human skill could cure. 
" So great," says Dr. Currie, " are the 
difficulties of tracing out the hidden causes 
of the disorders to which this frame of ours 
is subject, that the most candid of the pro- 
fession have allowed and lamented how 
unavoidably they are in the dark ; so that 
the best medicines, administered by the 
wisest heads, shall often do the mischief 
they intend to prevent." 'There are more 
reasons for this than Dr. Currie has here 
assigned. For not only are many of the 
diseases which flesh is heir to, obscure in 
their causes, difficultly distinguishable by 
their symptoms, and altogether mysterious 
in their effect upon the system, but consti- 
tutions may be as different as tempers, and 
their varieties may be as many and as great 
as those of the human countenance. Thus 
it is explained wherefore the treatment 
which proves successful with one patient 
should fail with another, though precisely in 
the same stage of the same disease. Another 
and not unfrequent cause of failure is that 
the life of a patient may depend as much 
upon administering the right remedy at the 
right point of time, as the success of an 
alchemist was supposed to do upon seizing 
the moment of projection. And where 
constant attendance is not possible, or where 



skill is wanting, it must often happen that 
the opportunity is lost. This cause would 
not exist in the Columbian Infirmary, where 
the ablest Physicians would be always 
within instant call, and where the Beguines 
in constant attendance would have sufficient 
skill to know when that call became neces- 
sary. 

" A ship-captain," the Doctor used to say, 
"when he approaches the coast of France 
from the Bay of Biscay, or draws near the 
mouth of the British Channel, sends down 
the lead into the sea, and from the ap- 
pearance of the sand which adheres to its 
tallowed bottom, he is enabled to find upon 
the chart where he is, with sufficient pre- 
cision for directing his course. Think," he 
would say, " what an apparently impossible 
accumulation of experience there must have 
been, before the bottom of that sea every- 
where within soundings could be so ac- 
curately known, as to be marked on charts 
which may be relied on with perfect con- 
fidence ! No formal series of experiments 
was ever instituted for acquiring this know- 
ledge ; and there is nothing in history which 
can lead us to conjecture about what time 
sailors first began to trust to it. The boasted 
astronomy of the Hindoos and Egyptians 
affords a feebler apparent proof in favour 
of the false antiquity of the world, than 
might be inferred from this practice. Now 
if experience in the Art of Healing had 
been treasured up with equal care, it is not 
too much to say that therapeutics might 
have been as much advanced, as navigation 
has been by preserving the collective know- 
ledge of so many generations." * 



$XK%mtut$. 

— The prince 
Of Poets, Homer, sang long since, 
A skilful leech is better far 
Than half a hundred men of war. 



Such prescriptions as were composed of 
any part of the human body were repro- 



* The following fragments belong to the chapters which 
were to have treated on the Medical Science. They may 
therefore appropriately be appended to these chapters on 
Dofia Oliva. I have only prefixed a motto from Butler. 



THE DOCTOR. 



595 



bated by Galen, and he severely condemned 
Xenocrates for having introduced them, as 
being worse than useless in themselves, and 
wicked in their consequences. Yet these 
abominable ingredients continued in use till 
what may be called the Reformation of 
medicine in the Seventeenth century. Hu- 
man bones were administered internally as 
a cure for ulcers, and the bones were to be 
those of the part affected. A preparation 
called Aqua Divina was made by cutting in 
pieces the body of a healthy man who had 
died a violent death, and distilling it with 
the bones and intestines. Human blood 
was prescribed for epilepsy, by great autho- 
rities, but others equally great with better 
reason condemned the practice, for this 
among other causes, that it might com- 
municate the diseases of the person from 
whom it was taken. Ignorant surgeons 
when they bled a patient used to make him 
drink the warm blood that he might not lose 
the life which it contained. The heart dried, 
and taken in powder, was thought good 
in fevers ; but conscientious practitioners 
were of opinion that it ought not to be used, 
because of the dangerous consequences which 
might be expected if such a remedy were in 
demand. It is not long since a Physician 
at Heidelberg prescribed human brains to 
be taken inwardly in violent fevers, and 
boasted of wonderful cures. And another 
German administered cat's entrails as a 
panacea ! 



The Egyptian physicians, each being con- 
fined to the study and treatment of one part 
of the body, or one disease, were bound to 
proceed in all cases according to the pre- 
scribed rules of their art. If the patient 
died under this treatment, no blame attached 
to the physician ; but woe to the rash prac- 
titioner who ventured to save a life by any 
means out of the regular routine ; the suc- 
cess of the experiment was not admitted as 
an excuse for the transgression, and he was 
punished with death ; for the law presumed 
that in every case the treatment enjoined 
was such as by common consent of the most 
learned professors had been approved, be- 



cause by long experience it had been found 
beneficial. The laws had some right to 
interfere because physicians received a pub- 
lic stipend. 

Something like this prevails at this day in 
China. It is enacted in the Ta Tsing Leu 
Lee, that "when unskilful practitioners of 
medicine or surgery administer drugs, or 
perform operations with the puncturing 
needle, contrary to the established rules 
and practice, and thereby kill the patient, 
the Magistrates shall call in other prac- 
titioners to examine the nature of the medi- 
cine, or of the wound, as the case may 
be, which proved mortal ; and if it shall ap- 
pear upon the whole to have been simply an 
error without any design to injure the pa- 
tient, the practitioner shall be allowed to 
redeem himself from the punishment of 
homicide, as in cases purely accidental, but 
shall be obliged to quit his profession for 
ever. If it shall appear that a medical 
practitioner intentionally deviates from the 
established rules and practice, and while 
pretending to remove the disease of his 
patient, aggravates the complaint, in order 
to extort more money for its cure, the money 
so extorted shall be considered to have been 
stolen, and punishment inflicted accordingly, 
in proportion to the amount. If the patient 
dies, the medical practitioner who is con- 
victed of designedly employing improper 
medicines, or otherwise contriving to injure 
his patient, shall suffer death by being 
beheaded after the usual period of con- 
finement." 

No man ever entertained a higher opinion 
of medical science, and the dignity of a 
Physician, than Van Helmont. What has 
been said of the Poet ought, in his opinion, 
to be said of the Physician also, Nascitur, non 
Jit; and in his relation to the Creator, he 
was more Poet, or Prophet, whom the word 
vates brings under one predicament, — 
more than Priest. Scilicet Pater Miseri- 
cordiarum, qui Medicum ab initio, ceu Me- 
diatorem inter Deum et hominetn, constitute 
immo sibi in deliciis posuit, a Medico vinci 
vette, nimirum, ad hoc se creasse peculiari 

Q Q 2 



596 



THE DOCTOR. 



elogio, et elegisse testatur. Ita est sane. Non 
enim citius hominem punit Deus, infrmat, aut 
interimere minatur, sibi quam optet opponentem 
Medicum, ut se Omnipotentem, etiam meritas 
immittendo pcenas, vincat propriis dementia 
sua donis. Ejusmodi autem Medici sunt in 
ventre matris prceparati, — suo fungentes mu- 
nere, nullius lucri intuitu, nudeque rejiectuntur 
super beneplacitum (immo mandatum) illius, 
qui solus, vert misericors, nos jubet, sub in- 
dictione pcence infer nalis, fore Patri suo similes. 

— Obedite praepositis prceceptum quidem : 
sed honora parentes, honora Medicum, an- 
gustius est quam obedire, cum cogamur etiam 
obedire minoribus. Medicus enim Mediator 
inter Vita Principem et Mortem. 

" To wit," — this done into English by 
J. C. sometime of M. H. Oxon. — "the 
Father of mercies, he who appointed a Phy- 
sician, or Mediator between God and man 
from the beginning, yea He made it his de- 
light that he would be overcome by a Phy- 
sician, indeed he testifieth that he created 
and chose him to this end — for a peculiar 
testimony of his praise. It is so in truth. 
For no sooner doth He punish, weaken, and 
threaten to kill man, but he desireth a 
Physician opposing himself, that He may 
conquer himself, being Omnipotent, and 
even in sending deserved punishments, by 
the proper gifts of his clemency. — Of this 
sort are Physicians, which are fitted from 
their Mothers' wombs, exercise their gift with 
respect to no gain ; and they are nakedly 
cast upon the good pleasure — yea the com- 
mand — of him, who alone being truly mer- 
ciful commands us that, under pain of in- 
fernal punishment, we be like to his father. 

— Obey those that sit over you, is a precept 
indeed ; but honour thy Parents, honour 
the Physician, is more strict than to obey, 
seeing we are constrained even to obey our 
youngers. For the Physician is a Mediator 
between the Prince of life and Death." 

Some of the Floridian tribes had a high 
opinion of medical virtue. They buried all 
their dead, except the Doctors ; them they 
burned, reduced their bones to powder, and 
drank it in water. 



A century ago the Lions in the Tower 
were named after the different Sovereigns 
then reigning, "and it has been observed 
that when a King dies, the Lion of that 
name dies also." 

In the great Place at Delhi the poor 
Astrologers sit, as well Mahometan as 
Heathen. These Doctors, forsooth, sit there 
in the sun upon a piece of tapestry, all 
covered with dust, having about them some 
old mathematical instruments, which they 
make show of to draw passengers, and a 
great open book representing the animals of 
the Zodiac. These men are the oracles of 
the vulgar, to whom they pretend to give for 
one Payssa, that is a penny, good luck, and 
they are they that looking upon the hands 
and face, turning over their books and 
making a show of calculation, determine the 
fortunate moment when a business is to be 
begun, to make it successful. The mean 
women, wrapped up in a white sheet from 
head to foot, come to find them out, telling 
them in their ear their most secret concerns, 
as if they were their confessors, and intreat 
them to render the stars propitious to them, 
and suitable to their designs, as if they could 
absolutely dispose of their influences. 

The most ridiculous of all these astrologers, 
in my opinion, was a mongrel Portugueze 
from Goa, who sat with much gravity upon 
his piece of tapestry, like the rest, and had 
a great deal of custom, though he could 
neither read nor write ; and as for instru- 
ments and books was furnished with nothing 
but an old sea-compass, and an old Romish 
prayer-book in the Portugueze language, of 
which he showed the pictures for figures of 
the Zodiac. " As taes bestias, tal Astrologo, 
— for such beasts, such an Astrologer," said 
he to father Buze, a Jesuit, who met him 
there. 

M. Rondeau in 1780 opened a large tu- 
mour which had grown behind a woman's 
left ear, at Brussels, and found in it a stone, 
in form and size like a pigeon's egg, which 
all the experiments to which it was subject 
proved to be a real Bezoar, of the same 



THE DOCTOR. 



597 



colour, structure, taste and substance with 
the oriental and occidental Bezoars. This, 
however, was a fact which the Doctor could 
not exactly accommodate to his theory, 
though it clearly belonged to it ; the diffi- 
culty was not in this, that there are those 
animals in which the Bezoar is produced, 
the goat, in which it is most frequent, the 
cow, in which it is of less value, and the ape, 
in which it is very seldom found, but is of 
most efficacy. Through either of these 
forms the Archeus might have passed. But 
how the Bezoar, which is formed in the 
stomach of these animals, should have con- 
creted in a sort of wen upon the woman's 
head was a circumstance altogether ano- 
malous. 

At Mistra, a town built from the ruins of 
Sparta, the sick are daily brought and laid 
at the doors of the metropolitan Church, as 
at the gates of the ancient temples, that 
those who repair thither to worship may 
indicate to them the remedies by which 
their health may be recovered. 

It is well remarked of the Spaniards by 
the Abbe de Yayrac, Que d'un trop grand 
attachement pour les Anciens en matiere de 
Philosophie et de Medecine, et de trop de 
negligence pour eux en matiere de Poesie, il 
arrive presque toujours quails ne sont ni 
bons Philosophes, ni bons Medecins^ ni bens 
Poetes. 

The desire of having something on which 
to rely, as dogmatical truths, " as it appears," 
says Donne, "in all sciences, so most mani- 
festly in Physic, which for a long time 
considering nothing but plain curing, and 
that by example and precedent, the world 
at last longed for some certain canons and 
rules how these cures might be accomplished : 
and when men are inflamed with this desire, 
and that such a fire breaks out, it rages and 
consumes infinitely by heat of argument, 
except some of authority interpose. This 
produced Hippocrates his Aphorisms ; and 
the world slumbered, or took breath, in his 
resolution divers hundreds of years. And 



then in Galen's time, which was not satisfied 
with the effect of curing, nor with the 
knowledge how to cure, broke out another 
desire of finding out the causes why those 
simples wrought those effects. Then Galen, 
rather to stay their stomachs than that he 
gave them enough, taught them the qualities 
of the four Elements, and arrested them 
upon this, that all differences of qualities 
proceeded from them. And after, (not 
much before our time,) men perceiving that 
all effects in physic could not be derived 
from these beggarly and impotent proper- 
ties of the Elements, and that therefore they 
were driven often to that miserable refuge 
of specific form, and of antipathy and sym- 
pathy, we see the world hath turned upon 
new principles, which are attributed to 
Paracelsus, but indeed too much to his 
honour." 

" This indenture made 26 Apr. 18 Hen. 8, 
between Sir Walter Strickland, knight, of 
one part, and Alexander Kenet, Doctor of 
Physic, on the other part, witnesseth, that 
the said Alexander permitteth, granteth, 
and by these presents bindeth him, that he 
will, with the grace and help of God, render 
and bring the said Sir Walter Strickland to 
perfect health of all his infirmities and 
diseases contained in his person, and espe- 
cially stomach and lungs and breast, wherein 
he has most disease and grief; and over to 
minister such medicines truly to the said 
Sir Walter Strickland, in such manner and 
ways as the said Master Alexander may 
make the said Sir Walter heal of all in- 
firmities and diseases, in as short time as 
possible may be, with the grace and help of 
God. And also the said Master Alexander 
granteth he shall not depart at no time from 
the said Sir Walter without his license, 
unto the time the said Sir Waller be 
perfect heal, with the grace and help of 
God. For the which care the said Sir 
Walter Strietland granteth by these pre- 
sents, binding himself to pay or cause to be 
paid to the said Mr. Alexander or his 
assigns j£20. sterling monies of good and 
lawful money of England, in manner and 



598 



THE DOCTOR. 



form following : that is, five marks to be 
paid upon the first day of May next ensuing, 
and all the residue of the said sum of ^20. 
to be paid parcel by parcel as shall please 
the said Sir Walter, as he thinks necessary 
to be delivered and paid in the time of his 
disease, for sustaining such charges as the 
said Mr. Alexander must use in medicine 
for reducing the said Sir Walter to health ; 
and so the said payment continued and 
made, to the time the whole sum of ,^20. 
aforesaid be fully contented and paid. In 
witness whereof, either to these present 
indentures have interchangeably set their 
seals, the day and year above mentioned." 

Sir Walter, however, died on the 9th of 
January following. 

Je voudrois de bon cceur, says an inter- 
locutor in one of the evening conversation 
parties of Guillaume Bouchet, Sieur de 
Brocourt, quil y eust des Medecins pour 
remedier aux ennuis et maladies de Vesprit, 
ne plus ne moins quHl en y a qui guerissent 
les maladies et douleurs du corps ; comme il 
se trouve qrfil y en avoit en Grece ; car il est 
escrit que Xenophon ayant faict bastir une 
maison a Corinthe, il mit en un billet sur la 
porte, qu'il faisoit profession, et avoit le 
moyen de guerir de paroles ceux qui estoient 
ennuyez et faschez ; et leur demandant les 
causes de leurs ennuis, il les guerissoit, les 
recomfortant, et consolant de leurs douleurs et 
ennuis. 

Under barbarous governments the most 
atrocious practices are still in use. It was 
reported in India that when Hyder Aly was 
suffering with a malignant bile on his back 
common in that country, and which oc- 
casioned his death, an infant's liver was 
applied to it every day. An Englishman in 
the service of Phizal Beg Cawn was on an 
embassy at Madras when this story was 
current ; the Governor asked him whether 
he thought it likely to be true, and he ac- 
knowledged his belief in it, giving this suf- 
ficient reason, that his master Phizal Beg had 
tried the same remedy, but then he begged 
leave to affirm, in behalf of his master, that 



the infants killed for his use were slaves, 
and his own property. 

Of odd notions concerning virginity I do 
not remember a more curious one than that 
virgin mummy was preferred in medicine. 



INTERCHAPTER XXV. 

A WISHING INTERCHAPTER WHICH IS SHORTLY 
TERMINATED, ON SUDDENLY RECOLLECTING 

THE WORDS OF CLEOPATRA, " WISHERS 

WERE EVER FOOLS." 

Begin betimes, occasion's bald behind, 
Stop not thine opportunity, for fear too late 
Thou seek'st for much, but canst not compass it. 
Marlowe. 

Plust a Dieu que feusse presentement cent 
soixante et dixhuit millions d'or ! says a 
personage in Rabelais : ho, comment je 
triumpherois J 

It was a good, honest, large, capacious 
wish ; and in wishing, it is as well to wish 
for enough. By enough, in the way of 
riches, a man is said to mean always some- 
thing more than he has. Without exposing 
myself to any such censorious remark, I will, 
like the person above quoted, limit my 
desires to a positive sum, and wish for just 
one million a-year. 

" And what would you do with it ? " says 
Mr. Sobersides. 

" Attendez encores un peu, avec demie once 

de patience." 

I now esteem my venerable self 

As brave a fellow, as if all that pelf 

Were sure mine own ; and I have thought a way 

Already how to spend. 

And first, for my private expenditure, I 
would either buy a house to my mind, or 
build one ; and it should be such as a house 
ought to be, which I once heard a glorious 
agriculturist define " a house that should 
have in it everything that is voluptuous, 
and necessary and right." In my accep- 
tation of that felicitous definition, I request 
the reader to understand that everything 
which is right is intended, and nothing but 
what is perfectly so : that is to say I mean 
every possible accommodation conducive to 



THE DOCTOR. 



599 



health and comfort. It should be large 
enough for my friends, and not so large as 
to serve as an hotel for my acquaintance, 
and I would live in it at the rate of five 
thousand a-year, beyond which no real and 
reasonable enjoyment is to be obtained by 
money. 

I would neither keep hounds, nor hunters, 
nor running horses. 

I would neither solicit nor accept a 
peerage. I would not go into Parliament. 
I would take no part whatever in what is 
called public life, farther than to give my 
vote at an election against a Whig, or against 
any one who would give his in favour of the 
Catholic Question. 

I would not wear my coat quite so thread- 
bare as I do at present : but I would still 
keep to my old shoes, as long as they would 
keep to me. 

But stop — Cleopatra adopted some wi- 
zard's words when she said " Wishers were 
ever fools ! " 



CHAPTER CCXXH. 

ETYMOLOGY. ON TOUR DE MAITRE GONIN. 
ROMAN DE VAUDEMONT AND THE LETTER C. 
SHENSTONE. THE DOCTOR'S USE OF CHRIS- 
TIAN NAMES. 

Aristophanes. 

Magnus thesaurus latet in nominibus, said 
Strafford, then Lord Deputy Wentworth, 
when noticing a most unwise scheme which 
was supposed to proceed from Sir Abraham 
Dawes, he observes, it appeared most plainly 
that he had not his name for nothing ! In 
another letter, he says, " I begin to hope I 
may in time as well understand these 
customs as Sir Abraham Dawes. Why 
should I fear it ? for I have a name less 
ominous than his." 

Gonin, Court de Gebelin says, is a French 
word or rather name which exists only in 
these proverbial phrases, Maitre Gonin, — 
un tour de Maitre Gonin ; it designates un 
Maitre passe en ruses et artifices ; un homme 
fin et ruse. The origin of the word, says 



he, was altogether unknown. Menage 
rejects with the utmost contempt the opinion 
of those who derive it from the Hebrew 
piy, Gwunen, a diviner, an enchanter. It 
is true that this etymology has been ad- 
vanced too lightly, and without proofs : 
Menage, however, ought to have been less 
contemptuous, because he could substitute 
nothing in its place. 

It is remarkable that neither Menage nor 
Court de Gebelin should have known that 
Maistre Gounin was a French conjuror, as 
well known in his day as Katterfelto and 
Jonas, or the Sieur Ingleby Emperor of 
Conjurors in later times. He flourished in 
the days of Francis the First, before whom he 
is said to have made a private exhibition of 
his art in a manner perfectly characteristic 
of that licentious King and his profligate 
court. Thus he effected par ses inventions, 
illusions et sorcelleries et enchantements, — 
car il estoit un homme fort expert et subtil en 
son art, says Brantome ; et son petit-Jils, que 
nous avons veu, n'y entendoit rien au prix de 
luy. Grandfather and grandson having 
been at the head of their worshipful pro- 
fession, the name passed into a proverbial 
expression, and survived all memory of the 
men. 

Court de Gebelin traced its etymology 
far and wide. He says, it is incontestable 
that this word is common to us with the 
ancient Hebrews, though it does not come 
to us from them. We are indebted for it 
to the English. Cunning designe chez eux un 
homme adroit, Jin, ruse. Master Cunning a 
fait Maitre Gonin. This word comes from 
the primitive Cen pronounced Ken, which 
signifies ability, (habilite,) art, power. The 
Irish have made from it Kami, I know ; 
Kunna, to know ; Kenning, knowledge, 
(science) ; Kenni-mnrm, wise men (homines 
savans,) Doctors, Priests. 

It is a word common to all the dialects of 
the Celtic and Teutonic ; to the Greek in 
which Konne-ein* signifies to know (savoi?-), 
to be intelligent and able, &c, to the Tartar 
languages, &c. 



* So in the MS. 



600 



THE DOCTOR. 



Les Anglois, associant Cunning avec Man, 
homme, en font le mot Cunning-Man, qui 
signijie Devin, Enchanteur, homme qui fait 
de grandes choses, et qui est habile : cest done 
le correspondant du mot Hebreu Gvvunen, 
Enchanteur, Devin ; Gwuna, Magicienne, 
Devineresse ; a"ou le verbe Gwunen, deviner, 
observer les Augures, faire des prestiges. Ne 
soyons pas etonnes, says the author, bringing 
this example to bear upon his system, de 
voir ce mot commun a tant de Peuples, et si 
ancien : il vint chez lous d'une source commune, 
de la haute Asie, berceau de tous ces Peuples 
et de leur Langue. 

If Mr. Canning had met with the fore- 
going passage towards the close of his poli- 
tical life, when he had attained the summit 
of his wishes, how would it have affected 
him in his sober mind? Would it have 
tickled his vanity, or stung his conscience ? 
Would he have been nattered by seeing his 
ability prefigured in his name ? or would he 
have been mortified at the truth conveyed 
in the proverbial French application of it, 
and have acknowledged in his secret heart 
that cunning is as incompatible with self- 
esteem as it is with uprightness, with mag- 
nanimity, and with true greatness ? 

His name was unlucky not only in its 
signification, but according to Roman de 
Vaudemont, in its initial. 

Maudit est nom qui par C se commence, 
Coquin, cornard, caignard, coqu, caphard : 
Aussi par B, badaud, badin, bavard, 

Mais pire est C, si fay bien remembrance. 

Much as the Doctor insisted upon the 
virtues of what he called the divine initial, 
he reprehended the uncharitable sentiment 
of these verses, and thought that the author 
never could have played at " I love my 
Love with an A," or that the said game 
perhaps was not known among the French ; 
for you must get to x, y, and z before you 
find it difficult to praise her in any letter 
in the alphabet, and to dispraise her in the 
same. 

Initials therefore, he thought, (always 
with one exception,) of no other consequence 
than as they pleased the ear, and combined 
gracefully in a cypher, upon a seal or ring. 



But in names themselves a great deal more 
presents itself to a reflecting mind. 

Shenstone used to bless his good fortune 
that his name was not obnoxious to a pun. 
He would not have liked to have been com- 
plimented in the same strain as a certain 
Mr. Pegge was by art old epigrammatist. 

What wonder if my friendship's force doth last 
Firm to your goodness ? You have pegg'd it fast. 

Little could he foresee, as Dr. Southey has 
observed, that it was obnoxious to a rhyme 
in French English. In the gardens of F!r- 
menonville M. * placed this in- 

scription to his honour. 

This plain stone 

To William Shenstone. 
In his writings he display'd 
A mind natural ; 
At Leasowes he laid 

Arcadian greens rural. 

Poor Shenstone hardly appears more ridi- 
culous in the frontispiece to his own works, 
where, in the heroic attitude of a poet who 
has won the prize and is "about to receive 
the crown, he stands before Apollo in a 
shirt and boa, as destitute of another less 
dispensable part of dress as Adam in Eden ; 
but like Adam when innocent, not ashamed : 
while the shirtless God holding a lyre in one 
hand prepares with the other to place a 
wreath of bay upon the brow of his delighted 
votary. 

The father of Sir Joshua Reynolds fancied 
that if he gave his son an uncommon Chris- 
tian name, it might be the means of better- 
ing his fortune ; and therefore he had him 
christened Joshua. It does not appear, 
however, that the name ever proved as con- 
venient to the great painter as it did to Joshua 
Barnes. He to whose Barnesian labours 
Homer and Queen Esther, and King 
Edward III. bear witness, was a good man 
and a good scholar, and a rich widow who 
not imprudently inferred that he would 
make a good husband, gave him an oppor- 
tunity by observing to him one day that 
Joshua made the Sun and Moon stand still, 
and significantly adding that nothing could 
resist Joshua. The hint was not thrown 

* So in the MS. 



THE DOCTOR. 



601 



away ; — and he never had cause to repent 
that he had taken, nor she that she had 
given it. 

A Spanish gentleman who made it his 
pastime to write books of chivalry, being to 
bring into his work a furious Giant, went 
many days devising a name which might in 
all points be answerable to his fierceness ; 
neither could he light upon any ; till playing 
one day at cards in his friend's house, he 
heard the master of the house say to the boy 
— muchacho — tra qui tantos. As soon as 
he heard Traquitantos he laid down his 
cards, and said that now he had found a 
name which would fit well for his Giant.* 

I know not whether it was the happy- 
minded author of the TVorthies and the 
Church History of Britain who proposed as 
an Epitaph for himself the words " Fuller's 
Earth," or whether some one proposed it for 
him. But it is in his own style of thought 
and feeling. 

Nor has it any unbeseeming levity, like 
this which is among Browne's poems. 

Here lieth in sooth 
Honest John Tooth, 
Whom Death on a day 
From us drew away. 

Or this upon a Mr. Button, 

Here lieth one, God rest his soul, 
Whose grave is but a button-hole. 

No one was ever punned to death, nor, 
though Ditton is said to have died in con- 
sequence of " the unhappy effect " which 
Swift'3 verses produced upon him, can I 
believe that any one was ever rhymed to 
death. 

A man may with better reason bless his 
godfathers and godmothers if they chase for 
him a name which is neither too common 
nor too peculiar.^ 

It is not a good thing to be Tom'd or 
Bob'd, Jack'd or Jim'd, Sam'd or Ben'd, 
Natty' d or Batty'd, Neddy 'd or Teddy'd, 
WHIM or Bill'd, Dick'd or Nick'd, Joe'd or 
Jerry'd, as you go through the world. And 
yet it is worse to have a christian name, 

* HUARTE. 

t It is said of an eccentric individual that he never 
forgave his Godfathers and Godmother forgiving him the 
name of Moses, for which the short is Mo. 



that for its oddity shall be in every body's 
mouth when you are spoken of, as if it were 
pinned upon your back, or labelled upon 
your forehead : — Quintin Dick, for example, 
which would have been still more unlucky 
if Mr. Dick had happened to have a cast in 
his eye. The Report on Parochial Regis- 
tration contains a singular example of the 
inconvenience which may arise from giving 
a child an uncouth christian name. A 
gentleman called Anketil Gray had occasion 
for a certificate of his baptism : it was 
known at what church he had been baptized, 
but on searching the register there no such 
name could be found ; some mistake was 
presumed therefore not in the entry, but in 
the recollection of the parties, and many 
other registers were examined without suc- 
cess. At length the first register was again 
recurred to, and then upon a closer investiga- 
tion they found him entered as Miss Ann 
Kettle Grey. 

Souvent, says Brantome, ceux qui portent 
le nom de leurs ayeuls, leur ressemblent 
volontiers, comme je lay veu observer et en 
discourir a aucuns philosophes. He makes 
this remark after observing that the Em- 
peror Ferdinand was named after his grand- 
father Ferdinand of Arragon, and Charles 
V. after his great-grandfather Charles the 
Bold. But such resemblances are, as 
Brantome implies, mutational where they 
exist. And Mr. Keightley's observation, 
that " a man's name and his occupation 
have often a most curious coincidence," 
rests perhaps on a similar ground, men 
being sometimes designated by their names 
for the way of life which they are to pursue. 
Many a boy has been called Nelson in our 
own days, and Rodney in our father's, 
because he was intended for the sea service, 
and many a seventh son has been christened 
Luke, in the hope that he might live to be a 
physician. In what other business than 
that of lottery-office would the name 
Goodluck so surely have brought business 
to the house ? Captain Death could never 
have practised medicine or surgery, unless 
under an alias; but there would be no 
better name with which to meet an enemy 



602 



THE DOCTOR. 



in battle. Dr. Damman was an eminent 
physician and royal professor of midwifery 
at Ghent in the latter part of the last cen- 
tury. He ought to have been a Caivinistic 
divine. 

The Ancients paid so great a regard to 
names, that whenever a number of men 
were to be examined on suspicion, they 
began by putting to the torture the one 
whose name was esteemed the vilest. And 
this must not be supposed to have had its 
origin in any reasonable probability, such as 
might be against a man who, being appre- 
hended for a riot, should say his name was 
Patrick Murphy, or Dennis O'Connor, or 
Thady O'Callaghan; or against a Moses 
Levi, or a Daniel Abrahams for uttering bad 
money ; it was for the import of the name 
itself, and the evidence of a base and servile 
origin which it implied. 

Tax ete tousjours fort etonne, says 
Bayle, que les families qui portent un nom 
odieux ou ridicule, ne le quitent pas. The 
Leatherheads and Shufflebottoms, the Hig- 
genses and Huggenses, the Scroggses and 
the Scraggses, Sheepshanks and Rams- 
bottoms, Taylors and Barbers, and worse 
than all, Butchers, would have been to 
Bayle as abominable as they were to Dr. 
Dove. "I ought," the Doctor would say, 
" to have a more natural dislike to the names 
of Kite, Hawk, Falcon and Eagle ; and yet 
they are to me (the first excepted) less 
odious than names like these : and even 
preferable to Bull, Bear, Pig, Hog, Fox or 
Wolf." 

"What a name," he would say, "is Lamb 
for a soldier, Joy for an undertaker, Rich for 
a pauper, or Noble for a taylor : Big for a 
lean and little person, and Small for one 
who is broad in the rear and abdominous in 
the van. Short for a fellow six feet without 
his shoes, or Long for him whose high heels 
hardly elevate him to the height of five. 
Sweet for one who has either a vinegar face, 
or a foxey complexion. Younghusband 
for an old bachelor. Merryweather for 
any one in November and February, a black 
spring, a cold summer or a wet autumn. 
Goodenough for a person no better than he 



should be : Toogood for any human crea- 
ture, and Best for a subject who is perhaps 
too bad to be endured." 

Custom having given to every Christian 
name its alias, he always used either the 
baptismal name or its substitute as it hap- 
pened to suit his fancy, careless of what 
others might do. Thus he never called any 
woman Mary, though Mare he said being 
the sea was in many respects but too em- 
blematic of the sex. It was better to use 
a synonyme of better omen, and Molly 
therefore was to be preferred as being soft. 
If he accosted a vixen of that name in her 
worst temper he mollyfied her. On the 
contrary he never could be induced to 
substitute Sally for Sarah. — Sally he said 
had a salacious sound, and moreover it 
reminded him of rovers, which women 
ought not to be. Martha he called Patty, 
because it came pat to the tongue. Dorothy 
remained Dorothy, because it was neither 
fitting that women should be made Dolls 
nor Idols. Susan with him was always 
Sue, because women were to be sued, and 
Winifred Winny because they were to be 



CHAPTER CCXXIII. 

TRUE PRONUNCIATION OF THE NAME OF DOVE. 
DIFFICULTIES OF PRONUNCIATION AND PRO- 
SODY. A TRUE AND PERFECT RHYME HIT 
UPON. 

Tal nombre, que a los siglos extendido, 

Se olvide de olvidarsele al Olvido. Lope de Vega. 

Considering the many mysteries which our 
Doctor discovered in the name of Dove, 
and not knowing but that many more may 
be concealed in it which will in due time be 
brought to light, I am particularly desirous, 
— I am solicitous, — I am anxious, — I 
wish (which is as much as if a Quaker were 
to say " I am moved," or " it is upon my 
mind,") to fix for posterity, if possible, the 
true pronunciation of that name. If possible, 
I say, because whatever those readers may 
think, who have never before had the sub I 



THE DOCTOR. 



603 



ject presented to their thoughts, it is ex- 
ceedingly difficult. My solicitude upon this 
point will not appear groundless, if it be 
recollected to what strange changes pro- 
nunciation is liable, not from lapse of time 
alone, but from caprice and fashion. Who 
in the present generation knows not how 
John Kemble was persecuted about his 
a-ches, a point wherein, right as he was, he 
was proved to be wrong by a new norma 
loquendi. Our allies are no longer iambic 
as they were wont to be, but pure trochees 
now, like Alley Croker and Mr. Alley the 
counsellor. Beta is at this day called Veta 
in Greece, to the confusion of Sir John 
Cheke, to the triumph of Bishop Gardiner, 
and in contempt of the whole ovine race. 
Nay, to bring these observations home to 
the immediate purport of this chapter, the 
modern Greeks when they read this book 
will call the person, on whose history it 
relates, Thaniel Thove ! and the Thoctor ! 
their Delta having undergone as great a 
change as the Delta in Egypt. Have I not 
reason then for my solicitude ? 

Whoever examines that very rare and 
curious book, Lesclarcissement de la langue 
frangoyse, printed by Johan Haukyns, 1530, 
(which is the oldest French grammar in our 
language, and older than any that the 
French possess in their own,) will find in- 
dubitable proof that the pronunciation of 
both nations is greatly altered in the course 
of the last three hundred years. 

Neither the Spaniards nor Portuguese 
retain in their speech that strong Rhotacism 
which they denoted by the double rr, and 
which Camden and Fuller notice as peculiar 
to the people of Carlton in Leicestershire. 
Lily has not enumerated it among those 
isms from which boys are by all means to be 
deterred ; a most heinous ism, however, it is. 
A strange uncouth wharling Fuller called 
it, and Camden describes it as a harsh and 
ungrateful manner of speech with a guttural 
and difficult pronunciation. They were 
perhaps a colony from Durham or North- 
umberland in whom the burr had become 
hereditary. 

Is the poetry of the Greeks and Romans 



ever read as they themselves read it ? Have 
we not altered the very metre of the pen- 
tameter by our manner of reading it ? Is it 
not at this day doubtful whether Caesar was 
called Ksesar, Chaesar, or as we pronounce 
his name ? And whether Cicero ought not 
to be called Chichero * or Kikero ? Have 
I not therefore cause to apprehend that 
there may come a time when the true pro- 
nunciation of Dove may be lost or doubt- 
ful ? Major Jardine has justly observed 
that in the great and complicated art of 
alphabetical writing, which is rendered so 
easy and familiar by habit, we are not 
always aware of the limits of its powers. 

" Alphabetical writing," says that always 
speculative writer," was doubtless awonderful 
and important discovery. Its greatest merit, 
I think, was that of distinguishing sounds 
from articulations, a degree of perfection to 
which the eastern languages have not yet 
arrived ; and that defect may be, with those 
nations, one of the chief causes of their 
limited progress in many other things. You 
know they have no vowels, except some that 
have the a, but always joined to some 
articulation : their attempt to supply that 
defect by points give them but very im- 
perfect and indistinct ideas of vocal and 
articulate sounds, and of their important 
distinction. But even languages most al- 
phabetical, if the expression may be allowed, 
could not probably transmit by writing a 
compleat idea of their own sounds and pro- 
nunciation from any one age or people to 
another. Sounds are to us infinite and 
variable, and we cannot transmit by one 
sense the ideas and objects of another. We 
shall be convinced of this when we recollect 
the innumerable qualities of tone in human 
voices, so as to enable us to distinguish all 



* The well-known verses of Catullus would be against 
CAicAero, at least. 

Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda vellet 

Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias : 
Et turn mirifici sperabat se esse locutum, 
Cum quantum poter at, dixerat hinsidias, SfC. 

Carm. lxxxiv. 

The h appears to have been an old Shibboleth, and not 
restricted either to Shropshire or Warwickshire. Mr. 
Evans' verses will occur to many readers of " The Doc- 
tor, &c." 



604 



THE DOCTOR. 



our acquaintances, though the number 
should amount to many hundreds, or per- 
haps thousands. With attention we might 
discover a different quality of tone in every 
instrument ; for all these there never can be 
a sufficient number of adequate terms in 
any written language ; and when that 
variety comes to be compounded with alike 
variety of articulations, it becomes infinite 
to us. The varieties only upon the seven 
notes in music, varied only as to pitch and 
modulation throughout the audible scale, 
combined with those of time, are not yet 
probably half exhausted by the constant 
labour of so many ages. So that the idea 
of Mr. Steel and others, of representing to 
the eye the tune and time only of the 
sounds in any language, will probably ever 
prove inadequate to the end proposed, even 
without attempting the kinds and qualities 
of tones and articulations which would 
render it infinite and quite impossible." 

Lowth asserts that " the true pronuncia- 
tion of Hebrew is lost, — lost to a degree 
far beyond what can ever be the case of any 
European language preserved only in writ- 
ing ; for the Hebrew language, like most of 
the other Oriental languages, expressing 
only the consonants, and being destitute of 
its vowels, has lain now for two thousand 
years in a manner mute and incapable of 
utterance, the number of syllables is in a 
great many words uncertain, the quantity 
and accent wholly unknown." 

In the pronouncing Dictionary of John 
Walker, (that great benefactor to all ladies 
employed in the task of education,) the word 
is written Duv, with a figure of 2 over the 
vowel, designating that what*he calls the 
short simple u is intended, as in the English 
tub, cup, sup, and the French veuf, neuf. 
How Sheridan gives it, or how it would 
have been, as Mr. Southey would say, 
uglyographised by Elphin stone and the other 
whimsical persons who have laboured so 
disinterestedly in the vain attempt of re- 
gulating our spelling by our pronunciation, 
I know not, for none of their books are at 
hand. My public will forgive me that I 
have not taken the trouble to procure them. 



It has not been neglected from idleness, nor 
for the sake of sparing myself any pains 
which ought to have been taken. Would I 
spare any pains in the service of my Public ! 

I have not sought for those books because 
their authority would have added nothing 
to Walker's : nor if they had differed from 
him, would any additional assistance have 
been obtained. They are in fact all equally 
inefficient for the object here required, 
which is so to describe and fix the true pro- 
nunciation of a particular word, that there 
shall be no danger of it ever being mistaken, 
and that when this book shall be as old as 
the Iliad, there may be no dispute con- 
cerning the name of its principal personage, 
though more places should vie with each 
other for the honour of having given birth 
to Urgand the Unknown, than contended 
for the birth of Homer. Now that cannot 
be done by literal notation. If you think it 
may, " I beseech you, Sir, paint me a voice ! 
Make a sound visible if you can ! Teach 
mine ears to see, and mine eyes to hear ! " 

The prosody of the ancients enables us to 
ascertain whether a syllable be long or short. 
Our language is so much more flexible in 
verse that our poetry will not enable the 
people of the third and fourth millenniums 
even to do this, without a very laborious 
collation, which would after all in many in- 
stances leave the point doubtful. Nor will 
rhyme decide the question ; for to a foreigner 
who understands English only by book (and 
the people of the third and fourth millen- 
niums may be in this state) Dove and 
Glove, Rove and Grove, Move and Prove, 
must all appear legitimate and inter- 
changeable rhymes. 

I must therefore have given up the matter 
in despair had it not been for a most for- 
tunate and felicitous circumstance. There 
is one word in the English language which, 
happen what may, will never be out of use, 
and of which the true pronunciation, like 
the true meaning, is sure to pass down 
uninterruptedly and unaltered from genera- 
tion to generation. That word, that one 
and only word which must remain immutable 
wherever English is spoken, whatever other 



THE DOCTOR. 



605 



mutations the speech may undergo, till the 
language itself be lost in the wreck of all 
things, — that word (Youths and Maidens 
ye anticipate it now !) that one and only 
word — 

that dear delicious monosyllable Love, — 
that word is a true and perfect rhyme to the 
name of our Doctor. 

Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied ; 
.... pronounce but Love and Dove.f 



CHAPTER CCXXIY. 

CHARLEMAGNE, CASIMIR THE POET, MAR- 
GARET DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE, NOCTUR- 
NAL REMEMBRANCER. THE DOCTOR NOT 
AMBITIOUS OF FAME. THE AUTHOR IS 
INDUCED BY MR. FOSBROOKE AND NORRIS 
OF BEMERTON TO EJACULATE A HEATHEN 
PRATER IN BEHALF OF HIS BRETHREN. 

Tutte le cose son rose et viole 

Ch' io dico 6 ck' to dirb de la virtute. 

Fr. Sansovino. 

It is recorded of Charlemagne by his secre- 
tary Eginhart, that he had always pen, ink 
and parchment beside his pillow, for the 
purpose of noting down any thoughts 
which might occur to him during the night : 
and lest upon waking he should find himself 
in darkness, a part of the wall, within reach 
from the bed, was prepared, like the leaf of 
a tablet, with wax, on which he might 
indent his memoranda with a style. 

The Jesuit poet Casimir had a black 
tablet always by his bedside, and a piece of 
chalk, with which to secure a thought, or a 
poetical expression that might occur to him, 
si quid insomnis noctu non infeliciter cogitabat 
ne id sibi periret. In like manner it is 
related of Margaret Duchess of Newcastle 
that some of her young ladies always slept 
within call, ready to rise at any hour in the 
night, and take down her thoughts, lest she 
should forget them before morning. 

Some threescore years ago a little instru- 
ment was sold by the name of the Nocturnal 



• Euripides. 



f Romeo and Juliet. 



Remembrancer ; it consisted merely of some 
leaves of what is called asses- skin, in a 
leathern case wherein there was one aperture 
from side to side, by aid of which a straight 
line could be pencilled in the dark : the leaf 
might be drawn up and fixed at measured 
distances, till it was written on from top to 
bottom. 

Our Doctor, ( — now that thou art so well 
acquainted with him and likest him so 
cordially, Reader, it would be ungenerous 
in me to call him mine) — our Doctor needed 
no such contrivances. He used to say that 
he " laid aside all his cares when he put off 
his wig, and that never any were to be 
found under his night-cap." Happy man, 
from whom this might be believed ! but so 
even had been the smooth and noiseless 
tenour of his life that he could say it truly. 
Anxiety and bereavements had brought to 
him no sleepless nights, no dreams more 
distressful than even the realities that 
produce and blend with them. Neither had 
worldly cares or ambitious hopes and projects 
ever disquieted him, and made him misuse 
in midnight musings the hours which belong 
to sleep. He had laid up in his mind an 
inexhaustible store of facts and fancies, and 
delighted in nothing more than in adding to 
these intellectual treasures ; but as he 
gathered knowledge only for its own sake, 
and for the pleasure of the pursuit, not 
with any emulous feelings, or aspiring 
intent 

— to be for ever known, 
And make the years to come his own, 

he never said, with the studious Elder 
Brother in Fletcher's comedy, 

— the children 
Which I will leave to all posterity, 
Begot and brought up by my painful studies 
Shall be my living issue. 

And therefore — voilcl un Jiomme qui etait 
fort savant et fort eloquent, et neanmoins — 
(altering a little the words of Bayle,) — 
il n'est pas connu dans la republique des 
lettres, et il y a eu une infinite de gens beauconp 
moins habile que lui, qui sont cent fois plus 
connus ; Jest quils ont publie des livres, et que 
la presse ria point roule sur ses productions. 
U importe extremement aux homines doctes. 



606 



THE DOCTOR. 



qui ne veulent pas torriber dans Vouhli apres 
lew mort, de s'eriger en auteurs ; sans cela 
leur nom ne passe guere la premiere genera- 
tion ; res erat unius cetatis. Le commun des 
lecteurs ne prend point garde au nom des 
savans qu'ils ne connaissent que par le temoig- 
nage d'autrui ; on oublie bientot un homme, 
lorsque Veloge qu 'en fontles autres jinit par — 
le public ria rien ou de lui. 

Bayle makes an exception of men who 
like Peiresc distinguish themselves dunfaqon 
singuliere. 

"I am not sure," says Sir Egerton 
Brydges, "that the life of an author is a 
happy life ; but yet, if the seeds of author- 
ship be in him, he will not be happy except 
in the indulgence of this occupation. With- 
out the culture and free air which these 
seeds require they will wither and turn to 
poison." It is no desirable thing, according 
to this representation, to be born with such 
a predisposition to the most dangerous of all 
callings. But still more pitiable is the con- 
dition of such a person, if Mr. Fosbrooke 
has described it truly : " the mind of a man 
of genius," says he, (who beyond all question 
is a man of genius himself, ) " is always in a 
state of pregnancy, or parturition ; and its 
power of bearing offspring is bounded only 
by supervening disease, or by death." Those 
who are a degree lower in genius are in a 
yet worse predicament ; such a sort of man, 
as Morris of Bemerton describes, who, 
" although he conceives often, yet by some 
chance or other he always miscarries, and 
the issue proves abortive." 

Juno Lucina/cj- opem ! 

This invocation the Doctor never made 
metaphorically for himself, whatever serious 
and secret prayers he may have preferred 
for others, when exercising one branch of 
his tripartite profession. 

Bernardin de Saint Pierre says in one of 
his letters, when his Etudes de la Nature 
were in the press, Je suis a present dans les 
douleurs de T enfantement, car il riy a point de 
mere qui souffre autant en mettant un enfant 
au monde, et qui craigneplus qu'on ne Vecorche 
ou qu'on ne les creve un ceil, quun auteur qui 
revoit les epreuves de son ouvrage. 



CHAPTER CCXXV. 

TWO QUESTIONS GROWING OUT OF THE 
PRECEDING CHAPTER. 

A Taylor who has no objection to wear motley, may 
make himself a great coat with half a yard of his own stuff, 
by eking it out with cabbage from every piece that comes 
in his way. Robert Southey. 

But here two questions arise : 

Ought Dr. Dove, or ought he not, to have 
been an author ? 

Was he, or was he not, the happier, for 
not being one ? 

" Not to leave the reader," as Lightfoot 
says, " in a bivium of irresolutions," I will 
examine each of these questions, Escriviendo 
algunos breves reglones, sobre lo mucho que 
dezir y escrivir se podria en esto ; — moviendo 
me principalmente a ello la grande ignorancia 
que sobre esta matheria veo manifiestamente 
entre las gentes de nuestro sigh* 

"I am and have been," says Robert 
Wilmot " (if there be in me any soundness 
of judgement,) of this opinion, that whatso- 
ever is committed to the press is commended 
to eternity; and it shall stand a lively 
witness with our conscience, to our comfort 
or confusion, in the reckoning of that great 
day. Advisedly therefore was that proverb 
used of our elder Philosopher, Manum a 
Tabula ; withhold thy hand from the paper, 
and thy papers from the print, or light of 
the world." 

Robert Wilmot says, I say, using the 
present tense in setting his words before the 
reader, because of an author it may truly be 
said that "being dead he yet speaketh." 
Obscure as this old author now is, for his 
name and his existing works are known only 
to those who love to pore among the tombs 
and the ruins of literature, yet by those who 
will always be enough " to make a few," his 
name will continue to be known, long after 
many of those bubbles which now glitter as 
they float upon the stream of popularity are 
" gone for ever ; " and his remains are safe 
for the next half millennium, if the globe 



Garibay. 



THE DOCTOR. 



607 



should last so long without some cataclasm 
which shall involve its creatures and its 
works in one common destruction. 

Wilmot is right in saying that whatever is 
written for the public, is, as regards the 
individual responsibility of the writer, 
written for eternity, however brief may be 
its earthly duration ; — an aweful consider- 
ation for the authors of wicked books, and 
for those who by becoming instrumental in 
circulating such books involve themselves 
in the author's guilt as accessaries after 
the fact, and thereby bring themselves de- 
servedly under the same condemnation. 

Looking at the first question in this point 
of view, it may be answered without hesi- 
tation, the Doctor was so pure in heart, and 
consequently so innocent in mind, that there 
was no moral reason why he ought not to 
have been an author. He would have 
written nothing but what, religiously 
speaking, might have been accounted among 
his good works, — so far as, so speaking, 
any works may deserve to be called good. 

But the question has two handles, and we 
must now take it by the other. 

An author, more obscure in the literature 
of his own country than Wilmot, (unless 
indeed some Spanish or Italian Haslewood 
may have disinterred his name,) has ex- 
pressed an opinion directly the reverse of 
Wilmot's concerning authorship. Ye who 
understand the noble language which the 
Emperor Charles V. ranked above all other 
living tongues may have the satisfaction of 
here reading it in the original. 

Muchos son los que del loable y fructuoso 
trdbajo de escrevir, rehuir suelen ; unos por 
no saber, a los quales su ignorancia en alguna 
manera escusa; otros por negligencia, que 
teniendo habilidad y disposicion par ello no lb 
hazen ; y a estos es menester que Dios los 
perdone en lo passado, y emiende en lo por 
venir; otros dexan de hazello por temor de los 
detractores y que mat acostumbran dezir ; los 
quales a mi parecer de toda reprehension son 
dignos, pues siendo el acto en si virtuoso, 
dexan de usarlo por temor. Mayormente 
que todos, o los mas que este exercicio 
usan, o con buen ingenio escriven, o con 



buen desseo querrian escrevir. Si con buen 
ingenio hazen buena obra, cierto es que dese 
ser alabada. Y se el defecto de mas no 
alcanzar algo, la haze diminuta de lo que 
mejor pudiera ser, deve se loar lo que el tal 
quisiera hazer, si mas supiera, o la invencion 
y fantasia de la obra, por que fue, o porque 
desseo ser bueno. De manere que es mucho 
mejor escrevir como quiera que sepueda hazer, 
que no por algun temor dexar de hazerlo. * 

"Many," says this author, "are they who 
are wont to eschew the meritorious and 
fruitful labour of writing, some for want 
of knowledge, whom their ignorance in some 
manner excuses ; others for negligence, who 
having ability and fitness for this neverthe- 
less do it not, and need there is for them, 
that God should forgive them for the past, 
and amend them for the time to come ; 
others forbear writing, for fear of detractors 
and of those who accustom themselves to 
speak ill ; and these in my opinion are worthy 
of all reprehension, because the act being 
in itself so virtuous they are withheld by 
fear from performing it. Moreover it is to 
be considered that all, or most of those who 
practise this art, either write with a good 
genius, or a good desire of writing well. If 
having a good genius they produce a good 
work, certes that work deserves to be com- 
mended. And if for want of genius it falls 
short of this, and of what it might better 
have been, still he ought to be praised, who 
would have made his work praiseworthy if 
he had been able, and the invention and 
fancy of the work, either because it is or 
because he wished it to be so. So that it is 
much better for a man to write whatever 
his ability may be, than to be withheld from 
the attempt by fear." 

A very different opinion was expressed 
by one of the most learned of men, Ego 
multos studiosos quotidie video, paucos doctos ; 
in doctis paucos ingeniosos ; in seynidoctis 
nullos bonos ; atque adeo Uteres generis humani 
unicum solamen, jam pestis et perniciei max- 
imal loco sunt.-f 

M. Cornet used to say, Que pour /aire des 



* Question de Amor. Prologo. 



t Scaliger. 



608 



THE DOCTOK. 



livres, il faloit etre ou bien fou ou bien sage, 
que pour lui, comme il ne se cro'ioit pas assez 
sage pour /aire un bon livre, ni assez fou 
pour en f aire un mechant, il avoit pris le 
parti de ne point ecrire, 

Pour lui, the Docteur of the Sorbonne : 
pour moi, — every reader will, in the ex- 
ercise of that sovereign judgment whereof 
every reader is possessed, determine for 
himself whether in composing the present 
work I am to be deemed bien sage or bien 
fou. I know what Mr. Dulman thinks upon 
this point, and that Mr. Slapdash agrees 
with him. To the former I shall say 
nothing ; but to the latter, and to Slender- 
wit, Midge, Wasp, Dandeprat, Brisk and 
Blueman, I shall let Cordara the Jesuit 
speak for me. 

O quanti, o quanti sono, a cut displace 
Vedere un uom contento ; sol per questo 
Lo pungono con stile acre e mordace, 

Per questi versi miei chi sa che presto 
Qualche xanxara contro me non s'armi, 
E non prenda di qui qualche pretesto. 

lo certo me V aspetto, che ollraggiarmi 
Talun pretender a sol per che pare, 
Che di lieti pensier' sappia occuparmi. 

Ma canti pur, lo lascerb cantare 
E per mostrargli quanto me ne prendo, 
Tornerb, se bisogna, a verseggiare. 

Leaving the aforesaid litterateurs to con- 
strue and apply this, I shall proceed in due 
course to examine and decide whether Dr. 
Daniel Dove ought or ought not to have 
been an author, — being the first of two 
questions, propounded in the present 
chapter, as arising out of the last. 



CHAPTER CCXXVI. 

THE AUTHOR DIGRESSES A LITTLE, AND TAKES 
UP A STITCH WHICH WAS DROPPED IN THE 
EARLIER PART OF THIS OPUS. NOTICES 
CONCERNING LITERARY AND DRAMATIC 
HISTORY, BUT PERTINENT TO THIS PART 
OF OUR SUBJECT. 

Jam paululum digressus a spectantibus, 
Doctis loquar, qui non adco spectare quam 
Audire gestiunt, logosque ponderant, 
Examinant, dijudicantque pro suo 
Candore vel livore ; non latum tamen 
Culmum {quod aiunt) dum loquar sapientibus 
Loco movebor. Macropedius. 

The boy and his schoolmaster were not 
mistaken in thinking that some of Textor's 



Moralities would have delighted the people 
of Ingleton as much as any of Rowland 
Dixon's stock pieces. Such dramas have 
been popular wherever they have been pre- 
sented in the vernacular tongue. The pro- 
gress from them to the regular drama was 
slow, perhaps not so much on account of 
the then rude state of most modern lan- 
guages, as because of the yet ruder taste of 
the people. I know not whether it has been 
observed in literary history how much more 
rapid it was in schools, where the Latin lan- 
guage was used, and consequently fit au- 
dience was found, though few. 

George von Langeveldt, or Macropedius, 
as he called himself, according to the 
fashion of learned men in that age, was con- 
temporary with Textor, and like him one of 
the pioneers of literature, but he was a 
person of more learning and greater in- 
tellectual powers. 'He was born about the 
year 1475, of a good family in the little 
town or village of Gemert, at no great 
distance from Bois-le-Duc. As soon as his 
juvenile studies were compleated he entered 
among the Fratres Vita Communis ; they 
employed him in education, first as Rector 
in their college at Bois-le-duc, then at 
Liege, and afterwards at Utrecht, from 
whence in 1552, being infirm and grievously 
afflicted with gout, he returned to Bois-le- 
duc, there to pass the remainder of his days, 
as one whose work was done. Old and 
enfeebled, however, as he was, he lived till 
the year 1558, and then died not of old age 
but of a pestilential fever. 

There is an engraved portrait of him in 
the hideous hood and habit of his order ; 
the countenance is that of a good-natured, 
intelligent, merry old man : underneath are 
these verses by Sanderus the topographer. 

Tu Seneca, et nostri potes esse Terentius cevi, 
Seu struts adfaciles viva theatra pedes, 

Seu ploras tragicas, Macropedi, carmine clades, 
Materiam Sanctis adsimilante modis. 

He sine jam Lalios mirari Roma cothumos ; 
Nescio quid majus Belgica scena dabit. 

Macropedius published Rudiments both 
of the Greek and Latin languages ; he had 
studied the Hebrew and Chaldee ; had some 
skill in mathematics, and amused his leisure 



THE DOCTOR. 



609 



in making mathematical instruments, a 
branch of art in which he is said to have 
been an excellent workman. Most of the 
men who distinguished themselves as scholars 
in that part of the Low Countries, toward 
the latter part of the 16th century, had 
been his pupils : for he was not more re- 
markable for his own acquirements than 
for the earnest delight which he took in 
instructing others. There is some reason 
for thinking that he was a severe disci- 
plinarian, perhaps a cruel one. Herein 
he differed widely from Textor, who took 
every opportunity for expressing his ab- 
horrence of magisterial cruelty. In one of 
these Dialogues with which Guy and young 
Daniel were so well acquainted, two school- 
masters after death are brought before 
Rhadamanthus for judgment; one for his 
inhumanity is sent to be tormented in Tar- 
tarus, part of his punishment, in addition to 
those more peculiarly belonging to the re- 
gion, being that 

Verbera quce pueris intulit, ipseferat : 

the other who indulged his boys and never 
maltreated them is ordered to Elysium, the 
Judge saying to him 

— lua te in pueros dementia salvum 
Ifeddit^ et ceternis persimilem superis. 

That Textor's description of the cruelty 
exercised by the pedagogues of his age was 
not overcharged, Macropedius himself might 
be quoted to prove, even when he is vindi- 
cating and recommending such discipline as 
Dr. Parr would have done. I wish Parr 
had heard an expression which fell from the 
honest lips of Isaac Reid, when a school, 
noted at that time for its consumption of 
birch, was the subject of conversation ; — the 
words would have burned themselves in. I 
must not commit them to the press ; but this 
I may say, that the Recording Angel en- 
tered them on the creditor side of that kind- 
hearted old man's account. 

Macropedius, like Textor, composed dra- 
matic pieces for his pupils to represent. The 
latter, as has been shown in a former chap- 
ter, though he did not exactly take the 
Moralities for his model, produced pieces of 
the same kind, and adapted his conceptions 



to the popular facts, while he clothed them 
in the language of the classics. His aim at 
improvement proceeded no farther, and he 
never attempted to construct a dramatic 
fable. That advance was made by Macro- 
pedius, who in one of his dedicatory epistles 
laments that among the many learned men 
who were then flourishing, no Menander, no 
Terence was to be found; their species of 
writing, he says, had been almost extinct 
since the time of Terence himself, or at 
least of Lucilius. He regretted this be- 
cause comedy might be rendered useful to 
persons of all ages, quid enim plus pueris ad 
eruditionem, plus adolescentibus ad honesta 
studia, plus provectioribus, immb omnibus in 
commune ad virlutem conducat? 

Reuchlin, or Capnio, (as he who was one 
of the lights of his generation was misnamed 
and misnamed himself,) who had with his 
other great and eminent merits that of re- 
storing or rather introducing into Germany 
the study of Hebrew, revived the lost art of 
comedy. If any one had preceded him in 
this revival, Macropedius was ignorant of it ; 
and by the example and advice of this great 
man he was induced to follow him, not only 
as a student of Hebrew, but as a comic 
writer. Hrosvitha indeed, a nun of Gan- 
dersheim in Saxony, who lived in the tenth 
century and in the reign of Otho II., com- 
posed six Latin comedies in emulation of 
Terence, but in praise of virginity ; and 
these with other of her poems were printed 
at Nuremburg in the year 1501. The book 
I have never seen, nor had De Bure, nor 
had he been able (such is its rarity) to pro- 
cure any account of it farther than enabled 
him to give its title. The name of Conrad 
Celtes, the first German upon whom the 
degree of Poet Laureate was conferred, 
appears in the title, as if he had discovered 
the manuscript; Conrado Celte in re afore. 
De Bure says the volume was attribue au 
meme Conradus Celtes. It is rash for any 
one to form an opinion of a book which he 
has never examined, unless he is well ac- 
quainted with the character and capacity of 
its author ; nevertheless I may venture to 
observe that nothing can be less in unison 



610 



THE DOCTOR. 



with the life and conversation of this Latin 
poet, as far as these maybe judged of by his 
acknowledged poems, than the subjects of 
the pieces published under Hrosvitha's 
name ; and no reason can be imagined why, 
if he had written them himself, he should 
have palmed them upon the public as her 
composition. 

It is remarkable that Macropedius, when 
he spoke of Reuchlin's comedies, should not 
have alluded to these, for that he must have 
seen them there can be little or no doubt. 
One of Reuchlin's is said to have been 
imitated from la Farce de Pathelin, which, 
under the title of the Village Lawyer, has 
succeeded on our own stage, and which was 
so deservedly popular that the French have 
drawn from it more than one proverbial 
saying. The French Editor who affirms 
this says that Pathelin was printed in 1474, 
four years before the representation of 
Reuchlin's comedy ; but the story is one of 
those good travellers which are found in all 
countries, and Reuchlin may have drama- 
tised it without any reference to the French 
drama, the existence of which may very 
probably have been unknown to him, as 
well as to Macropedius. Both his pieces are 
satirical. His disciple began with a scrip- 
tural drama upon the Prodigal Son ; Asotus 
is its title. It must have been written early 
in the century, for about 1520 he laid it 
aside as a juvenile performance, and faulty 
as much because of the then comparatively 
rude state of learning, as of his own inex- 
perience. 

Scripsi olim adolescens, trimetris versibus, 
Et tetrametris, ed phrasi etfacundid 
Quce turn per adolescentiam et mala tempora 
Licebal, evangel/cum Asotum aut Prodi-gum 
Omnis quidem met labor is Initium. 

After it had lain among his papers for 
thirty years, he brought it to light, and 
published it. In the prologue he intreats 
the spectators not to be offended that he 
had put his sickle into the field of the 
Gospel, and exhorts them, while they are 
amused with the comic parts of the dialogue, 
still to bear in mind the meaning of the 
parable. 

Srd oral author carminis vos res duas : 
Ne cegreferatis, quod levem fnlcem tulit 



Sementem in evangelicam, eamque quod audeat 
Tractare majestatem Iambo et Tribracho ; 
Neve insuper nimis hcereatis ludicris 
Ludisque comicis, sed animum advortite 
Hie abdito mysterio, quod eruam. 

After these lines he proceeds succinctly to 
expound the parable. 

Although the grossest representations 
were not merely tolerated at that time in 
the Miracle Plays, and Mysteries, but per- 
formed with the sanction and with the assis- 
tance of the clergy, it appears that objec- 
tions were raised against the sacred dramas 
of this author. They were composed for a 
learned audience, — which is indeed the 
reason why the Latin, or as it may more 
properly be called the Collegiate drama, 
appeared at first in a regular and respectable 
form, and received little or no subsequent 
improvement. The only excuse which could 
be offered for the popular exhibitions of this 
kind, was that they were, if not necessary, 
yet greatly useful, by exciting and keeping 
up the lively faith of an ignorant, but all- 
believing people. That apology failed 
where no such use was needed. But Ma- 
cropedius easily vindicated himself from 
charges which in truth were not relevant to 
his case ; for he perceived what scriptural 
subjects might without impropriety be re- 
presented as he treated them, and he care- 
fully distinguished them from those upon 
which no fiction could be engrafted without 
apparent profanation. In the prologue to 
his Lazarus he makes this distinction be- 
tween the Lazarus of the parable, and the 
Lazarus of the Gospel History : the former 
might be thus treated for edification, the 
latter was too sacred a theme, 

— quod is sine 
Filii Dei persona agi non possiel. 

Upon this distinction he defends himself, 
and carefully declares what were the bounds 
which ought not to be overpassed. 

Fortassis objcclabit illi quispiam 
Quod audeat sacerrimam rem, et serio 
Nostrtz saluli a Christo Jesu proditam 
Tractare cornice, etjacere rem ludicram, 
Fatetur ingenue, quod eadem ratio se 
Scepenumero deterruit, ne quid suum, 
Vel ab aliis quantumlibet. scriplum, pie 
Docteve, quod personam haberet Ckrisli Jesu 
Agentis, histrionibus seu ludiis 
Populo cxhibendum ex pulpito committer et. 



THE DOCTOR. 



611 



From this passage I am induced to suspect 
that the Jesus Scholasticus, and the tragedy 
De Passione Chris ti, which are named in 
the list of his works, have been erroneously 
ascribed to him. No date of time or place 
is affixed to either by the biographers. 
After his judicious declaration concerning 
such subjects it cannot be thought he would 
have written these tragedies ; nor that if he 
had written them before he seriously con- 
sidered the question of their propriety, he 
would afterwards have allowed them to 
appear. It is more probable that they were 
published without an author's name, and 
ascribed to him, because of his reputation. 
No inference can be drawn from their not 
appearing in the two volumes of his plays; 
because that collection is entitled Omnes 
Georgii Macropedii Fabuloe Comics, and 
though it contains pieces which are deeply 
serious, that title would certainly preclude 
the insertion of a tragedy. But a piece 
upon the story of Susanna which the biogra- 
phers have also ascribed to him is not in the 
collection * ; the book was printed after his 
retirement to Bois-le-duc, when from his 
age and infirmities he was most unlikely to 
have composed it, and therefore I conclude 
that, like the tragedies, it is not his work. 

Macropedius was careful to guard against 
anything which might give offence, and 
therefore he apologises for speaking of the 
fable of his Nama : 

Mirabitur fortasse vestr&m quispiam, 
Quod fabulam rem sacrosanciam dixerim. 
Verum sibi is persuasum habebit, omne quod 
Tragico artificio comicove scribitur, 
Dici poetisfabulatn ; quod utique non 
Tarn historia veri texilur, quod proprium est, 
Quam imago veri fingitur , quod artis est. 
Nam comicus non propria personis solet, 
Sed apta tribuere atque verisimilia, ut 
Quce pro loco vel tempore potuere agi 
Vel dicier. 

For a very different reason he withdrew 
from one of these dramas certain passages, 
by the advice of his friends ; he says, qui rem 
seriam fabulosius tractandum dissuaserunt. 
These it seems related to the first chapter of 
St. Luke, but contained circumstances 
derived not from that Gospel, but from the 



* This must be a comic drama. — R. S. 



legends engrafted upon it, and therefore 
he rejects them as extra scriptara authori- 
tatem. 

From the scrupulousness with which Ma- 
cropedius in this instance distinguishes be- 
tween the facts of the Gospel history and 
the fables of mans invention, it may be 
suspected that he was not averse at heart to 
those hopes of a reformation in the church 
which were at that time entertained. This 
is still further indicated in the drama called 
Hecastus ("£/cao-roc — Every one,) in which 
he represents a sinner as saved by faith in 
Christ and repentance. He found it neces- 
sary to protest against the suspicion which 
he had thus incurred, and to declare that he 
held works of repentance and the sacra- 
ments appointed by the Church necessary 
for salvation."!" 

Hecastus is a rich man, given over to the 
pomps and vanities of the world, and Epi* 
curia his wife is of the same disposition. 
They have prepared a great feast, when 
Nomodidascalus arrives with a summons for 
him to appear before the Great King for 
judgement. Hecastus calls upon his son 
Philomathes, who is learned in the law, for 
counsel; the son is horror-stricken, and con- 
fesses "his ignorance of the language in which 
the summons is written : 

Horror, pater, me invadit, anxietas quoquc 

Non ?nediocris ; nam elementa quanquam barbara 

Mir am Dei potentiam prce seferunt> 

Humaniorcs literas scio ; barbaras 

Neque legere, neque intelligere, pater, queo. 

The father is incensed that a son who had 
been bred to the law for the purpose of 

t Hecastus was represented by the schoolboys in 1538, 
non sine ?nagno spectantium plausu. It was printed in 
the ensuing year ; and upon reprinting it, in 1550, the 
author offers his apology. He says, Fuere ?>iulti quibus 
(fabulce scopo recteconsiderato) per omnia placuit ; fuere 
quibus in ea nonnulla offendcrunt ; fuere quoquc, quibus 
omnino displicuit, ob hoc praxipuc, quod erroribus qui- 
busdam nostri temporis connivere et sujfragari vidcretur. 
Jnprimis illi, quod citra pocnitcntice opera (satisfactionem 
dicimus) ct ecclesicz sacramenta, per solam in Christum 
fidem et cordis contritionem, condonationcm criminttm 
doccre, vel asserere videre/ur : et quod quisqme ccrto sc 
fore servendum credere teneretur : Id quod nequaquam 
nee mente concept', nee unqttam docere volui, licet qui- 
busdam fortassis fabuloe scopum non cxacte consideran- 
tibus, prima (quod aiunt) front e sic videri potueril. Si 
enim rei scopum, quern i?i argumento indicabam, penitus 
observassent, secus fortassis judicaturi fuissent. — JR. S. 



R R 2 



612 



THE DOCTOR. 



pleading his cause at any time should fail 
him thus ; but Nomodidascalus vindicates 
the young man, and reads a severe lecture 
to Hecastus, in which Hebrew words of 
aweful admonishment are introduced and 
interpreted. The guests arrive ; he tells 
them what has happened, and entreats them 
to accompany him, and assist him when he 
appears before the Judge ; they plead other 
engagements, and excuse themselves. He 
has no better success with his kinsmen ; 
though they promise to look after his affairs, 
and say that they will make a point of 
attending him with due honour as far as the 
gate. He then calls upon his two sons to 
go with him unto the unknown country 
whereto he has been summoned. The elder 
is willing to fight for his father, but not to 
enter upon such a journey ; the lawyer does 
not understand the practice of those courts, 
and can be of no use to him there ; but he 
advises his father to take his servants with 
him, and plenty of money. 

Madam Epicuria, who is not the most 
affectionate of wives, refuses to accompany 
him upon this unpleasant expedient, and 
moreover requests that her maids may be 
left with her ; let him take his man servants 
with him, and gold and silver in abundance. 
The servants bring out his wealth. Plutus, 
ex area loquens, is one of the Dramatis 
Personae, and the said Plutus, when brought 
upon the stage in a chest, or strong box, 
complains that he is shaken to pieces by 
being thus moved. Hecastus tells him he 
must go with him to the other world and 
help him there, which Plutus flatly refuses. 
If he will not go of his own accord he shall 
be carried whether he will or no, Hecastus 
says. Plutus stands stiffly to his refusal. 

Non transferent j prizes quidem 
Artus el ilia ruperint, quam transferant. 
In morte nemini opilulor usquam gentium, 
Quin magis ad alienum dominum Iranseo. 

Hecastus on his part is equally firm, and 
orders his men to fetch some strong poles, 
and carry off the chest, Plutus and all. 
Having sent them forward, he takes leave of 
his family, and Epicuria protests that she 
remains like a widowed dove, and his 



neighbours promise to accompany him as far 
as the gate. 

Death comes behind him now : 

Horrenda imago, larva abominabilis, 
Figura lam execranda, ut ahum damona 
Putetis obvium.* 

This dreadful personage is with much 
difficulty entreated to allow him the respite 
of one short hour, after which Death de- 
clares he will return, and take him, will he 
or nill he before the Judge, and then to the 
infernal regions. During this interval who 
should come up but an old and long- 
neglected friend of Hecastus, Virtue by 
name ; a poor emaciated person, in mean 
attire, in no condition to appear with him 
before the Judge, and altogether unfit to 
plead his desperate cause. She promises, 
however, to send him a Priest to his assist- 
ance, and says moreover that she will speak 
to her sister Faith, and endeavour to per- 
suade her to visit him. 

Meantime the learned son predicts from 
certain appearances the approaching end of 
his father. 

Actum Philocrate, de patris salute, uti 
Plane recenti ex lotio prrjudico, 
Nam cerulea si trndit ad nigredinem 
Vrina mortem proximam denunciat. 

He has been called on, he says, too late, 

Sero meam medentis admisit manum. 

The brothers begin to dispute about their 
inheritance, and declare law against each 
other ; but they suspend the dispute when 
Hieronymus the Priest arrives, that 1hey 
may look after him lest he should prevail 



* The reader should by all means consult Mr. Sharpe's 
" Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries, 
anciently performed in Coventry." " The Devil," he 
observes, " was a very favourite and prominent character 
in our Religious Mysteries, wherein he was introduced as 
often as was practicable, and considerable pains taken to 
furnish him with appropriate habiliments, &c." p. 31. 
also pp. 57-60. There are several plates of " Hell-Mought 
and Sir Satkanas," which will not escape the examina- 
tion of the curious. The bloody Herod was a character 
almost as famous as " Sir Satkanas ;" hence the expres- 
sion " to out-herod Herod," e.g. in Hamlet, Act iii. Sc. ii. 
With reference to the same personage Charmian says to 
the Soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra, "Let me have 
a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage," 
Act i. Sc. ii. ; and Mrs. Page asks in the Merry Wives of 
Windsor, " What Herod oj Jewry is this ? " Act ». Sc. i. 



THE DOCTOR, 



613 



upon the dying to dispose of too large a part 
of his property in charitable purposes. 

Id cautum oportet maximi. Novimus enim 
Quam turn sibi, turn cceteris quibus favent, 
Legata larga extorqueat id hominum genus, 
Cum morte ditem terminandum viderint. 

Virtue arrives at this time with his sister 
Faith ; they follow Hieronymus into the 
chamber into which Hecastus has been 
borne ; and as they go in up comes Satan 
to the door, and takes his seat there to draw 
up a bill of indictment against the dying- 
man : he must do it carefully, he says, that 
there may be no flaw in it. 

Causam meam scripturus absolutius 
Adversum Hecastum, hie paululum desedero ; 
Ne si quid insit falsitatis ?naximis 
Facinoribus, res tota venial in gravem 
Fcedamque controversion. Abstinete vos, 
Quolquot iheatro adestis, a petulantia, 
Nisi si velitis et hos cachinnos scribier. 

Then he begins to draw up the indictment, 
speaking as he writes, 

Primum omnium superbus est et arrogans, — 
Superbus est et arrogans,— et arrogans ; — 
Turn in cedibus> — turn in aidibus ; turn in vestibus, — 
Turn in vestibus. Jam reliqua tacitus scripsero, 
Loquaculi ne exaudiant et deferant. 

While Satan is thus employed at the door, 
the priest Hieronymus within is questioning 
the patient concerning his religion. Hecastus 
possesses a very sound and firm historical 
belief. But this the Priest tells him is not 
enough, for the Devils themselves believe 
and tremble, and he will not admit Faith 
into the chamber till Hecastus be better 
instructed in the true nature of a saving 
belief. 

Credis quod omnia quce patravit Filius 
Dei unicus, tibi redimendo gesserit ? 
Tibi natus est ? tibi vixerit ? tibi mortuus 
Sit ? tibi sepulius ? et tibi surrcxerit ? 
Mortemque tibi devicerit ? 

Hecastus confesses in reply that he is a 
most miserable sinner, unworthy of forgive- 
ness ; and having brought him into this state 
of penitence the Priest calls Fides in. 

Then says Fides, 

Ha?c tria quidern, cognitio nempe criminis, 
Horror gehennce, et pocnitentia, heta sunt 
Veree salutis omnium primordia, 
J,:»i pergr, ut in Deum excites fiduciam. 



When this trust has been given him, and he 
has declared his full belief, he confesses that ' 
still he is in fear, 

— est quod adkuc parit mihi scrupulum ; 
Mors horrida, atque aspectus atri Dcemonis, 
Queis terribilius (inquiunt) nil hominibus. 
Post paululum quos adfuturos arbitros. 

But Hieronymus assures him that Fides 
and Yirtus will defend him from all danger, 
and under their protection he leaves him. 

The scene is now again at the door : Mors 
arrives. Satan abuses her for having made 
him wait so long, and the improba bestia in 
return reproaches him for his ingratitude 
and imprudence. However they make up 
their quarrel. Satan goes into the house 
expecting to have a long controversy with 
his intended victim, and Mors amuses herself 
in the mean time with sharpening her dart. 
Satan, however, finds that his controversy is 
not to be with Hecastus himself, but with 
his two advocates Fides and Virtus ; and 
they plead their cause so provokingly that 
the old Lawyer tears his bill, and sculks 
into a corner to see how Mors will come off. 

Now comes his son the Doctor, and prog- 
nosticates speedy dissolution ex pulsu et 
airo lotio. And having more professional 
pride than filial feeling, he would fain 
persuade the Acolyte, who is about to assist 
in administering extreme unction, that he 
has chosen a thankless calling, and would do 
wisely if he forsook it for more gainful 
studies. The youth makes a good defence 
for his choice, and remains master in the 
argument ; for the Doctor getting sight of 
Death brandishing the sharpened dart takes 
fright and runs off. Having put the Doctor 
to flight, Death enters the sick chamber, 
and finding Fides there calls in Satan as an 
ally: their joint force avails nothing against 
Virtus, Fides, and Hieronymus; and these 
dismiss the departing Spirit under a convoy 
of Angels to Abraham's bosom. 

Three supplementary scenes conclude the 
two dramas; in the two first the widow ami 
the sons and kinsmen lament the dead, and 
declare their intention of putting themselves 
all in mourning, and giving a funeral wortliv 
of his rank. But Hieronymus reproves 



614 



THE DOCTOR. 



them for the excess of their grief, and for 
the manner by which they intended to show 
their respect for the dead. The elder son is 
convinced by his discourse, and replies 

Recte mones vir omnium piissime, 

Linquamus omnem hunc apparatum splendidum, 

Linquamus hcecce cuncta in usum pauperum, 

Linquamus omnem luclum inanem et lachrymas ; 

Moresque nostros corrigamus pristinos. 

Si multo amoeniora vitcs munia, 

Post hanc calamitatem, morantur in fide 

Spe ut charitate mortuos, quid residuum est 

Nisi et hunc diem cum patre agamus mortuo 

Lcetissimum ? non in cibis etpoculis 

Gravioribus, natura quam poposcerit ; 

Nee tympanis et organis, sed maximas 

Deo exhibendo gratias. Viro pio 

Congaudeamus intimis affectibus ; 

Et absque pompd inutili exequias pias 

Patri paremus mortuo. 

The Steward then concludes the drama by 
dismissing the audience in these lines : 

Vos qui advolastis impigri ad 
Nostra hcec theatra, turn viri, tumfoemince, 
Adite nunc vestras domos sine remora. 
Nam Hecastus hie quern Morte ccesum exhibuimus, 
Non ante tertium diem tumulandus est, 
Valete cuncti, et, si placuimus, plaudite. 

We have in our own language a dramatic 
piece upon the same subject, and of the 
same age. It was published early in Henry 
the Eighth's reign, and is well known to 
English philologists by the name of Every 
Man. The title page says, " Here be- 
gynneth a treatyse how the hye Fader of 
Eleven sendeth Dethe to somon every crea- 
ture to come and gyve a counte of theyr 
lyves in this worlde, and is in maner of a 
moralle Playe." 

The subject is briefly stated in a prologue 
by a person in the character of a Messenger, 
who exhorts the spectators to hear with re- 
verence. 

This mater is wonders precyous ; 
But the extent of it is more gracyous, 

And swete to bere awaye. 
The story sayth, Man, in the begynnynge 
Loke well and take good heed to the endynge, 

Be you never so gay. 

God (the Son) speaketh at the opening of 
the piece, and saying that the more He 
forbears the worse the people be from year 
to year, declares his intention to have a 
reckoning in all haste of every man's person, 
and do justice on every man living. 



"Where art thou, Deth, thou mighty messengere ? 

Dethe. 
Almighty God, I am here at your wyll 
Your commaundement to fulfyll. 

God. 
Go thou to E very-man 
And shewehym in my name, 
A pylgrymage he must on hym take, 
Whiche he in no wyse may escape : 
And that he brynge with him a sure rekenynge, 
Without delay or ony taryenge. 

Dethe. 
Lorde, I wyll in the world go renne over all 
And cruelly out serche bothe grete and small. 

The first person whom Death meets is 
Every-man himself, and he summons him in 
God's name to take forthwith a long journey, 
and bring with him his book of accounts. 
Every-man offers a thousand pounds to be 
spared, and says that if he may but have 
twelve years allowed him, he will make his 
accounts so clear that he shall have no need 
to fear the reckoning. Not even till to- 
morrow is granted him. He then asks if he 
may not have some of his acquaintances to 
accompany him on the way, and is told yes, 
if he can get them. The first to whom he 
applies is his old boon-companion Fellow- 
ship, who promises to go with him anywhere, 
— till he hears what the journey is on which 
Every-man is summoned : he then declares 
that he would eat, drink and drab with him, 
or lend him a hand to kill anybody, but 
upon such a business as this he will not stir 
a foot ; and with that bidding him God 
speed, he departs as fast as he can. 

Alack, exclaims Every-man, when thus 
deserted, 

Felawship herebefore with me wolde mery make, 

And now lytell sorowe for me dooth he take. 

Now wheder for socoure shall I flee 

Syth that Felawship hath forsaken me ? 

To my kynnesmen I wyll truely, 

Prayenge them to helpe me in my necessyte. 

I byleve that they wyll do so ; 

For kynde wyll crepe where it may not go. 

But one and all make their excuses ; they 
have reckonings of their own which are not 
ready, and they cannot and will not go with 
him. Thus again disappointed he breaks 
out in more lamentations ; and then catches 
at another fallacious hope. 

Yet in my mynde a thynge there is ; 
All my lyfe I have loved Ryches ; 



THE DOCTOR. 



615 



If that my good now helpe me myght 
He wolde make me herte full lyght. 
I wyll speke to hym in this distresse, 
Where art thou, my Goodes, and Ryches ? 

Goodes. 
Who calleth me ? Every-man ? What hast thou haste ? 
I lye here in corners, trussed and pyled so hye, 
And in chestes I am locked so fast, 
Also sacked in bagges, thou mayst se with thyn eye 
I cannot styrre ; in packes low I lye. 
What wolde ye have ? lightly me saye — 
Syr, an ye in the worlde have sorowe or adversyte 
That can I helpe you to remedy shortly. 

Every-man. 
In this world it is not, 1 tell thee so, 
I am sent for an other way to go, 
To gyve a strayts counte generall 
Before the hyest Jupiter of all : 
And all my life I have had joye and pleasure in the, 
Therefore, I pray the, go witli me : 
For paraventure, thou mayst before God Almighty 
My rekenynge helpe to clene and puryfye ; 
For it is said ever amonge 
That money maketh all ryght that is wrong. 

Goodes. 
Nay, Every-man, I synge an other songe ; 
I folowe no mau in such vyages. 
For an I wente with the, 
Thou sholdes fare moche the worse for me. 

Goodes then exults in having beguiled 
him, laughs at his situation, and leaves him. 
Of whom shall he take counsel ? He be- 
thinks him of Good Dedes. 

But alas she is so weke 
That she can nother go nor speke. 
Yet wyll I venter on her now 
My Good Dedes, where be you ? 

Good Dedes. 
Here I lye colde on the grounde, 
Thy sinnes hath me sore bounde 
That I cannot stere. 

Every-man. 
I pray you that ye wyll go with me. 

Good Dedes. 
I wolde full fayne, but I can not stand veryly. 

Every-man. 
Why, is there any thynge on you fall ? 

Good Dedes. 
Ye, Sir ; I may thanke you of all. 
If ye had parfytely sheved me, 
Your boke of counte full redy had be. 
Loke, the bokes of your workes and dedes eke, 
A ! se how they lye under the fete, 
To your soules hevynes. 

Every-man. 
Our Lorde Jesus helpe me, 
For one letter here I cannot se ! 

Good Dedes. 
There is a blynde rekenynge in tyme of dystres ! 

Every-man. 
Good-Dedes, I pray you, helpe me in this nede, 
Or elles I am for ever dampned in dede. 

Good Dedes calls in Knowledge to help 
him to make his reckoning ; and Knowledge 



takes him lovingly to that holy man Con- 
fession ; and Confession gives him a precious 
jewel called Penance, in the form of a 
scourge. 

When with the scourge of Penance man doth hym bynde, 
The oyl of forgyvenes than shall he fynde, — 
Now may you make your rekenynge sure. 

Every-man. 
In the name of the holy Trynyte, 
My body sore punyshed shall be. 
Take this, Body, for the synne of the flesshe ! 
Also thou delytest to go gay and fresshe, 
And in the way of dampnacyon thou dyd me brynge, 
Therefore suffre now strokes of punysshynge. 
Now of penaunce I wyll wede the water clere 
To save me from Purgatory, that sharpe fyre. 

Good Dedes. 
I thanke God, now I can walke and go ; 
And am delyvered of my sykenesse and wo, 
Therfore with Every-man I wyll go and not spare ; 
His good workes I wyll helpe hym to declare. 

Knowlege. 
Now Every-man, be mery and glad, 
Your Good Dedes cometh now, ye may not be sad. 
Now is your Good Dedes hole and sounde, 
Goynge upryght upon the grounde. 

Every-man. 
My herte is lyght, and shall be evermore, 
Nor wyll I smyte faster than I dyde before. 

Knowledge then makes him put on the 
garment of sorrow called contrition, and 
makes him call for his friends Discretion, 
Strength, and Beauty, to help him on his 
pilgrimage, and his Five Wits to counsel 
him. They come at his call, and promise 
faithfully to help him. 

Strength. 
I Strength wyll by you stande in dystres, 
Though thou wolde in batayle fyght on the grownde. 

Fyve-Wyttes. 
And thought it were thrugh the world rounde, 
We wyll not depart for swete ne soure. 

Beaute. 
No more wyll I unto dethes howre, 
Watsoever therof befall. 

He makes his testament, and gives half 
his goods in charity. Discretion and Know- 
ledge send him to receive the holy sacrament 
and extreme unction, and Five-Wits expa- 
tiates upon the authority of the Priesthood. 
To the Priest he says, 

God hath — more power given 
Than to ony Aungell that is in Heven, 
With five wordes he may consecrate 
Goddes body in flesshe and blode to make, 
And handeleth his maker bytwene his handes. 
The preest byndeth and unbyndeth all bandes 

Both in erthe and in heven 

No remedy we fynde under God 
But all-onely preesthode. 



616 



THE DOCTOR. 



— God gave Preest that dygnyte, 

And setteth them in his stede among us to be : 

Thus they be above Aungelles in degree. 

Having received his viaticum Every-man 
sets out upon this mortal journey : his com- 
rades renew their protestations of remaining 
with him ; till when he grows faint on the 
way, and his limbs fail, — they fail him also. 

Every-man. 
— into this cave must I crepe, 
And tourne to erth, and there to slepe. 

What, says Beauty ; into this Grave ? 

— adewe by saynt Johan, 
I take my tappe in my lappe and am gone. 

Strength in like manner forsakes him ; 
and Discretion says that " when Strength 
goeth before, he follows after ever more." 
And Fyve-Wyttes, whom he took for his 
best friend, bid him, " farewell and then an 

end." 

Every-man. 

Jesu, helpe ! all hath forsaken me ! 

Good Dedes. 
Nay, Every-man, I wyll byde with the, 

1 wyll not forsake the in dede ; 

Thou shalt fynde me a good frende at nede. 

Knowledge also abides him till the last ; 
the song of the Angel who receives his 
spirit is heard, and a Doctour concludes the 
piece with an application to the audience. 

This morall men may have in mynde, 

— forsake Pryde for he deceyveth you in the ende, 

And remembre Beaute, Fyve-Wyttes, Strength and Dys- 

crecyon, 
They all at the last do Every-man forsake, 
Save his Good Dedes, these doth he take : 
But be ware, an they be small, 
Before God he hath no helpe at all ! * 



CHAPTER CCXXVIT. 

SYSTEM OF PROGRESSION MARRED ONLY BY 
MAN'S INTERFERENCE. THE DOCTOR 

SPEAKS SERIOUSLY AND HUMANELY, AND 
QUOTES JUVENAL. 

Montenegro. How now, are thy arrows feathered ? 

Velasco. Well enough for roving. 

Montenegro. Shoot home then. Shirley. 

It is only when Man interferes, that the 

system of progression, which the All Father 

has established throughout the living and 

sentient world, is interrupted, and Man, our 



* The reader who may wish to see Every-man com- 
plete will find it in the first volume of Thomas Hawkins' 
" Origin of the English Drama," &c. 



Philosopher would sorrowfully observe, has 
interrupted it, not only for himself, but for 
such of the inferior creatures as are under 
his control. He has degraded the instincts 
of some, and in others, perhaps it may not 
be too much to say that he has corrupted 
that moral sense of which even the brute 
creation partakes in its degree ; and has 
inoculated them with his own vices. Thus 
the decoy duck is made a traitor to her own 
species, and so are all those smaller birds 
which the bird-catcher trains to assist him 
in ensnaring others. The Rat, who is one 
of the bravest of created things, is in like 
manner rendered a villain. 

Upon hunting and hawking the Doctor 
laid little stress, because both dogs and 
falcons in their natural state would have 
hunted and fowled on their own account. 
These sports, according to his " poor way of 
thinking," tended to deprave not so much 
the animals, as the human beings employed 
in them ; for when they ceased to be ne- 
cessary for the support or protection of man, 
they became culpable. But to train dogs 
for war, and flesh them upon living pri- 
soners, as the Spaniards did, (and as, long 
since the decease of my venerable friend, 
Buonaparte's officers did in St. Domingo,) 
— to make horses, gentle and harmless as 
well as noble in their disposition as they are, 
take a part in our senseless political con- 
tentions, charge a body of men, and trample 
over their broken limbs and palpitating 
bodies, — to convert the Elephant, whom 
Pope, he said, had wronged by only calling 
him half-reasoning, the mild, the thoughtful, 
the magnanimous Elephant, into a wilful, 
and deliberate, and cruel executioner, — these, 
he thought, were acts of high treason against 
humanity, and of impiety against universal 
nature. Grievous indeed it is, he said, to 
know that the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain ; but more grievous to 
consider that man, who by his original sin 
was the guilty cause of their general de- 
pravation, should continue by repeated sins to 
aggravate it ; — to which he added that the 
lines of the Roman Satirist, though not exactly 
true, were yet humiliating and instructive. 



THE DOCTOR. 



617 



Mundi 
Principio indulsit communis conditor Mis 
Taritum animas, nobis animum quoque, mutuus ut nos 
Adfectus petere auxilium et prcestare juberet, 
D/spersos trahere in populum, migrare vetusto 
De nernore, et proavis habitatas linquere siluas ; 
JEdificare domos, Laribus conjungere nostris 
Tectum aliud, tutos vicino limine somnos 
Ut conlata daret fiducia ; protegere armis 
Labsum, aut ingenti nutantem vulnere civem, 
Communi dare signa tuba, defendier isdem 
Turribus, atque una portarum clave teneri. 
Sed jam serpentum major concordia ; parcit 
Cognatis ynaculis similisfera ; quando leoni 
Fortior eripuit vitam leo ? quo nemore unquam 
Expiravit aper majoris dentibus aprif 
Indica tigris agit rabidd cum f/gride pacem 
Perpetuam : scevis inter se convenit ursis. 
Ast homini ferrum lethale incude nefanda 
Produxisse parum est ; quum rastra et sarcula tantum 
Adsueti coquere, et marris ac vomere lassi 
Nesciermt primi gladios excudere fabri. 
Adspicimus populos, quorum non sufficit ira 
Occidisse aliquem : sed pectora, brachia, vultum 
Crediderint genus esse cibi. Quid diceret ergo 
Vel quo nonfugerit, si nunc hcec monstra videret 
Pythagoras : cunctis animalibus abstinuit qui 
Tanquam nomine, et ventri indulsit non omne legumen* 



CHAPTER CCXXVIII. 

RATS. PLAN OF THE LAUREATE SOUTHEY FOR 
LESSENING THEIR NUMBER. THE DOCTOR'S 
HUMANITY IN REFUSING TO SELL POISON 
TO KILL VERMIN, AFTER THE EXAMPLE 
OF PETER HOPKINS HIS MASTER. POLI- 
TICAL RATS NOT ALLUDED TO. RECIPE 
FOR KILLING RATS. 

I know that nothing can be so innocently writ, or 
carried, but may be made obnoxious to construction ; 
marry, whilst I bear mine innocence about me, I fear 
it not. Ben Jonson. 

The Laureate Southey proposed some years 
ago in one of his numerous and multifarious 

* The reader may call to mind the commencement of 
the Third Canto of Rokeby. 

The hunting tribes of air and earth 
Respect the brethren of their birth ; 
Nature, who loves the claim of kind, 
Less cruel, chase to each assigned. 
The falcon, poised on soaring wing, 
Watches the wild-duck bj the spring; 
The slow-hound wakes the fox's lair ; 
The greyhound presses on the hare ; 
The eagle pounces on the lamb ; 
The wolf devours the fleecy dam : 
Even tiger fell and sullen bear 
Their likeness and their lineage spare. 
Man, only, mars kind Nature's plan 
And turns the fierce pursuit on man ; 
Plying war's desultory trade, 
Incursion, flight, and ambuscade, 
Since Nimrod, Cush's mighty son, 
At first the bloody game begun. 



books, three methods for lessening the 
number of rats, one of which was to in- 
oculate some of these creatures with the 
small-pox or any other infectious disease, 
and turn them loose. Experiments, he said, 
should first be made, lest the disease should 
assume in them so new a form, as to be 
capable of being returned to us with in- 
terest. If it succeeded, man has means in 
his hand which would thin the hyenas, 
wolves, jackals and all gregarious beasts of 
prey. 

Considering the direction which the March 
of his Intellect has long been taking, it 
would surprise me greatly if the Laureate 
were now to recommend or justify any such 
plan. For setting aside the contemplated 
possibility of physical danger, there are 
moral and religious considerations which 
ought to deter us from making use of any 
such means, even for an allowable end. 

Dr. Dove, like his master and benefactor 
Peter Hopkins before him, never would sell 
poison for destroying vermin. Hopkins 
came to that resolution in consequence of 
having been called as a witness upon a trial 
for poisoning at York. The arsenic had not 
been bought at his shop ; but to prevent the 
possibility of being innocently instrumental 
to the commission of such a crime, he made 
it from that time a rule for himself, irre- 
vocable as the laws of the Medes and Per- 
sians, that to no person whatever, on any 
account, would he supply ingredients which 
by carelessness or even by unavoidable ac- 
cident might be so fatally applied. 

To this rule his pupil and successor, our 
Doctor, religiously adhered. And when 
any one not acquainted with the rule of the 
shop, came there on such an errand, he 
used always, if he was on the spot, to re- 
commend other methods, adapting his argu- 
ments to what he knew of the person's 
character, or judged of it from his | hv- 
siognomy. To an ill-conditioned and ill- 
looking applicant he simply recommended 
certain ways of entrapping rats as more 
convenient, and more likely to prove effi- 
cacious : but to those of whom he enter- 
tained a more favourable opinion, he would 



618 



THE DOCTOR. 



hint at the cruelty of using poison, ob- 
serving that though we exercised a clear 
natural right in destroying noxious crea- 
tures, we were not without sin if in so 
doing we inflicted upon them any suffering 
more than what must needs accompany a 
violent death. 

Some good-natured reader who is pestered 
with rats in his house., his warehouses, or his 
barns, will perhaps, when he comes to this 
part of our book, wish to be informed in 
what manner our Zoophilist would have 
advised him to rid himself of these vermin. 

There are two things to be considered 
here, first how to catch rats, and secondly, 
how to destroy them when caught. And 
the first of these questions is a delicate one, 
when a greater catch has recently been 
made than any that was ever heard of 
before, except in the famous adventure of 
the Pied Piper at Hammel. Jack Robinson 
had some reputation in his day for his pro- 
fessional talents in this line, but he was a 
bungler in comparison with Mr. Peel. 

The second belongs to a science which 
Jeremy the thrice illustrious Bentham calls 
Phthisozoics, or the art of destruction ap- 
plied to noxious animals, a science which 
the said Jeremy proposes should form part 
of the course of studies in his Chrestomathic 
school. There are no other animals in this 
country who do so much mischief now as the 
disciples of Jeremy himself. 

But leaving this pestilent set, as one of 
the plagues with which Great Britain is 
afflicted for its sins ; and intending no 
offence to any particular Bishop, Peer, 
Baronet, Peer-expectant, or public man 
whatever, and protesting against any ap- 
plication of what may here be said to any 
person who is, has been, or may be included 
under any of the forementioned denomina- 
tions, I shall satisfy the good-natured 
reader's desires, and inform him in what 
manner our Philosopher and Zoophilist, 
(philanthropist is a word which would 
poorly express the extent of his benevolence,) 
advised those who consulted him as to the 
best manner of taking and destroying rats. 
Protesting therefore once more, as is need- 



ful in these ticklish times, that I am speaking 
not of the Pro-papist or Anti-Hanoverian 
r"at, which is a new species of the Parliament 
rat, but of the old Norway or Hanoverian 
one, which in the last century effected the 
conquest of our island by extirpating the 
original British breed, I inform the humane 
reader that the Doctor recommended 
nothing more than the common rat-catcher's 
receipt, which is to lure them into a cage by 
oil of carraways, or of rhodium, and that 
when entrapped, the speediest and easiest 
death which can be inflicted is by sinking 
the cage in water. 

Here Mr. Slenderwit, critic in ordinary 
to an established journal, wherein he is 
licensed to sink, burn and destroy any book 
in which his publisher has not a particular 
interest, turns down the corners of his 
mouth in contemptuous admiration, and 
calling to mind the anecdote of Grainger's 
invocation repeats in a tone of the softest 
self-complacence, " Now Muse, let's sing of 
Rats ! " And Mr. Slapdash, who holds a 
similar appointment in a rival periodical, 
slaps his thigh in exultation upon finding so 
good an opportunity for a stroke at the 
anonymous author. But let the one simper 
in accompaniment to the other's snarl. I 
shall say out my say in disregard of both. 
Ay, Gentlemen, 

For if a Humble Bee should kill a Whale 
With the butt end of the Antarctic pole, 
'Tis nothing to the mark at which we aim. 



CHAPTER CCXXIX. 

RATS LIKE LEARNED MEN LIABLE TO BE 
LED BY THE NOSE. THE ATTENDANT UPON 
THE STEPS OF MAN, AND A SORT OF 
INSEPARABLE ACCIDENT. SEIGNEUR DE 
HUMESESNE AND PANTAGRUEL. 

Where my pen hath offended, 

I pray you it may be amended 

By discrete consideration 

Of your wise reformation : 

I have not offended, I trust, 

If it be sadly discust. Skelton. 

Marvel not, reader, that rats, though they 
are among the most sagacious of all animals, 



THE DOCTOR. 



619 



should be led by the nose. It has been the 
fete of many great men. many learned men. 
most weak ones, and some cunning ones. 

When we regard the comparative sag 
of animals, it should always be remembered 
that every creature, from the lowest point 
of sentient existence upward, till we arrive 
at man. is endued with sagacity sufficient to 
provide for its own well-being, and for the 
continuance of its kind. They are gifted 
with greater endowments as they ascend in 
the scale of being, and those who lead a life 
of danger, and at the same time of en- 
terprise, have their faculties improved by 
practice, take lessons from experience, and 
draw rational conclusions upon matters 
within then- sphere of intellect and of 
action, more sagaciously than nine tenths oi 
the human race can do. 

Now no other animal is placed in circum- 
stances which tend so continually to sharpen 
its wits — (were I writing to the learned 
only, I should perhaps say to senate its 
faculties, or to develope its intellectual 
powers.) — as the rat, nor does any other ap- 
pear to be of a more improvable nature. 
He is of a most intelligent family, being 
related to the Beaver. And in civilised 
countries he is not a wild creature, for he 
follows the progress of civilisation, and 
adapts his own habits of life to it. so as to 
avail himself of its benefits. 

The "pampered Goose" who in Pope's 
Essay retorts upon man, and says that man 
was made for the use of Geese, must have 
been forgetful of plueking-tiine. as well as 
ignorant of the rites that are celebrated in 
all old-fashioned families on St. Michael's 
day. But the Bat might with more ap- 
parent reason support such an assertion : he 
is not mistaken in thinking than corn-stacks 
are as much for his use as for the farmer's ; 
that barns and granaries are his winter 
magazines : that the Miller is his acting 
partner, the Cheesemonger his purveyor, 
and the Storekeeper his steward. He places 
himself in relation with man. not as his de- 
pendent like the dog, nor like the cat as his 
ally, nor like the sheep as his property, nor 
like the ox as his servant, nor like horse and 



ass as his slaves, nor like poultry who are to 
"come and be killed" when Mrs. Bond 
invites them : but as his enemy, a bold 
borderer, a Johnnie Armstrong or Bob Boy. 
who acknowledge no right of property in 
others, and live by spoil. 

Wheresoever man goes, Bat follows, or 
accompanies him. Town or country are 
equally agreeable to him. He enters upon 
your house as a tenant-at-will, (his own, not 
yours.) works out for himself a covered way 
in your walls, ascends by it from one story 
to another, and leaving you the larger apart- 
ments, takes possession of the space between 
floor and ceiling, as an entresol for himself. 
There he has his parties, and his revels, and 
his gallopades, (merry ones they are,) when 
you would be asleep, if it were not for the 
spirit with which the youth and belles of 
Bat -land keep up the ball over your head. 
And you are more fortunate than most of 
your neighbours, if he does not prepare for 
himself a mausoleum behind your chimney- 
piece or under your hearth-stone*, retire 
into it when he is about to die, and very 
soon afford you full proof that though he 
may have lived like a hermit, his relics are 
not in the odour of sanctity. You have 
then the additional comfort of knowing that 
the spot so appropriated will thenceforth be 
used either as a common cemetery, or a 
family vault. In this respect, as in many 
others, nearer approaches are made to us by 
inferior creatures than are dreamt ot^ in our 
philosophy. 

The adventurous merchant ships a cargo 
for some distant port. Bat goes with it. 
Great Britain plants a colony in Botany 
Ray, Van Diemen's Land, or at the Swan 
River, Bat takes the opportunity for colo- 
nising also. Ships are sent out upon a 
voyage of discovery. Bat emVarks as a 
volunteer, lie doubled the Stormy Cape 
with Diaz, arrived at Malabar in the first 
European vessel with Gama, discovered the 



* Southey alludes here to an incident which occurred 
in his own house. On taking up the hearth-stone in the 
dining-room at Keswick, it was found that the mice bad 
made underneath it a Campo Santo.— ■ depository tor 
their dead. 



620 



THE DOCTOR. 



new world with Columbus and took pos- 
session of it at the same time, and circum- 
navigated the globe with Magellan, and with 
Drake, and with Cook. 

After all, the Seigneur de Humesesne, 
whatever were the merits of that great case 
which he pleaded before Pantagruel at 
Paris, had reasonable grounds for his asser- 
tion when he said, Monsieur et Messieurs, si 
Viniquite des hommes estoit aussi facilement 
vue enjugement categorique, comme on connoit 
mousches en lait, le monde quatre bcevfs ne 
seroit tant mange de Bats comme il est. 

The Doctor thought there was no crea- 
ture to which you could trace back so many 
persons in civilised society by the indica- 
tions which they afforded of habits acquired 
in their prenatal professional education. In 
what other vehicle, during its ascent, could 
the Archeus of the Sailor have acquired the 
innate courage, the constant presence of 
mind, and the inexhaustible resources, which 
characterise a true seaman ? Through this 
link too, on his progress towards humanity, 
the good soldier has passed, who is brave, 
alert and vigilant, cautious never to give his 
enemy an opportunity of advantage, and 
watchful to lose the occasion that presents 
itself. From the Rat our Philosopher traced 
the engineer, the miner, the lawyer, the 
thief, and the thief-taker, — that is, ge- 
nerally speaking : some of these might have 
pre-existed in the same state as moles or 
ferrets ; but those who excelled in their 
respective professions had most probably 
been trained as rats. 

The judicious reader will do me the 
justice to observe that as I am only faith- 
fully representing the opinions and fancies 
of my venerable friend, I add neither 
M. P., Dean, Bishop nor Peer to the list, 
nor any of those public men who are known 
to hanker after candle-ends and cheese- 
parings. 

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time ; 

But men may construe things after their fashion, 

Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.* 

It behoves me to refrain more especially 
upon this subject from anything which the 

* Shakspeare. 



malicious might interpret as scandal : for 
the word itself okcivCoXov, the Greek gram- 
marians tell us, and the great Anglo-Latin 
Lexicographist tells me, properly signifies 
that little piece of wood in a mouse-trap or 
pit-fall, which bears up the trap, and being 
touched lets it fall. 



CHAPTER CCXXX. 

DISTINCTION BETWEEN YOUNG ANGELS AND 
YOUNG TAHOOS. FAIRIES, KILLCROPS, AND 
CHANGELINGS. LUTHER'S OPINIONS ON THE 
SUBJECT. HIS COLLOQUIA MENSALIA. DIF- 
FERENCE BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW 
EDITION. 

I think it not impertinent sometimes to relate such 
accidents as may seem no better than mere trifles ; for 
even by trifles are the qualities of great persons as well 
disclosed as by their great actions ; because in matters of 
importance they commonly strain themselves to the ob- 
servance of general commended rules ; in lesser things 
they follow the current of their own natures. 

Sm Walter Raleigh. 

It may easily be inferred from some of the 
Doctor's peculiar opinions, or fancies, as he 
in unaffected humility would call them, that 
though a dear lover of children, his love of 
them was not indiscriminate. He made a 
great distinction between young angels and 
young yahoos, and thought it might very 
early be discovered whether the angel or the 
brute part predominated. 

This is sometimes so strongly marked and 
so soon developed as to excite observation 
even in the most incurious ; and hence the 
well-known superstition concerning Change- 
lings. 

In the heroic ages a divine origin is 
ascribed to such persons as were most re- 
markable for their endowments either of 
body or of mind ; but this may far more 
probably be traced to adulation in the 
poets, than to contemporary belief at any 
time prevailing among the people ; whereas 
the opposite superstition was really believed 
in the middle ages, and traces of it are still 
to be found. 

It is remarkable that the Fairies, who in 



THE DOCTOR. 



621 



the popular belief of this country are never 
represented as malignant upon any other 
occasion, act an evil part in the supposed 
case of Changelings. So it is with the Trolls 
also of our Scandinavian kinsmen, (though 
this race of beings is in worse repute :) the 
children whom they substitute for those 
whom they steal are always a plague to the 
nurse and to the parents. In Germany 
such children were held to be young Devils, 
but whether Mac-Incubi, Mac-Succubi, or 
O'Devils by the whole blood is not clearly 
to be collected from Martin Luther, who is 
the great authority upon this subject. He 
is explicit upon the fact that the Nix or 
Water Fiend increases the population by a 
mixed breed ; but concerning the Killcrops, 
as his countrymen the Saxons call them, 
whom the Devil leaves in exchange, when 
he steals children for purposes best known 
to himself, Luther does not express any 
definite opinion, farther than that they are 
of a devilish nature : how fathered, how 
mothered, the reader is left to conjecture as 
he pleases. 

" Eight years since," said Luther, at 
" Dessaw I did see and touch a changed 
child, which was twelve years of age ; he 
had his eyes and all members like another 
child ; he did nothing but feed, and would 
eat as much as two clowns or threshers were 
able to eat. When one touched it, then it 
cried out. When any evil happened in the 
house, then it laughed, and was joyful ; but 
when all went well, then it cried, and was 
very sad. I told the Prince of Anhalt, that 
if I were Prince of that country, so would 
I venture homicidium thereon, and would 
throw it into the river Moldaw. I admo- 
nished the people dwelling in that place 
devoutly to pray to God to take away the 
Devil ; the same was done accordingly, and 
the second year after the Changeling died. 

" In Saxonia, near unto Halberstad, was 
a man that also had a Killcrop, who sucked 
the mother and five other women dry, and 
besides devoured very much. This man 
was advised that he should in his pilgrimage 
at Halberstad make a promise of the Killcrop 
to the Virgin Mary, and should cause him 



there to be rocked. This advice the man 
followed, and carried the Changeling thither 
in a basket. But going over a river, being 
upon the bridge, another Devil that was 
below in the river called, and said, Killcrop ! 
Killcrop ! Then the child in the basket, 
(which never before spake one word,) 
answered Ho, ho ! The Devil in the water 
asked further, whither art thou going ? The 
child in the basket said, ' I am going towards 
Halberstad to our Loving Mother, to be 
rocked.' The man being much affrighted 
thereat, threw the child with the basket 
over the bridge into the water. Whereupon 
the two Devils flew away together, and 
cried, ho, ho, ha ! tumbling themselves one 
over another and so vanished. 

" Such Changelings and Killcrops," said 
Luther, "supponit Satan in locum verorum 
filiorum ; for the Devil hath this power, 
that he changeth children, and instead 
thereof layeth Devils in the cradles, which 
thrive not, only they feed and suck : but 
such Changelings live not above eighteen or 
nineteen years. It oftentimes falleth out that 
the children of women in child-bed are thus 
changed, and Devils laid in their stead, one 
of which more fouleth itself than ten other 
children do, so that the parents are much 
therewith disquieted ; and the mothers in 
such sort are sucked out, that afterwards 
they are able to give suck no more. Such 
Changelings," said Luther, " are baptized, 
in regard that they cannot be known the 
first year, but are known only by sucking 
the mothers dry." 

Air. Cottle has made this the subject of a 
lively eclogue ; but if that gentleman had 
happened upon the modern edition of 
Luther's Colloquia MensaHa, or Divine 
Discourses at his Table, instead of the old 
one, this pleasant poem would never have 
been written, the account of the Killcrops 
being one of the passages which the modern 
editor thought proper to omit. His omis- 
sions are reprehensible, because no notice is 
given that any such liberty has been taken : 
and indeed a paragraph in the introductory 
life which is prefixed to the edition might 
lead the reader to conclude that it is a 



622 



THE DOCTOR. 



faithful reprint ; that paragraph saying 
there are many things which, for the credit 
of Luther, might as well have been left out, 
and proceeding to say, " but then it must be 
considered that such Discourses must not 
be brought to the test of our present refined 
age ; that all what a man of Luther's name 
and character spoke, particularly at the 
latter part of his life, was thought by his 
friends worth the press, though himself 
meant it only for the recreation of the com- 
pany ; that he altered many opinions in his 
progress from darkness to light ; and that it 
is with a work of this kind, as with the 
publishing of letters which were never in- 
tended for the press ; the Author speaks 
his sentiments more freely, and you are able 
to form a true idea of his character, by 
looking, as it were, into his heart." Never- 
theless there are considerable omissions, and 
as may be supposed of parts which are 
curious, and in a certain sense valuable 
because they are characteristic. But the 
reprint was the speculation of a low pub- 
lisher, put forth in numbers, and intended 
only for a certain class of purchasers, who 
would read the book for edification. The 
work itself deserves farther notice, and that 
notice is the more properly and willingly 
bestowed upon it here, because the original 
edition is one of the few volumes belonging 
to my venerable friend which have passed 
into my possession, and his mark occurs 
frequently in its margin. 

" I will make no long excursion here, but 
a short apology for one that deserved well 
of the reformed Religion. Many of our 
adversaries have aspersed Luther, with ill 
words, but none so violent as our English 
fugitives, because he doth confess it that the 
Devil did encounter him very frequently, 
and familiarly, when he first put pen to 
paper against the corruptions of the Church 
of Rome. In whose behalf I answer : much 
of that which is objected I cannot find in the 
Latin Editions of his works which himself 
corrected, although it appears by the quota- 
tions some such things were in his first 
writings set forth in the Dutch language. 
2. I say no more than he confesseth in- 



genuously of himself in an epistle to Bren- 
tius, his meaning was good, but his words 
came from him very unskilfully, and his 
style was most rough and unsavoury. St. 
Paul says of himself, that he was rudis 
sermone, rude in speech. But Luther was 
not so much idiMrng tq Xoyy, the word 
used in Saint Paul, as aypoiicog, after his 
Dutch Monastical breeding, and his own hot 
freedom. By nature he had a boisterous 
clownish expression ; but for the most part 
very good jewels of doctrine in the dung- 
hills of his language. 3. If the Devil did 
employ himself to delude and vex that 
heroical servant of God, who took such a 
task upon him, being a simple Monk, to 
inveigh against errors and superstitions 
which had so long prevailed, why should it 
seem strange to any man ? Ribadaneira 
sticks it among the praises of his founder 
Lgnatius Loiola, that the Devil did declaim 
and cry out against him, (believe it every one 
of you at your leisure,) and why might not 
the Devil draw near to vex Luther, as well 
as roar out a great way off against Loiola ? 
I have digrest a little with your patience, to 
make Luther's case appear to be no out- 
rageous thing, that weak ones may not be 
offended when they hear such stuff objected 
out of Parsons, or Barclay, or Walsingham, 
or out of Bellarmine himself. If Beelzebub 
was busy with the Master, what will he be 
with the Servants ? When Christ did begin 
to lay the first corner stone of the Gospel, 
then he walked into the wilderness to be 
tempted of the Devil.''' * 



Hacket s Sermons. 



THE DOCTOR. 



623 



CHAPTER CCXXXI. 

QUESTION AS TO WHETHER BOOKS UNDER 
THE TERMINATION OF " ANA " HAVE BEEN 
SERVICEABLE OR INJURIOUS TO LITERA- 
TURE CONSIDERED IN CONNECTION WITH 

luther's table talk, history or the 

EARLY ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THAT 
BOOK, OF ITS WONDERFUL PRESERVATION, 
AND OF THE MARVELLOUS AND UNIM- 
PEACHABLE VERACITY OF CAPTAIN HENRY 
BELL. 

Prophecies, predictions, Or where they abide, 
Stories and fictions, On this or that side, 

Allegories, rhymes, Or under the mid line 

And serious pastimes Of the Holland sheets fine, 

For all manner men, Or in the tropics fair 

Without regard when, Of sunshine and clear air, 
Or under the pole 
Of chimney and sea coal : 
Read they that list ; understand they that can ; 
Verbum satis est to a wise man. 

Book of Riddles. 

Luther's Table Talk is probably the earliest 
of that class of books, which, under the ter- 
mination of ana, became frequent in the two 
succeeding centuries, and of which it may 
be questioned whether they have been more 
serviceable or injurious to literature. For 
though they have preserved much that is 
valuable, and that otherwise might probably 
have been lost, on the other hand they have 
introduced into literary history not a little 
that is either false, or of suspicious authority; 
some of their contents have been obtained 
by breach of confidence ; many sayings are 
ascribed in them to persons by whom they 
were never uttered, and many things have 
been fabricated for them. 

The Collection concerning Luther bears 
this title in the English translation : " Doc- 
toris Martini Lutheri Colloquia Mensalia : 
or, Dr. Martin Luther's Divine Discourses 
at his Table, &c, which in his lifetime he 
held with divers learned men, (such as were 
Philip Melancthon, Casparus Cruciger, 
Justus Jonas, Paulus Eberus, Vitus Die- 
tericus, Joannes Bugenhagen, Joannes For- 
sterus, and others :) containing Questions 
and Answers touching Religion, and other 
main Points of Doctrine ; as also many 
notable Histories, and all sorts of Learning, 



Comforts, Advices, Prophecies, Admonitions, 
Directions and Instructions. Collected first 
together by Dr. Antonius Lauterbach, and 
afterwards disposed into certain Common- 
places by John Aurifaber, Doctor in Di- 
vinity. Translated out of the High German 
into the English tongue, by Captain Henry 
Bell. 

John vi. 12. Gather up the fragments that 

nothing be lost. 
1 Cor. x. 31. Whether therefore ye eat 
or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to 
the Glory of God. 
Tertull. Apologet. cap. 39. The primitive 
Christians ate and drank to satisfy 
nature, and discoursed at their Tables 
of the Holy Scriptures, or otherwise, as 
became those that knew God did hear 
them, ut non tarn ccenam camaverint, 
quam disciplinam. 
Ancient Writers, Councils, and our Uni- 
versity College Statutes require sacra 
ad mensam. 
Luther in Gen. 2. Sermones vera sunt 

condimenta ciborum. 
Melchior Adamus in Vita Lutheri. Inter 
prandendum et ccenandum non rarb con- 
dones aliis dictavit. 
London, Printed by William Du Gard, 
dwelling in Suffolk-lane, near London-stone, 
1652." 

The original Collection was first published 
three-and- thirty years after Luther's death, 
consequently not till most of those persons 
from whose reminiscences it professes to be 
compiled had passed away. The book there- 
fore is far from carrying with it any such 
stamp of authenticity as Boswell's Life of 
Johnson, which in that respect, as well as 
for its intrinsic worth, is the Ana of all Anas. 
But though it may have been undertaken 
upon book-making motives, there seems no 
reason to suppose that the task was not per- 
formed faithfully by the Doctors Clear- 
stream and Goldsmith, according to their 
judgement, and that much which had lightly 
or carelessly fallen from such a man as 
Luther was likely to be carefully preserved, 
and come into their hands. Many parts 
indeed authenticate themselves, bearing so 



624 



THE DOCTOR. 



strong a likeness that no one can hesitate at 
filiating them upon the ipsissimus Luther. 
The editor of the modern English edition, 
John Gottlieb Burckhardt, D. D., who was 
Minister of the German Lutheran Congre- 
gation in the Savoy, says, " the Book made 
a great noise at its first appearance in 1569. 
Some indeed have called its authenticity in 
question ; but there is no reason to doubt of 
the testimony of Dr. John Aurifaber ; and 
indeed the full character of Luther's free 
manner of speaking and thinking is seen 
almost in every line. The same manly, open, 
bold and generous spirit breathes through 
the whole, as is felt in reading the composi- 
tions which he published himself in his life- 
time. There is a pleasing variety of matters 
contained in these discourses, and many 
fundamental truths are proposed in a fa- 
miliar, careless dress, and in Luther's own 
witty, acute manner ; for which reason it is 
as much entertaining to popular capacities 
as to men of genius. Many good Christians 
have found it to be of great benefit for 
establishing their souls in the knowledge 
and practice of truth, and of the good old 
way ; and since many weeds grow up from 
time to time in the Church, this book handed 
down to posterity, will be a standing test of 
sound doctrines, which our forefathers be- 
lieved, and of such wise principles on which 
they acted at, and after the Reformation." 
On the other hand the book afforded as 
much gratification to the enemies of Luther, 
as to his admirers. Bayle after noticing 
some of the monstrous calumnies with which 
the Papists assailed his memory, proceeds to 
say, La plupart de ces medisances sont 
fondees sur quelques paroles d'un certain livre 
pullie par les amis de Luther, ausquelles on 
donne un sens tres-malin, et fort eloigne de la 
pensee de ce Ministre. Ce nest pas quHl ne 
faille convenir quit y eut une tres-grande 
imprudence a publier une telle compilation. 
Ce fut Veffet d'un zele inconsidere, ou plutot 
d'une preoccupation excessive, qui empechoit 
de conoitre les defauts de ce grand homme. 
In like manner Seckendorf, whom Bayle 
quotes, says it was compiled with little 
prudence, and incautiously published, but 



upon its authenticity, (as far as any such 
collection can be deemed authentic,) he casts 
no suspicion. 

Something worse than want of prudence 
may be suspected in those who set forth the 
English translation. The translator in- 
troduced it by "a Narrative of the mira- 
culous preserving" of the book, and "how 
by God's Providence it was discovered lying 
under the ground where it had lain hid 
fifty-two years : " " I, Capt. Henry Bell," 
he says, " do hereby declare both to the 
present age and also to posterity, that being 
employed beyond the seas in state affairs 
divers years together, both by King James, 
and also by the late King Charles, in Ger- 
many I did hear and understand in all 
places, great bewailing and lamentation 
made, by reason of the destroying or burn- 
ing of above fourscore thousand of Martin 
Luther's books, entituled his last Divine 
Discourses. For after such time as God 
stirred up the spirit of Martin Luther to 
detect the corruptions and abuses of Popery, 
and to preach Christ, and clearly to set forth 
the simplicity of the Gospel, many Kings, 
Princes and States, Imperial Cities, and 
Hanse-Towns, fell from the Popish Religion, 
and became Protestants as their posterities 
still are, and remain to this very day. And 
for the further advancement of the great 
work of Reformation then begun, the fore- 
said Princes and the rest did then order, 
that the said -Divine Discourses of Luther 
should forthwith be printed, and that every 
Parish should have and receive one of the 
foresaid printed Books into every Church 
throughout all their principalities and domi- 
nions, to be chained up, for the common 
people to read therein. Upon which the 
Reformation was wonderfully promoted and 
increased, and spread both here in England 
and other countries beside. But afterwards 
it so fell out, that the Pope then living, viz. 
Gregory XIII., understanding what great 
hurt and prejudice he and his popish re- 
ligion had already received by reason of the 
said Luther's Divine Discourses ; and also 
fearing that the same might bring farther 
contempt and mischief upon himself, and 



THE DOCTOR. 



625 



upon the popish Church, he therefore, to 
prevent the same, did fiercely stir up and 
instigate the Emperor then in being, viz. 
Rudolphus II., to make an edict through 
the whole empire, that all the foresaid 
printed books should be burnt, and also that 
it should be Death for any person to have 
or keep a copy thereof, but also to burn 
the same : which edict was speedily put in 
execution accordingly, in so much that not 
one of all the said printed books, not so 
much as any one copy of the same, could be 
found out, nor heard of in any place." 

Upon this it is to be observed that in the 
popish states of Germany such an edict was 
not required, and that in the Protestant 
ones it could not be enforced. There is 
therefore as little foundation for the state- 
ment, as for the assertion introduced in it 
that the Reformation was promoted in 
England by the publication of this book in 
German. The Book appears not to have 
been common, for Bayle had never seen it ; 
but this was because few editions were 
printed, not because many copies were des- 
troyed. The reader, however, will judge by 
what follows of the degree of credit which 
may be given to any statement of Capt. 
Henry Bell's. 

" Yet it pleased God," the veracious 
Captain proceeds, "that anno 1626 a German 
Gentleman, named Casparus Van Sparr, 
(with whom, in the time of my staying 
in Germany about King James's business, 
I became very familiarly known and ac- 
quainted,) having occasion to build upon 
the old foundation of an house wherein his 
grandfather dwelt at that time when the 
said edict was published in Germany for the 
burning of the foresaid books, and digging- 
deep into the ground under the said old 
foundation, one of the said original printed 
books was there happily found, lying in a 
deep obscure hole, being wrapt in a strong 
linen cloth, which was waxed all over with 
bees-wax both within and without, whereby 
the book was preserved fair without any 
blemish. And at the same time Ferdi- 
nandus II. being Emperor in Germany, who 
was a severe enemy and persecutor of the 



Protestant religion, the foresaid Gentleman 
and grandchild to him that had hidden the 
said Book in that obscure hole, fearing that 
if the said Emperor should get knowledge 
that one of the said Books was yet forth- 
coming and in his custody, thereby not only 
himself might be brought into trouble, but 
also the Book in danger to be destroyed, as 
all the rest were so long before ; and also 
calling me to mind, and knowing that I had 
the High Dutch tongue very perfect, did 
send the said original Book over hither into 
England, unto me ; and therewith did write 
unto me a letter, wherein he related the 
passages of the preserving and finding out 
of the said Book. And also he earnestly 
moved me in his letter, that for the ad- 
vancement of God's glory, and of Christ's 
Church, I would take the pains to translate 
the said Book, to the end that that most 
excellent Divine Work of Luther might be 
brought again to light ! 

" Whereupon I took the said Book before 
me, and many times began to translate the 
same, but always I was hindered therein, 
being called upon about other business ; 
insomuch that by no possible means I could 
remain by that work. Then about six weeks 
after I had received the said Book, it fell 
out, that I being in bed with my Wife, one 
night between twelve and one of the clock, 
she being asleep but myself yet awake, there 
appeared unto me an Antient Man, standing 
at my bed-side, arrayed all in white, having 
a long and broad white beard, hanging down 
to his girdle-stead ; who, taking me by my 
right ear, spake these words following unto 
me. Sirrah ! Will not you take time to 
translate that Book which is sent unto you out 
of Germany ? I will shortly provide for 
you both place and time to do it! And then 
he vanished away out of my sight. Where- 
upon being much thereby affrighted, I fell 
into an extreme sweat, insomuch that my 
Wife awaking, and finding me all over wet, 
she asked me what I ailed ; I told her what 
I had seen and heard ; but I never did heed 
nor regard visions, nor dreams. And so the 
same fell soon out of my mind. 

" Then, about a fortnight after I had seen 



626 



THE DOCTOR. 



that Vision, I went to Whitehall to hear the 
Sermon ; after which ended, I returned to 
my lodging, which was then in King Street 
at Westminster, and sitting down to dinner 
with my Wife, two Messengers were sent 
from the whole Council-Board, with a war- 
rant to carry me to the Keeper of the Gate 
House, Westminster, there to be safely 
kept, until further order from the Lords of 
the Council ; which was done without show- 
ing me any cause at all wherefore I was 
committed. Upon which said warrant I 
was kept there ten whole years close pri- 
soner ; where I spent five years thereof 
about the translating of the said Book : in- 
somuch as I found the words very true 
which the old man in the foresaid Vision 
did say unto me, ' / i&ill shortly provide for 
you both place and time to translate it.' " 



CHAPTER CCXXXII. 

THE DOCTOR'S FAMILY FEELING. 

It behoves the high 
For their own sakes to do things worthily. 

Ben Jonson. 

No son .ever regarded the memory of his 
father with more reverential affection than 
this last of the Doves. There never lived a 
man, he said, to whom the lines of Marcus 
Antonius Flaminius, (the sweetest of all 
Latin poets in modern times, or perhaps of 
any age,) could more truly be applied. 

Vixisti, genitor, bene, ac beate, 
Nee pauper, neque dives ; eruditas 
Satis, et satis eloquens ; valente 
Semper corpore, mente sand j amicis 
Jucundus, pietate smgulari. 

" What if he could not with the Heven- 
ninghams of Suffolk count five and twenty 
knights of his family, or tell sixteen knights 
successively with the Tilneys of Norfolk, or 
with the Nauntons shew where his ancestors 
had seven hundred pounds a year before 
the conquest," * he was, and with as much, 
or perhaps more reason, contented with his 



Fuller. 



parentage. Indeed his family feeling was 
so strong, that, if he had been of an illus- 
trious race, pride, he acknowledged, was the 
sin which would most easily have beset him ; 
though on the other hand, to correct this 
tendency, he thought there could be no 
such persuasive preachers as old family por- 
traits, and old monuments in the family 
church. 

He was far, however, from thinking that 
those who are born to all the advantages, as 
they are commonly esteemed, of rank and 
fortune, are better placed for the improve- 
ment of their moral and intellectual nature, 
than those in a lower grade. Fortunatos 
nirnium sua si bona nbrint I he used to say 
of this class, but this is a knowledge that 
they seldom possess ; and it is rare indeed 
to find an instance in which the high privi- 
leges which hereditary wealth conveys are 
understood by the possessors, and rightly 
appreciated and put to their proper use. 
The one, and the two talents are, 

(Oh ! bright occasions of dispensing good 
How seldom used, how little understood ! f) 

in general, more profitably occupied than 
the five \ the five indeed are not often tied 
up in a napkin, but still less often are they 
faithfully employed in the service of that 
Lord from whom they are received in trust, 
and to whom an account of them must be 
rendered. 

" A man of family and estate," said John- 
son, " ought to consider himself as having 
the charge of a district over which he is to 
diffuse civility and happiness." — Are there 
fifty men of family and estate in the Three 
Kingdoms who feel and act as if this were 
their duty ? — Are there five and forty ? — 
Forty?— Thirty? — Twenty?— Or can it 
be said with any probability of belief that 
" peradventure Ten shall be found there ? " 

— in sangue illustre e signorile, 
In uom d' alti parenti al ?nondo naio, 
La villa si raddoppia, e piu si scorge 
Che in color o il cui grado alto non sorge.% 

Here in England stood a village, within 
the memory of man, — no matter where, — 



\ COWPBB. 



t TASSO RlNALDO. 



THE DOCTOR. 



627 



close by the Castle of a noble proprietor, — 
no matter who : 

— ilfiglio 
Del tale, ed il nipote del cotale, 
Nato per madre della tale.* 

It contained about threescore houses, and 
every cottager had ground enough for keep- 
ing one or two cows. The noble proprietor 
looked upon these humble tenements as an 
eye-sore; and one by one as opportunity 
offered, he purchased them, till at length he 
became owner of the whole, one field ex- 
cepted, which belonged to an old Quaker. 
The old man resisted many offers, but at 
last he was induced to exchange it for a 
larger and better piece of land in another 
place. No sooner had this transaction been 
compleated, than the other occupants, who 
were now only tenants at will, received 
notice to quit ; the houses were demolished, 
the inclosures levelled, hearthsteads and 
homesteads, the cottage garden and the 
cottage field disappeared, and the site was 
in part planted, in part thrown into the 
park. The Quaker, who unlike Naboth 
had parted with the inheritance of his 
fathers, was a native of the village ; but he 
knew not how dearly he was attached to it, 
till he saw its demolition : it was his fault, 
he said ; and if he had not exchanged his 
piece of ground, he should never have lived 
to see his native place destroyed. He took 
it deeply to heart ; it preyed upon his mind, 
and he soon lost his senses and died. 

I tell the story as it was related, within 
sight of the spot, by a husbandman who 
knew the place and the circumstances, and 
well remembered that many people used to 
come every morning from the adjacent parts 
to buy milk there, — "a quart of new milk 
for a half-penny, and a quart of old given 
with it." 

Naboth has been named in relating this, 
but the reader will not suppose that I have 
any intention of comparing the great pro- 
prietor to Ahab, — or to William the Con- 
queror. There was nothing unjust in his 
proceedings, nothing iniquitous ; and (though 
there may have been a great want of proper 

* Chiabrera. 



feeling) nothing cruel. I am not aware that 
any hardship was inflicted upon the families 
who were ejected, farther than the incon- 
venience of a removal. He acted as most 
persons in the same circumstances probably 
would have acted, and no doubt he thought 
that his magnificent habitation was greatly 
improved by the demolition of the poor 
dwellings which had neighboured it so 
closely. Farther it may be said in his justi- 
fication, (for which I would leave nothing 
unsaid,) that very possibly the houses had 
not sufficient appearance of neatness and 
comfort to render them agreeable objects, 
that the people may have been in no better 
state of manners and morals than villagers 
commonly are, which is saying that they 
were bad enough ; that the filth of their 
houses was thrown into the road, and that 
their pigs, and their children, who were 
almost as unclean, ran loose there. Add to 
this, if you please, that though they stood 
in fear of their great neighbour, there may 
have been no attachment to him, and little 
feeling of good-will. But I will tell you 
how Dr. Dove would have proceeded if he 
had been the hereditary Lord of that Castle 
and that domain. 

He would have considered that this vil- 
lage was originally placed there for the sake 
of the security which the Castle afforded. 
Times had changed, and with them the rela- 
tive duties of the Peer and of the Peasantry : 
he no longer required their feudal services, 
and they no longer stood in need of his pro- 
tection. The more, therefore, according to 
his " way of thinking," was it to be desired, 
that other relations should be strengthened, 
and the bonds of mutual good-will be more 
closely intertwined. He would have looked 
upon these villagers as neighbours, in whose 
welfare and good conduct he was especially 
interested, and over whom it was in his 
power to exercise a most salutary and bene- 
ficial influence ; and, having this power, he 
would have known that it was his duty so to 
use it. He would have established a school 
in the village, and have allowed no ale- 
house there. He would have taken his do- 
mestics preferably from thence. If there 



628 



THE DOCTOR. 



were a boy who, by his gentle disposition, 
his diligence, and his aptitude for learning, 
gave promise of those qualities which best 
become the clerical profession, he would 
have sent that boy to a grammar-school, 
and afterwards to college, supporting him 
there in part, or wholly, according to the 
parents' means, and placing him on his list 
for preferment, according to his deserts. 

If there were any others who discovered 
a remarkable fitness for any other useful 
calling, in that calling he would have had 
them instructed, and given them his coun- 
tenance and support, as long as they con- 
tinued to deserve it. The Archbishop of 
Braga, Fray Bartolomen dos Martyres, 
added to his establishment a Physician for 
the poor. Our friend would, in like man- 
ner, have fixed a medical practitioner in the 
village, — one as like as he could find to a 
certain Doctor at Doncaster ; and have al- 
lowed him such a fixed stipend as "might 
have made him reasonably contented and 
independent of the little emolument which 
the practice of the place could afford, for he 
would not have wished his services to be 
gratuitous where there was no need. If the 
parish, to which the village belonged, was 
too extensive, or the parochial Minister un- 
willing, or unable, to look carefully after 
this part of his flock, his Domestic Chaplain, 
(for he would not have lived without one,) 
should have taken care of their religious in- 
struction. 

In his own family and his own person he 
would have set his neighbours an example 
of " whatsoever things are honest, whatso- 
ever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatso- 
ever things are of good report." And as 
this* example produced its sure effects, he 
would have left the Amateurs of Agricul- 
ture to vie with each other in their breeds 
of sheep and oxen, and in the costly culti- 
vation of their farms. It would have been, 
not his boast, for he boasted of nothing ; — 
not his pride, for he had none of 

that poor vice which only empty men 
Esteem a virtue — * 



Beaumont and Flktciiek. 



it was out of the root of Christian humility 
that all his virtues grew, — but his consola- 
tion and his delight, to know that nowhere in 
Great Britain was there a neater, a more 
comfortable village than close to his own 
mansion ; nowhere a more orderly, a more 
moral, a more cheerful, or a happier people. 
And if his castle had stood upon an eleva- 
tion commanding as rich a survey as Belvoir 
or Shobden, that village, when he looked 
from his windows, would still have been the 
most delightful object in the prospect. 

I have not mentioned the name of the old 
Quaker in my story ; but I will preserve it 
in these pages, because the story is to his 
honour. It was Joshua Dickson. If Quakers 
have (and certainly they have) the quality 
which is called modest assurance, in a super- 
lative degree, that distinguishes them from 
any other class of men (it is of the men only 
that I speak), they are the only sect, who, as 
a sect, cultivate the sense of conscience. 
This was not a case of conscience, but of 
strong feeling, assuming that character under 
a tendency to madness. 

When Lord Harcourt, about the same 
time, removed the village of Nuneham, an 
old widow, Barbara Wy at by name, earnestly 
intreated that she might be allowed to re- 
main in her old habitation. The request, 
which it would have been most unfeeling to 
refuse, was granted ; she ended her days 
there, and then the cottage was pulled down : 
but a tree, which grew beside it, and which 
she had planted in her youth, is still shown 
on the terrace at Nuneham, and called by 
her name. Near it is placed the following 
Inscription by that amiable man, the Lau- 
reate Whitehead. Like all his serious poems 
it may be read with pleasure and profit, — 
though the affecting circumstance, which 
gives the anecdote its highest interest, is re- 
lated only in a note. 

This Tree was planted by a female hand, 

In the gay dawn of rustic beauty's glow ; 
And fast beside it did her cottage stand, 

When age had clothed the matron's head with snow. 

To her, long used to nature's simple ways, 

This single spot was happiness compleat; 
Her tree could shield her from the noontide blaze, 

And from the tempest screen her little seat. 



THE DOCTOR. 



629 



Here with her Colin oft the faithful maid 
Had led the dance, the envious youths among ; 

Here when his aged bones in earth were laid, 
The patient matron turned her wheel and sung. 

She felt her loss, yet felt it as she ought, 
Nor dared 'gainst Nature's general law exclaim, 

But checkt her tears and to her children taught 
That well-known truth their lot would be the same. 

The Thames before her flowed, his farther shores 
She ne'er explored, contented with her own ; 

And distant Oxford, tho' she saw its towers, 
To her ambition was a world unknown. 

Did dreadful tales the clowns from market bear 
Of kings and tumults and the courtier train, 

She coldly listened with unheeding ear, 
And good Queen Anne, for aught she cared, might reign. 

The sun her day, the seasons marked her year, 
She toiled, she slept, from care, from envy free ; 

For what had she to hope, or what to fear, 
Blest with her cottage, and her favourite Tree. 

Hear this ye Great, whose proud possessions spread 
O'er earth's rich surface to no space confined ! 

Ye learn'd in arts, in men, in manners read, 
Who boast as wide an empire o'er the mind, 

With reverence visit her august domain ; 

To her unlettered memory bow the knee ; 
She found that happiness you seek in vain, 

Blest with a cottage, and a single Tree.* 

Mason would have produced a better in- 
scription upon this subject, in the same 
strain ; Southey in a different one ; Crabbe 
would have treated it with more strength ; 
Bowles with a finer feeling ; so would his 
kinswoman and namesake Caroline, than 
whom no author or authoress has ever writ- 
ten more touchingly, either in prose or verse. 
Wordsworth would have made a picture from 
it worthy of a place in the great Gallery of 
his Recluse. But Whitehead's is a remark- 
able poem, considering that it was produced 
during what has been not unjustly called 
the neap tide of English poetry : and the 
reader who should be less pleased with it 
than offended by its faults, may have cause 
to suspect that his refinement has injured 
his feelings in a greater degree than it has 
improved his taste. 



* The Classical reader will be aware that the Author of 
these lines had Claudian's " Old Man of Verona" in his 
mind's eye, as Claudian had Virgil's " Corycian Old 
Man." — Georg. iv. 127. 



CHAPTER CCXXXHI. 

THE PETTY GERMAN PRINCES EXCELLENT 
PATRONS OF LITERATURE AND LEARNED 
MEN. THE DUKE OF SAXE WEIMAR. QUOTA- 
TION FROM BISHOP HACKET. AN OPINION 
OF THE EXCELLENT MR. BOYLE. A TENET 
OF THE DEAN OF CHALON, PIERRE DE 
ST. JULIEN, AND A VERITABLE PLANTA- 
GENET. 

Ita nati estis, ut bona malaque vestra ad Rempublicam 
pertineant. Tacitus. 

" We have long been accustomed to laugh 
at the pride and poverty of petty German 
Princes," says one of the most sensible and 
right-minded travellers that ever published 
the result of his observations in Germany "j* ; 
" but nothing," he proceeds, " can give a 
higher idea of the respectability which so 
small a people may assume, and the quantity 
of happiness which one of these insignificant 
monarchs may diffuse around him, than the 
example of the little state of Weimar, with 
a prince like the present % Grand Duke at 
its head. The mere pride of sovereignty, 
frequently most prominent where there is 
only the title to justify it, is unknown to 
him; he is the most affable man in his 
dominions, not simply with the condescen- 
sion which any prince can learn to practise 
as a useful quality, but from goodness of 
heart." The whole population of his state 
little if at all exceeds that of Leicestershire; 
his capital is smaller than a third or fourth 
rate country town ; so in fact it scarcely 
deserves the name of a town ; and the in- 
habitants, vain as they are of its well-earned 
reputation as the German Athens, take a 
pride in having it considered merely a large 
village : his revenue is less than that of 
many a British Peer, great Commoner, or 
commercial Millionist. Yet " while the 
treasures of more weighty potentates were 
insufticient to meet the necessities of their 
political relations, his confined revenues 
could give independence and careless leisure 
to the men who were gaining for Germany 



t Russell. 



% A. D. 1822 



630 



THE DOCTOR. 



its intellectual reputation." It is not too 
much to say that for that intellectual re- 
putation, high as it is, and lasting as it will 
be, Germany is little less beholden to the 
Duke of Weimar's well-bestowed patronage, 
than to the genius of Wieland, and Schiller, 
and Goethe. " In these little principalities, 
the same goodness of disposition can work 
with more proportional effect than if it 
swayed the sceptre of an empire ; it comes 
more easily and directly into contact with 
those towards whom it should be directed : 
the artificial world of courtly rank and 
wealth has neither sufficient glare nor body 
to shut out from the prince the more 
chequered world that lies below." 

Alas no Prince either petty or great has 
followed the Duke of Saxe Weimar's ex- 
ample ! " He dwells," says Mr. Downes, 
" like an estated gentleman, surrounded by 
his tenantry." Alas no British Peer, great 
Commoner, or commercial Millionist, has 
given to any portion of his ampler revenues 
a like beneficent direction. 

A good old Bishop* quoting the text "not 
many wise men after the flesh, not many 
mighty, not many noble are called," cautions 
us against distorting the Scripture as if it 
pronounced nothing but confusion to the 
rulers of the earth : " let not the honourable 
person," said he, " hang down his head, as if 
power and wisdom, and noble blood, and 
dignity, were causes of rejection before God : 
no, beloved! Isaiah foretold that Kings 
should be nursing fathers, and Queens 
should be nursing mothers of the Church, 
but it is often seen that the benignity of 
nature and the liberality of fortune are 
made impediments to a better life ; and, 
therefore, Nobles and Princes are more 
frequently threatened with judgment. I ad- 
join moreover that the Scriptures speak more 
flatly against illustrious Magistrates, than 
the common sort ; for if God had left it to 
men, whose tongues are prostituted to flat- 
tery, they had scarce been told that their 
abominable sins would bring damnation." 

When our philosopher considered the 

* Bishop Hacket. 



manner in which large incomes are ex- 
pended, (one way he had opportunities 
enough of observing at Doncaster,) he 
thought that in these times high birth 
brought with it dangers and evils which in 
many or most instances more than counter- 
balanced its advantages. 

That excellent person Mr. Boyle had 
formed a different opinion. To be the son 
of a Peer whose prosperity had found many 
admirers, but few parallels, and not to be 
his eldest son, was a happiness that he used 
to "mention with great expressions of grati- 
tude ; his birth, he said, so suiting his in- 
clinations and designs, that, had he been 
permitted an election, his choice would scarce 
have altered God's assignment. For as on 
the one side, a lower birth would have too 
much exposed him to the inconveniences of 
a mean descent, which are too notorious to 
need specifying ; so on the other side, to a 
person whose humour indisposes him to the 
distracting hurry of the world, the being 
born heir to a great family is but a glittering 
kind of slavery, whilst obliging him to a 
public entangled course of life, to support 
the credit of his family, and tying him from 
satisfying his dearest inclinations, it often 
forces him to build the advantages of his 
house upon the ruins of his own content- 
ment." 

"A man of mean extraction," he con- 
tinues, " is seldom admitted to the privacy 
and secrets of great ones promiscuously, and 
scarce dares pretend to it, for fear of being 
censured saucy, or an intruder. And titular 
greatness is ever an impediment to the know- 
ledge of many retired truths, that cannot 
be attained without familiarity with meaner 
persons, and such other condescensions, as 
fond opinion, in great men, disapproves and 
makes disgraceful." " But he himself," Mr. 
Boyle said, "was born in a condition that 
neither was high enough to prove a tempta- 
tion to laziness, nor low enough to discourage 
him from aspiring." And certainly to a 
person that affected so much an universal 
knowledge, and arbitrary vicissitudes of quiet 
and employments, it could not be unwel- 
come to be of a quality that was a handsome 



THE DOCTOR. 



631 



stirrup to preferment, without an obligation 
to court it, and which might at once both 
protect his higher pretensions from the guilt 
of ambition, and secure his retiredness from 
contempt. 

There would be more and higher advan- 
tages in high birth than Mr. Boyle appre- 
hended, if the Dean of Chalon, Pierre de 
St. Julien, were right when he maintained 
contre V opinion des Philosophes, et Vordi- 
naire des Predicaments, — que la vraye No- 
blesse a sa source du sang, et est substancielle. 

Ces mots Gentilhomme de sang, et darmes, 
de race genereuse, de bonne part, §c, says 
the well-born Dean, who in his title pages 
let us know that he was de la maison de Bal- 
leurre, — sont termes nun de qualite, ny a" habi- 
tude; ains importants substance de vray, 
comme il est Men dit, 

veniunt cum sanguine mores ; 
et aillieurs, 

Qui viret infoliis venit a radicibus humor j 
Sic patrum in natos abeunt cum seminc mores. 

Et comme le sang est le vehicidc, etporteur 
des esprits de vie, esquels est enclose la sub- 
stance de Vame ; aussi est il le comme chariot, 
qui porte et soustient celle substance qui de- 
coide des peres, et des ayeulx, par long ordre 
de generation, et provient aux enfants, qui, 
nez de bonne etgentille semence, sont (confor- 
mement a Vopinion du divin Philosophe Pla- 
ton) rendu tels que leurs progeniteurs, par la 
vertu des esprits enclos en la semence. — Telle- 
ment quon ne peut nyer, que comme dune 
bonne Ayre sortent de bons oyseaux, dun bon 
Haras de bons chevaux, 8rc, aussi il importe 
beaucoup aux hommes destre nez de bons et 
valeureux parents ; voire tant, que les mat 
nez, ennemys de ceste bien naissance, ne sont 
suffisants pour en juger. 

Sir Robert Cotton once met with a man 
driving the plough, who was a true and un- 
doubted Plantagenet. " That worthy Doc- 
tor," (Dr. Hervey) says that worthy Fuller, 
(dignissimus of being so styled himself,) 
11 hath made many converts in physic to his 
seeming paradox, maintaining the circulation 
of blood running round about the body of 
man. Nor is it less true that gentle blood 
fetcheth a circuit in the body of a nation, 



running from Yeomanry, through Gentry 
to Nobility, and so retrograde, returning 
through Gentry to Yeomanry again." 

Plust a Dieu, said Maistre Francois Ra- 
belais, of facetious memory, quun chacun 
saust aussi certainemeid — (as Gargantua that 
is,) — sa genealogie, depuis VArche de Noe, 
jusqu'a cet age ! Je pense que plusieurs sont 
aujourdhui Empereurs, Boys, Dues, Princes 
et Papes en la terre, lesquels sont descendus 
de quelques Porteurs de rogatons et de con- 
strets. Comme au rebours plusieurs sont 
gueux de Vhostiere, souffreteux et miserables, 
lesquels sont descendus de sang et ligne de 
grands Roys et Empereurs ; attends V admi- 
rable transport des Regnes et Empires 

Des Assyriens, es Medes ; 
Des Medes, es Persess 
Des Perses, es Macedoniens ,• 
Des Macedoniens, es Grecs ; 
Des Grecs, es Francois. 

Et pour vous donner a entendre de moy 
qui vous parte, je cuide que suis descendu de 
quelque riche Boy, ou Prince, au temps jadis ; 
car oncques ne vistes homme qui eust plus 
grande affection d'estre Roy ou riche que moy, 
afin de /aire grand chere, pas ne travailler, 
point ne me soucier et bien enrichir mes amis, 
et tous gens de bien et de scavoir. 



CHAPTER CCXXXIY. 

OPINION OF A MODERN DIVINE UPON THE 
WHEREABOUT OF NEWLY-DEPARTED SPI- 
RITS, st. john's burial, one relic only 

OF THAT SAINT, AND WHEREFORE. A TALE 
CONCERNING ABRAHAM, ADAM AND EVE. 

Je sgay qu'il y a plusieurs qui diront que je fais beau- 
coup de petits fats amies, dont jc tn'en passerois bien. 
Ouy,bien pour aucuns, — ?nais mm pour moy. me con- 
tentant de ?n'en renouvcller le souvenance, el en liter 
aulant de plaisir. Bran tome. 

Watts, who came to the odd conclusion in 
his Philosophical Essay, that there may bo 
Spirits which must be said in strict philoso- 
phy to be nowhere, endeavoured to explain 
what he called the ubi or ichereness of those 
spirits which are in a more imaginable situa- 
tion. While man is alive, the soul he thought 



632 



THE DOCTOR. 



might be said to be in his brain, because 
the seat of consciousness seems to be there ; 
but as soon as it is dislodged from that local 
habitation by death, it finds itself at once 
in a heaven or hell of its own, and this 
" without any removal or relation to place, 
or change of distances." The shell is broken, 
the veil is withdrawn ; it is where it was, 
but in a different mode of existence, in the 
pure intellectual, or separate world. " It 
reflects upon its own temper and actions in 
this life, it is conscious of its virtues, or its 
vices," and it has an endless spring of peace 
and joy within, or is tormented with the 
anguish of self-condemnation. 

In his speculations the separation of soul 
from body is total, till their reunion at the 
day of judgement; and this unquestionably 
is the christian belief. The fablers of all 
religions have taken a different view, be- 
cause at all times and in all countries they 
have accommodated their fictions to the 
notions of the people. The grave is with 
them a place of rest, or of suffering. If 
Young had been a Jew, a Mahommedan, or 
a Roman Catholic, he might be understood 
as speaking literally when he says, 

How populous, how vital is the grave. 

St. Augustine had been assured by what 
he considered no light testimpny that St. 
John was not dead, but asleep in his sepul- 
chre, and that the motion of his breast as he 
breathed might be perceived by a gentle 
movement of the earth. The words of our 
Lord after his Resurrection, concerning the 
beloved disciple, "If I will that he tarry 
till I come, what is that to thee," gave scope 
to conjecture concerning the fate of this 
Evangelist, and yet in some degree set 
bounds to that spirit of lying invention 
which in process of time annexed as many 
fables to corrupted Christianity as the Greek 
and Roman poets had engrafted upon their 
heathenism, or the Rabbis upon the Jewish 
faith. " Sinner that I am," said a French 
prelate with demure irony, when a head of 
St. John the Baptist was presented to him 
to kiss in some Church of which it was the 
choicest treasure, — " sinner that I am, this 
is the fourth head of the glorious Baptist 



that I have had the happiness of holding in 
these unworthy hands ! " But while some 
half dozen or half score of these heads were 
produced, because it was certain that the 
Saint had been beheaded, no relic of St. 
John the Evangelist's person, nor of the 
Virgin Mary's, was ever invented. The 
story of the Assumption precluded any 
such invention in the one case, — and in St. 
John's the mysterious uncertainty of his 
fate had the same effect as this received 
tradition. The Benedictines of St. Claude's 
Monastery in the Jura exhibited his own 
manuscript of the Apocalypse, — (the most 
learned of that order in no unlearned age 
believed or affected to believe that it was 
his actual autograph,) — and they consi- 
dered that it was greatly enhanced in value 
by its being the only relic of that Saint in 
existence. 

The fable which St. Augustine seems to 
have believed was either parent or child of 
the story told under the name of Abdias, 
that when the Beloved Disciple had attained 
the postdiluvian age of ninety- seven, our 
Lord appeared to him, said unto him, 
" come unto me, that thou mayest partake 
at my feast with thy brethren," and fixed 
the next Sunday, being Easter, for his re- 
moval from this world. On that Sunday 
accordingly, the Evangelist, after having 
performed service in his own temple at 
Ephesus, and exhorted the people, told some 
of his chosen disciples to take with them 
two mattocks and spade, and accompany 
him therewith. They went to a place near 
the city, where he had been accustomed to 
pray; there he bade them dig a grave, and 
when they would have ceased from the 
work, he bade them dig it still deeper. 
Then taking off all his garments except a 
linen vestment, he spread them in the grave, 
laid himself down upon them, ordered his 
disciples to cover him up, and forthwith fell 
asleep in the Lord. Abdias proceeds no 
farther with the story ; but other ecclesiastic 
romancers add that the evangelist enjoined 
them to open the grave on the day follow- 
ing ; they did so and found nothing but his 
garments, for the Blessed Virgin, in recom- 



THE DOCTOR. 



633 



pence for the filial piety which he had 
manifested towards her in obedience to our 
Lord's injunctions from the cross, had ob- 
tained for him the privilege of an Assump- 
tion like her own. Baronius has no objec- 
tion to believe this; but that St. John 
actually died is, he says, more than certain, 
— certo certius; and that his grave at 
Ephesus was proof of it, for certe non nisi 
mortuorum solent esse sepulchra. 

Yet the Cardinal knew that the historian 
of his Church frequently represented the 
dead as sentient in their graves. The Jews 
have some remarkable legends founded upon 
the same notion. It is written in the book 
of Zohar, say the Rabbis, how when Abra- 
ham had made a covenant with the people 
of the land, and was about to make a feast 
for them, a calf, which was to be slaughtered 
on the occasion, broke loose and ran into 
the cave of Machpelah. Abraham followed, 
and, having entered the cave in pursuit, 
there he discovered the bodies of Adam and 
Eve, each on a bed, with lamps burning be- 
tween them. They were sleeping the sleep 
of death, and there was a good odour around 
them, like the odour of repose. In conse- 
quence of having made this discovery it was 
that he desired to purchase 'the cave for his 
own burial-place; and when the sons of 
Jebus refused to sell it, he fell upon his 
knees, and bowed himself before them, till 
they were entreated. When he came to 
deposit the body of Sarah there, Adam and 
Eve rose up, and refused their consent. The 
reason which they gave for this unexpected 
prohibition was, that they were already in a 
state of reproach before the Lord, because 
of their transgression, and a farther reproach 
would be brought upon them by a com- 
parison with his good deeds, if they allowed 
such company to be introduced into their 
resting-place. But Abraham took upon him- 
self to answer for that ; upon this they were 
satisfied with his assurances, and composed 
themselves again to their long sleep. 

The Rabbis may be left to contend for 
the authority of the book of Zohar in this 
particular against the story of the Cabal ists 
that Adam's bones were taken into the Ark, 



and divided afterwards by Noah among his 
sons. The skull fell to Shem's portion ; he 
burnt it on the mountain, which, for that 
reason, obtained the name of Golgotha, or 
Calvary, — being interpreted, the place of a 
skull, and on that spot, for mystical signifi- 
cation, the cross whereon our Saviour suf- 
fered was erected ; — a wild legend, on which 
as wild a fiction has been grafted, that a 
branch from the Tree of Life had been 
planted on Adam's grave, and from the wood 
which that branch had produced the cross 
was made. 

And against either of these the authority 
of Rabbi Judas Bar Simon is to be opposed, 
for he affirms that the dust of Adam was 
washed away by the Deluge, and utterly 
dispersed. 

The Rabbis have also to establish the 
credit of their own tradition against that of 
the Arabs, who, at this time, show Eve's 
grave near Jeddah ; — about three days' 
journey east from that place, according to 
Bruce. He says it is covered with green 
sods, and about fifty yards in length. The 
Cashmerian traveller Abdulkurreem, who 
visited it in 1742, says that it measured an 
hundred and ninety-seven of his footsteps, 
which would make the mother of mankind 
much taller than Bruce's measurement. He 
likens it to a flower-bed ; on the middle of 
the grave there was then a small dome, and 
the ends of it were enclosed with wooden 
pales. Burckhardt did not visit it ; he was 
told that it was about two miles only, north- 
ward of the town, and that it was a rude 
structure of stone, some four feet in length, 
two or three in height, and as many in 
breadth, thus resembling the tomb of Noah, 
which is shown in the valley of Bekaa, in 
Syria. Thus widely do these modern travel- 
lers, on any one of whom reasonable re- 
liance might have been placed, differ in the 
account of the same thing. 



634 



THE DOCTOK. 



CHAPTER CCXXXV. 

THE SHORTEST AND FLEASANTEST WAY PROM 
DONCASTER TO JEDDAH, WITH MANY MORE, 
TOO LONG. 



Tlovo; novw trovov QeQit, 
Hoi ira, ya.% ovx 'i^otv iyu. 



Sophocles. 



We have got from the West Riding of 
Yorkshire, to the Eastern shore of the Red 
Sea, without the assistance of mail-coach, 
steam-packet, or air-balloon, the magical 
carpet, the wishing-cap, the shoes of swift- 
ness, or the seven-leagued boots. Prom 
Mr. Bacon's vicarage we have got to Eve's 
grave, not per saltum, by any sudden, or 
violent transition; but by following the 
stream of thought. We shall get back in 
the same easy manner to that vicarage, and 
to the quiet churchyard wherein the remains 
of one of the sweetest and for the few latter 
years of her short life, one of the happiest 
of Eve's daughters, were deposited in sure 
and certain hope. If you are in the mood 
for a Chapter upon Churchyards, go, reader, 
to those which Caroline Bowles has written ; 
you will find in them everything that can 
touch the heart, everything that can sanctify 
the affections, unalloyed by anything that 
can offend a pure taste and a masculine 
judgement. 

But before we find our way back we must 
tarry awhile among the tombs, and converse 
with the fablers of old. 

A young and lovely Frenchwoman after 
visiting the Columbarium near the Villa 
Albani, expressed her feelings strongly upon 
our custom of interring the dead, as com- 
pared with the urn-burial of the ancients. 
Usage odieux, said she, qui rend la mort 
horrible I Si les anciens en avaient moins 
d'effroi, c'est que la coutume de bruler les 
corps derobait au trepas tout ce quHil a de 
hideux. Qiiil etait consolant et doux de 
pouvoir pleurer sur des cendres cheries ! 
Quil est epouvantable et dechirant aujourd'hui 
de penser que celui quon a tant aime rioffre 
plus quune image affreuse et decharnee dont 
on ne pourrait supporter la vue. 

The lady in whose journal these lines were 



written lies buried in the Campo Santo at 
Milan, with the following inscription on her 
tomb ; Priez pour une jeune Francaise que 
la mort a frappee a vingt ans, comme elle 
allait, apres un voyage de huit mois avec un 
epoux cheri, revoir son enfant, son pere et sa 
mere, qui venaient joyeux au-devant oVelle. 
Her husband wished to have her remains 
burnt, in conformity to her own opinion 
respecting the disposal of the dead, and to 
his own feelings at the time, that he might 
have carried her ashes to his own country, 
and piously have preserved them there, to 
weep over them, and bequeath them to his 
son ; mais les amis qui m'entouraient, he says, 
combatterent mon desir, comme une inspira- 
tion insensee de la douleur. 

There can be no doubt that our ghastly 
personification of Death has been derived 
from the practice of interment ; and that of 
all modes in which the dead have ever been 
disposed of, cremation is in some respects 
the best. But this mode, were it generally 
practicable, would in common use be ac- 
companied with more revolting circum- 
stances than that which has now become the 
Christian usage. Some abominations, how- 
ever, it would have prevented, and though 
in place of those superstitions which it pre- 
cluded others would undoubtedly have arisen, 
they would have been of a less loathsome 
character. 

The Moors say that the dead are disturbed 
if their graves be trodden on by Christian 
feet ; the Rabbis that they feel the worms 
devouring them. 

On the south side of the city of Erzeroom 
is a mountain called Eyerli, from the same 
likeness which has obtained for one of the 
English mountains the unpoetical name of 
Saddleback. The Turkish traveller ^Evlia 
Effendi saw on the top of this mountain a 
tomb eighty paces in length, with two 
columns marking the place of the head and 
of the feet. " I was looking on the tomb," 
he says, " when a bad smell occurred very 
hurtfully to my nose, and to that of my ser- 
vant who held the horses ; and looking near, 
I then saw that the earth of the grave, which 
was greasy and black, was boiling, like gruel 



THE DOCTOR. 



635 



in a pan. I returned then, and having re- 
lated my adventures in the evening in com- 
pany with the Pashaw, Djaafer Effendi of 
Erzeroom, a learned man and an elegant 
writer, warned me not to visit the place 
again, for it was the grave of Balaam the son 
of Beor, who died an infidel, under the curse 
of Moses, and whose grave was kept always 
in this state by subterraneous fires." 

When Wheler was at Constantinople, he 
noticed a monument in the fairest and largest 
street of that city, the cupola of which was 
covered with an iron grating. It was the 
tomb of Mahomet Cupriuli, father to the 
then Grand Vizier. He had not been scru- 
pulous as to the means by which he settled 
the government during the Grand Seignior's 
minority, and carried it on afterwards, quell- 
ing the discontents and factions of the prin- 
cipal Agas, and the mutinies of the Jani- 
zaries. Concerning him after his decease, 
says this traveller, " being buried here, and 
having this stately monument of white 
marble covered with lead ereeted over his 
body, the Grand Seigneur and Vizier had 
this dream both in the same night, to wit, 
that he came to them and earnestly begged 
of them a little water to refresh him, being 
in a burning heat. Of this the Grand Seig- 
neur and Vizier told each other in the 
morning, and thereupon thought fit to con- 
sult the Mufti what to do concerning it. 
The Mufti, according to their gross super- 
stition, advised that the roof of his sepulchre 
should be uncovered, that the rain might 
descend on his body, thereby to quench the 
flames which were tormenting his soul. And 
this remedy the people who smarted under 
his oppression think he had great need of, 
supposing him to be tormented in the other 
world for his tyrannies and cruelties com- 
mitted by him in this." 

If Cupriuli had been a Russian instead of 
a Turk, his body would have been provided 
with a passport before it was committed to 
the grave. Peter Henry Bruce in his curi- 
ous memoirs gives the form of one which in 
the reign of Peter the Great, always before 
the coffin of a Russian was closed, was put 
between the fingers of the corpse : — " We N. 



N". do certify by these presents that the 
bearer hereof hath always lived among us as 
became a good Christian, professing the 
Greek religion ; and although he may have 
committed some sins, he hath confessed the 
same, whereupon he hath received absolu- 
tion, and taken the communion for the re- 
mission of sins : That he hath honoured God 
and his Saints ; that he hath not neglected 
his prayers ; and hath fasted on the hours 
and days appointed by the Church : That he 
hath always behaved himself towards me, 
his Confessor, in such a manner that I have 
no reason to complain of him, or to refuse 
him the absolution of his sins. In witness 
whereof I have given him these testimonials, 
to the end that St. Peter upon sight of them, 
may not deny him the opening of the gate 
to eternal bliss ! " 

The custom evidently implies an opinion 
that though soul and body were disunited by 
death, they kept close company together till 
after the burial ; otherwise a passport which 
the Soul was to present at Heaven's gate 
would not have been placed in the hands of 
the corpse. In the superstitions of the 
Romish church a re-union is frequently sup- 
posed, but that there is an immediate sepa- 
ration upon death is an article of faith, and 
it is represented by Sir Thomas More as one 
of the punishments for a sinful soul to be 
brought from Purgatory and made to attend, 
an unseen spectator, at the funeral of its own 
body, and feel the mockery of all the pomps 
and vanities used upon that occasion. The 
passage is in his Supplycacyon of Soulys. 
One of the Supplicants from Purgatory 



" Some hath there of us, while we were 
in health, not so much studied how we might 
die penitent, and in good christian plight, 
as how we might solemnly be borne out to 
burying, have gay and goodly funerals, with 
heralds at our herses, and offering up our 
helmets, setting up our scutcheons and coat- 
armours on the wall, though there never came 
harness on our backs, nor never ancestor of 
ours ever bare arms before. Then devised 
we some Doctor to make a sermon at our 
mass in our month's mind, and then preach 



636 



THE DOCTOR. 



to our praise with some fond fantasy devised 
of our name ; and after mass, much feasting, 
riotous and costly ; and finally, like madmen, 
made men merry at our death, and take our 
burying for a brideale. For special punish- 
ment whereof, some of us have been by our 
Evil Angels brought forth full heavily, in 
full great despight to behold our own bury- 
ing, and so, stand in great pain, invisible 
among the press, and made to look on our 
carrion corpse, carried out with great pomp, 
whereof our Lord knoweth we have taken 
heavy pleasure ! " 

In opposition to this there is a Rabbinical 
story which shows that though the Jews 
did not attribute so much importance to the 
rites of sepulture as the ancient Greeks, 
they nevertheless thought that a parsimo- 
nious interment occasioned some uncom- 
fortable consequences to the dead. 

A pious descendant of Abraham, whom 
his wife requited with a curtain lecture for 
having, as she thought improvidently, given 
alms to a poor person in a time of dearth, 
left his house, and went out to pass the 
remainder of the night among the tombs, 
that he might escape from her objurgations. 
There he overheard a conversation between 
the Spirits of two young women, not long 
deceased. The one said, " come let us go 
through the world, and then listen behind 
the curtain and hear what chastisements 
are decreed for it." The other made 
answer, " I cannot go, because I have been 
buried in a mat made of reeds, but go you, 
and bring me account of what you hear." 
Away went the Ghost whose grave-clothes 
were fit to appear in : and when she re- 
turned, " well friend, what have you heard 
behind the curtain ? " said the ghost in the 
reed-mat. " I heard," replied the gad-about, 
" that whatever shall be sown in the first 
rains will be stricken with hail." Away 
went the alms-giver ; and upon this in- 
telligence, which was more certain than any 
prognostication in the Almanack, he waited 
till the second rains before he sowed his 
field ; all other fields were struck with hail, 
but according as he had expected his crop 
escaped. 



Next year, on the anniversary of the 
night which had proved so fortunate to him, 
he went again to the Tombs : and overheard 
another conversation between the same 
ghosts to the same purport. The well-dressed 
ghost went through the world, listened 
behind the curtain, and brought back infor- 
mation that whatever should be sown in the 
second rains would be smitten with rust. 
Away went the good man, and sowed his 
field in the first rains ; all other crops were 
spoiled with the rust, and only his escaped. 
His wife then inquired of him how it had 
happened that in two successive years he 
had sown his fields at a different time from 
everybody else, and on both occasions his 
were the only crops that had been saved. 
He made no secret to her of his adventures, 
but told her how he had come to the know- 
ledge which had proved so beneficial. Ere 
long his wife happened to quarrel with the 
mother of the poor ghost who was obliged 
to keep her sepulchre ; and the woman of 
unruly tongue, among other insults, bade 
her go and look at her daughter, whom she 
had buried in a reed-mat ! Another anni- 
versary came round, and the good man went 
again to the Tomb ; but he went this time 
in vain, for when the well-dressed Ghost 
repeated her invitation, the other made 
answer, " let me alone, my friend, the words 
which have passed between you and me have 
been heard among the living." 

The learned Cistercian * to whom I owe 
this legend, expresses his contempt for it ; 
nevertheless he infers from it that the spirits 
of the dead know what passes in this world ; 
and that the doctrine of the Romish Church 
upon that point is proved, by this tradition 
to have been that of the Synagogue also. 

The Mahommedans, who adopted so many 
of the Rabbinical fables, dispensed in one 
case, for reasons of obvious convenience, 
with all ceremonies of sepulchral costume. 
For the funeral of their martyrs, by which 
appellation all Musselmen who fell in battle 
against the unbelievers were honoured, none 
of those preparations were required, which 

* Bertolacci. 



THE DOCTOR. 



637 



were necessary for those who die a natural 
death. A martyr needs not to be washed 
after his death, nor to be enveloped in 
grave-clothes ; his own blood with which he 
is besmeared serves him for all legal puri- 
fication, and he may be wrapped in his robe, 
and buried immediately after the funeral 
prayer, conformably to the order of the 
Prophet, who has said, " bury them as they 
are, in their garments, and in their blood ! 
Wash them not, for their wounds will smell 
of musk on the Day of Judgement." 

A man of Medina, taking leave of his 
wife as he was about to go to the wars, com- 
mended to the Lord her unborn babe. She 
died presently afterwards, and every night 
there appeared a brilliant light upon the 
middle of her tomb. The husband hearing 
of this upon his return, hastened to the 
place; the sepulchre opened of itself; the 
wife sate up in her winding-sheet, and 
holding out to him a boy in her arms, said 
to him take "that which thou commendedst 
to the Lord. Hadst thou commended us 
both, thou shouldest have found us both 
alive." So saying she delivered to him the 
living infant, and laid herself down, and the 
sepulchre closed over her. 



Paks imperfecta manebat. — Virg. Mn. 

The following materials, printed verbatim 
from the MS. Collection, were to have com- 
pleted the Chapter. It has been thought 
advisable in the present instance to show how 
the lamented Southey worked up the collection 
of years. Each extract is on a separate 
slip of paper, and some of them appear to 
have been made from thirty to forty years 
ago, more or less. 



And so the virtue of his youth before 
Was in his age the ground of his delight. 

James I. 

"EvBtv hi ~2dtviXov rot-tpov \hgcLxov , Axro^ihot,o' 
"Oe pa. r ' A/xa^ovihaiv nokv6<x.£<rio; Ix "xoXi/AOio 
A-v]/ ocviaiv (h'h ya.£ o-vvot,vv}XvQlv 'H^xxXr/i) 
'BXyiutyoi ]£ xndiv It oc.-yxiu.Xov dxvlv ocxtyi?. 
Ov fjciv 6*iv !T£OT-'g&) 'otvifjuir^iov' r : xt yae, oour/i 
$igo-iQov/i ipuxr.v ■xoXvba.xgvov 'Axrogihao 
Aicro-of&sv/iv, rurdov ts§ bfjurfiia; ocvh^as IhitrOai. 
Tv/ut.fiov hi 0-TlQa.vris lm(Zot.s o-xotiolZito vijx., 



Toios \uv olo; troXt/xov h' itv' it.iJt.qi) hi xaX-h 

TirgatpaXo; tpaivixi Xotpai 'mt\oc.fjt,nn<o 7rr,XY,%, 

Kat,} p o fjt.lv a-vn; 'ihuvl fjtiyav Z,6qoV ol h' htrthovTls 

©a.fx.^'/io'ocv ■ Toi; 5' Z^cn dto^r^o^rituv 'fzixiXo~ou 

' A/jfxvxihv^ Mo-vJ/oj, Xoifivio-i ri f/.uXi^octrdot.t. 

O'i h' dcvoc. fji.lv x^ai^rvdUe Xoutpo? tma.trot.v, ix hi fiaXovrt? 

Ils/fl-^toir' Iv alyiocXS) "SdzviXov roitpov a-fjupixivovTo, 

XvtXoc. ii oixivoivTO, KKi Yjyvto'oe.v 'ivroyLot, (jLy{Xeav. 

Apollonius Rhodius. 

The Abaza (a Circassian tribe) have a strange way of 
burying their Beys. They put the body in a coffin of wood, 
which they nail on the branches of some high trees and 
make a hole in the coffin by the head, that the Bey, as they 
say, may look unto Heaven. Bees enter the coffin, and 
make honey, and cover the body with their comb : If the 
season comes they open the coffin, take out the honey and 
sell it, therefore much caution is necessary against the 
honey of the Abazas. Evlia Effendi. 

Once in their life time, the Jews say, they are bound by 
the Law of Moses to go to the Holy Land, if they can, or 
be able, and the bones of many dead Jews are carried 
there, and there burnt. We were fraughted with wools 
from Constantinople to Sidon, in which sacks, as most 
certainly was told to me, were many Jew's bones put into 
little chests, but unknown to any of the ship. The Jews 
our Merchants told me of them at my return from Jeru- 
salem to Saphet, but earnestly intreated me not to tell it, 
for fear of preventing them another time. 

Going on, one of my companions said, if you will take 
the trouble of going a little out of the way, you will see a 
most remarkable thing. Well, said I, what should be the 
object of all pains taken in travelling, if it were not to ad. 
mire the works of God. So we went on for an hour to the 
north, but not taking the great road leading to the Plain of 
Moosh, we advanced to a high rock that is a quarter of an 
hour out of the road. To this rock, high like a tower, a 
man was formerly chained, whose bones are yet preserved 
in the chains. Both bones and chains are in a high state 
of preservation. The bones of the arms are from seven 
to eight cubits in length, of an astonishing thickness. The 
skull is like the cupola of a bath, and a man may creep in 
and out without pain through the eye-holes. Eagles 
nestle in them. These bones are said to be those of a 
faithful man who in Abraham's time was chained by 
Nimrod to this rock, in order to be burnt by fire. The 
fire calcined part of his body, so that it melted in one part 
with the rock ; but the arms and legs are stretching forth 
to the example of posterity. We have no doubt that they 
will rise again into life at the sound of the trumpet on the 
day of judgement. Evlia Effendi. 

The Magistrates of Leghorn have authority to issue out 
orders for killing dogs if they abound too much in the 
streets, and molest the inhabitants. The men entrusted 
with the execution of these orders go through the city in 
the night, and drop small bits of poisoned bread in the 
streets. These are eaten by the dogs and instantaneously 
kill them. Before sunrise the same men go through the 
streets with a cart, gather hundreds of the dead dogs, and 
carry them to the Jew's burying-ground without the 
town. Hasselquist. 

In the Romance of Merlin it is said that before the 
time of Christ, Adam and Eve and the whole ancient 
world were (not in Limbo) but actually in Hell. And that 
when the Prophets comforted the souls under their suf- 
ferings by telling them of the appointed Redeemer, the 
Devils for that reason tormented these Prophets more 
than others. The Devils themselves tell the story, ct 



638 



THE DOCTOK. 



les tourmentions plus que les autres. Et ilz faisoycnt 
semblant que nostre tourment ne les grevoit riens ; 
aingois comfortoyent les aultres pecheurs et disoyent. Le 
Saulveur de tout le monde viendra qui tous nous deli- 
vrera. 

At the time of the deluge the wife of Noah being preg- 
nant, was through the hardships of the voyage delivered 
of a dead child to which the name of Tarh was given, be- 
cause the letters of this word form the number 217, which 
was the number of days he was carried by his mother 
instead of the full time of 280 days, or nine months. This 
child was buried in the district now called Djezere Ibn 
Omar, the Island or Peninsula of the son of Omar, and 
this was the first burial on earth after the deluge. And 
Noah prayed unto the Lord, saying, Oh God, thou hast 
given me a thousand years of life, and this child is dead 
before it began to live on earth ! And he begged of the 
Lord as a blessing given to the burial-place of his child, 
that the women of this town might never miscarry, which 
was granted ; so that since that time women, and female 
animals of every kind in this town, are all blessed with 
births in due time and long living. The length of the 
grave of this untimely child of Noah is 40 feet and it is 
visited by pilgrims. Evlia Effendi. 

They suppose that a few souls are peculiarly gifted with 
the power of quitting their bodies, of mounting into the 
skies, visiting distant countries, and again returning and 
resuming them ; they call the mystery of prayer by which 
this power is obtained, the Mandiram. Craufurd. 

The plain of Kerbela is all desert, inhabited by none but 
by the dead, and by roving wild hounds, the race of the 
dogs which licked the blood of the martyrs, and which 
since are doomed to wander through the wilderness. 

Evlia Effendi. 

Shi whang, the K. of Tsin becoming Emperor, he chose 
for his sepulchre the mountain Li, whose foundation he 
caused to dig, if we may so speak, even to the centre of 
the earth. On its surface he erected a mausoleum which 
might pass for a mountain. It was five hundred feet high, 
and at least half a league in circumference. On the out- 
side was a vast tomb of stone, where one might walk as 
easily as in the largest hall. In the middle was a sump- 
tuous coffin, and all around there were lamps and flam- 
beaux, whose, flames were fed by human fat. Within this 
tomb, there was upon one side a pond of quicksilver, 
upon which were scattered birds of gold and silver ; on 
the other a compleat magazine of moveables and arms ; 
here and there were the most precious jewels in thou- 
sands. Dc Halde. 

Emududakel, the Messenger of Death, receives the Soul 
as 'tis breathed out of the body into a kind of a sack, and 
runs away with it through briars and thorns and burning 
whirlwinds, which torment the Soul very sensibly, till he 
arrives at the bank of a fiery current, through which he is 
to pass to the other side in order to deliver the soul to 
Emen, the God of the Dead. 

Letters to the Danish Missionaries. 

A curious story concerning the power which the Soul 
has been supposed to possess of leaving the body, in a 
visible form, may be found in the notes to the Vision of 
the Maid of Orleans. A more extraordinary one occurs 
in the singularly curious work of Evlia Effendi. 

" Sultan Bajazet II. was a saint-monarch, like Sultan 
Orkhaun, or Sultan Mustapha I. There exist different 
works relating his miracles and deeds, but they are rare. 
The last seven years of his life he ate nothing which had 
blood and life. One day longing much to eat calf's or 



mutton's feet, he struggled long in that glorious contest 
with the Soul, and as at last a well-seasoned dish of feet 
was put before him, he said unto his Soul, " See my Soul, 
the feet are before thee, if thou wantest to enjoy them, 
leave the body and feed on them." In the same moment 
a living creature was seen to come out of his mouth, 
which drank of the juice in the dish and having satisfied 
its appetite, endeavoured to return into the mouth from 
whence it came. But Bajazet having prevented it with 
his hand to re-enter his mouth, it fell on the ground, 
and the Sultan ordered it to be beaten. The Pages arrived 
and kicked it dead on the ground. The Mufti of that 
time decided that as the Soul was an essential part of man, 
this dead Soul should be buried : prayers were performed 
over it, and the dead Soul was interred in a small tomb 
near Bajazet's tomb. This is the truth of the famous 
story of Bajazet II. having died twice and having been 
twice buried. After this murder of his own Soul, the 
Sultan remained melancholy in the corner of retirement, 
taking no part or interest in the affairs of government." 

The same anecdote of the Soul coming out of the mouth 
to relish a most desired dish, had already happened to the 
Sheik Bajazet Bostaumi, who had much longed to eat 
Mohallebi (a milk-dish), but Bajazet Bostaumi permitted 
it to re-enter, and Sultan Bajazet killed it ; notwith- 
standing which he continued to live for some time longer. 

See Josselyn for a similar tale. 

When Mohammed took his journey upon Alborach, 
Gabriel (said he) led me to the first Heaven, and the 
Angels in that Heaven graciously received me, and they 
beheld me with smiles and with joy, beseeching for me 
things prosperous and pleasant. One alone among the 
Angels there sat, who neither prayed for my prosperity, 
nor smiled ; and Gabriel when I inquired of him who he 
was, replied, never hath that Angel smiled, nor will smile, 
he is the Keeper of the Fire ; and I said to him is this the 
Angel who is called the well-beloved of God ? and he 
replied, this is that Angel. Then said I bid him that he 
show me the Fire, and Gabriel requesting him, he removed 
the cover of the vessel of Fire, and the Fire ascending 1 
feared lest all things whatever that I saw should be con- 
sumed, and I besought Gabriel that the Fire again might 
be covered. And so the fire returned to its place, and 
it seemed then as when the Sun sinks in the West, and the 
gloomy Angel, remaining the same, covered up the Fire. 

FiODERICl XlMENES, ARC. TOL. HlST. ARAB. 

Should a Moslem when praying, feel himself disposed 
to gape, he is ordered to suppress the sensation ns the 
work of the Devil, and to close his mouth, lest the father 
of iniquity should enter and take possession of his person. 
It is curious that this opinion prevails also among the 
Hindoos, who twirl their fingers close before their mouths 
when gaping, to prevent an evil spirit from getting in that 
way. Griffiths. 

In what part soever of the world they die and are 
buried, their bodies must all rise to judgement in the 
Holy Land, out of the valley of Jehosophat, which causeth 
that the greater and richer sort of them have their bones 
conveyed to some part thereof by their kindred or friends. 
By which means they are freed of a labour to scrape 
thither through the ground, which with their nails they 
hold they must, who are not there buried, nor conveyed 
thither by others. Sanderson. Purchas. 

The Russians in effecting a practicable road to China 
discovered in lat. 50 N., between the rivers Irtish and 
Obalet, a desert of very considerable extent, overspread 
in many parts with Tumuli, or Barrows, which have been 
also taken notice of by Mr. Bell and other writers. This 



THE DOCTOR. 



639 



desert constitutes the southern boundary of Siberia. It is 
said the borderers on the desert have, for many years, 
continued to dig for the treasure deposited in these tumuli, 
which still, however, remain unexhausted. We are told 
that they find considerable quantities of gold, silver and 
brass, and some precious stones, among ashes and re- 
mains of dead bodies : also hilts of swords, armour, orna- 
ments for saddles and bridles, and other trappings, with 
the bones of those animals to which the trappings be- 
longed, among which are the bones of elephants. The 
Russian Court, says Mr. Demidoff, being informed of 
these depredations, sent a principal officer, with sufficient 
troops, to open such of these tumuli, as were too large 
for the marauding parties to undertake and to secure their 
contents. This officer, on taking a survey of the number- 
less monuments of the dead spread over this great desert, 
concluded that the barrow of the largest dimensions most 
probably contained the remains of the prince or chief; 
and he was not mistaken ; for, after removing a very deep 
covering of earth and stones, the workmen came to three 
vaults, constructed of stones, of rude workmanship ; a 
view of which is exhibited in the engraving. That 
wherein the prince was deposited, which was in the 
centre, and the largest of the three, was easily dis- 
tinguished by the sword, spear, bow, quiver and arrow 
which lay beside him. In the vault beyond him, towards 
which his feet lay, were his horse, bridle, saddle and 
stirrups. The body of the prince lay in a reclining posture 
on a sheet of pure gold, extending from head to foot, and 
another sheet of gold, of the like dimensions, was spread 
over him. He was wrapt in a rich mantle, bordered with 
gold and studded with rubies and emeralds. His head, 
neck, breast and arms naked, and without any ornament. 
In the lesser vault lay the princess, distinguished by her 
female ornaments. She was placed reclining against the 
wall, with a gold chain of many links, set with rubies, 
round her neck, and gold bracelets round her arms. The 
head, breast and arms were naked. The body was covered 
with a rich robe, but without any border of gold or jewels, 
and was laid on a sheet of fine gold, and covered over with 
another. The four sheets of gold weighed 40 lb. The 
robes of both looked fair and complete ; but on touching, 
crumbled into dust. Many more of the tumuli were 
opened, but this was the most remarkable. In the others 
a great variety of curious articles were found. 

Monthly Review, Vol. 49. 

The following story I had from Mr. Pierson, factor here 
for the African company, who was sent here from Cape 
Coree to be second to Mr. Smith then chief factor. Soon 
after his arrival Mr. Smith fell very ill of the country 
malignant fever ; and having little prospect of recovery, 
resigned his charge of the company's affairs to Pierson. 
This Mr. Smith had the character of an obliging, ingenious 
young gentleman, and was much esteemed by the King, 
who hearing of his desperate illness, sent his Fatishman to 
hinder him from dying ; who coming to the factory went 
to Mr. Smith's bed-side, and told him, that his King had 
such a kindness for him, that he had sent to keep him 
alive, and that he should not die. Mr. Smith was in such 
a languishing condition, that he little regarded him. Then 
the Fatishman went from him to the hog-yard, where they 
bury the white men ; and having carried with him some 
brandy, rum, oil, rice, &c, he cry'd out aloud, you dead 
white men that lie here, you have a mind to have this factor 
that is sick to you, but he is our king's friend and he loves 
him, and will not part with him as yet. Then he went 
to captain Wiburn's grave who built the factory, and 
cry'd, you captain of all the dead white men that lie here, 
this is your doings ; you would have this man from us to 
bear you company, because he is a good man, but our king 



will not part with him, nor you shall not have him yet. 
Then making a hole in the ground over his grave, he 
poured in the brandy, rum, oil, rice, &c, telling him, Jf 
he wanted those things, there they were for him, but the 
factor he must not expect, nor should not have, with more 
such nonsense ; then went to Smith, and assured him he 
should not die ; but growing troublesome to the sick man, 
Pierson turned him out of the factory, and in two days 
after poor Smith made his exit. 

Mr. Josiah Relph to Mr. Thomas Routh, in Castle 
Street, Carlisle. j une 20, 1740. 

***** 
" The following was sent me a few months ago by the 
minister of Kirklees in Yorkshire, the burying-place of 
Robin Hood. My correspondent tells me it was found 
among the papers of the late Dr. Gale of York, and is 
supposed to have been the genuine epitaph of that noted 
English outlaw. He adds that the grave- stone is yet to 
be seen, but the characters are now worn out. 
Here undernead dis laitl Stean 
Laiz Robert Earl of Huntingtun. 
Nea Arcir ver az hie sa geud, 
An Piple kauld im Robin Heud. 
Sick utlawz az hi and is men 
Vil england nivir si agen. 

Obiit 24. Kal. Dehembris, 1247. 
I am, dear Sir, your most faithful and humble Servant, 
Josiah Relph." 

Note in Nichols See the stone engraved in the 

Sepulchral Monuments, vol. i. p. cviii. Mr. Gough says 
the inscription was never on it ; and that the stone must 
have been brought from another place, as the ground 
under it, on being explored, was found to have been never 
before disturbed.* 

Lord Dalmeny, son of the E. of Rosebery, married 
about eighty years ago a widow at Bath for her beauty. 
They went abroad, she sickened, and on her death-bed 
requested that she might be interred in some particular 
churchyard, either in Sussex or Suffolk, I forget which. 
The body was embalmed, but at the custom-house in the 
port where it was landed the officer suspected smuggling 
and insisted on opening it. They recognised the features 
of the wife of their own clergyman, — who having been 
married to him against her own inclination had eloped. 
Both husbands followed the body to the grave. The 
Grandfather of Dr. Smith of Norwich knew the Lord. 

It was a melancholy notion of the Stoics that the con- 
dition of the Soul, and even its individual immortality, 
might be affected by the circumstances of death : for 
example, that if any person were killed by a great mass 
of earth falling upon him, or the ruins of a building, the 
Soul as well as the body would be crushed, and not being 
able to extricate itself would be extinguished there : 
existimant animam hominis magno pondere cxtriti prr- 
meare non posse, el stalim spargi, quia non fucrit illi 
exitus liber. 

Upon this belief, the satirical epitaph on Sir John Van- 
brugh would convey what might indeed be called a heavy 
curse. 



* On the disputed question of the genuineness of the 
above epitaph, see the Notes and Illustrations to Ritson's 
Robin Hood, pp. xliv— 1. Robin Hood's Death and 
Burial is the last Ballad in the second volume. 
" And there they buried bold Robin Hood, 
Near to the fair Kirkleys." 



640 



THE DOCTOR. 



Some of the Greenlanders, for even in Greenland there 
are sects, suppose the soul to be so corporeal that it can 
increase or decrease, is divisible, may lose part of its sub- 
stance, and have it restored again. On its way to Heaven, 
which is five days' dreadful journey, all the way down a 
rugged rock, which is so steep that they must slide down 
it, and so rough that their way is tracked with blood, they 
are liable to be destroyed, and this destruction, which they 
call the second death, is final, and therefore justly deemed 
of all things the most terrible. It is beyond the power 
of their Angekoks to remedy this evil ; but these impos- 
tors pretend to the art of repairing a maimed soul, bring- 
ing home a strayed or runaway one, and of changing away 
one that is sickly, for the sound and sprightly one of a 
hare, a rein-deer, a bird, or an infant. 

" This is the peevishness of our humane wisdom, yea, 
rather of our humane folly, to yearn for tidings from the 
dead, as if a spirit departed could declare anything more 
evidently than the book of God, which is the sure oracle 
of life? This was Saul's practise, — neglect Samuel 
when he was alive, and seek after him when he was dead. 
What says the Prophet, Should not a people seek unto 
their God ? Should the living repair to the dead ? (Isai. 
viij. 19.) Among the works of Athanasius I find (though 
he be not the author of the questions to Antiochus,) a 
discourse full of reason, why God would not permit the 
soul of any of those that departed from hence to return 
back unto us again, and to declare the state of things in 
hell unto us. For what pestilent errors would arise from 
thence to seduce us ? Devils would transform themselves 
into the shapes of men that were deceased, pretend that 
they were risen from the dead (for what will not the 
Father of lies feign ?) and so spread in any false doc- 
trines, or incite us to many barbarous actions, to our end- 
less error and destruction. And admit they be not 
Phantasms, and delusions, but the very men, yet all men 
are liars, but God is truth. I told you what a Necro- 
mancer Saul was in the Old Testament, he would believe 
nothing unless a prophet rose from the grave to teach 
him. There is another as good as himself in the New 
Testament, and not another pattern in all the Scripture 
to my remembrance, Luke xvi. 27. The rich man in hell 
urged Abraham to send Lazarus to admonish his brethren 
of their wicked life ; Abraham refers to Moses and the 
Prophets. He that could not teach himself when he was 
alive, would teach Abraham himself being in hell, Nay, 
Father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the 
dead, they will repent. 

" The mind is composed with quietness to hear the 
living ; the apparitions of dead men, beside the suspicion 
of delusion, would fill us with ghastly horror, and it were 
impossible we should be fit scholars to learn if such strong 
perturbation of fear should be upon us. How much 
better hath God ordained for our security, and tranquil- 
lity, that the priest's lips should preserve knowledge? I 
know, if God shall see it fit to have us disciplined by such 
means, he can stir up the spirits of the faithful departed 
to come among us : So, after Christ's resurrection, many 
dead bodies of the Saints which slept arose, and came out 
of their graves, and went into the Holy City, and appeared 
unto many. This was not upon a small matter, but upon 
a brave and renowned occasion : But for the Spirits of 
damnation, that are tied in chains of darkness, there is no 
re-passage for them, and it makes more to strengthen our 
belief that never any did return from hell to tell us their 
woeful tale, than if any should return. It is among the 
severe penalties of damnation that there is no indulgence 
for the smallest respite to come out of it. The heathen 
put that truth into this fable. The Lion asked the Fox, 
why he never came to visit him when he was sick : Says 



the Fox, because I can trace many beasts by the print of 
their foot that have gone toward your den, Sir Lion, but 
I cannot see the print of one foot that ever came back : 

Quia me vestigia terrent 
Omnia te advorsum spectantia, nulla retrorsum. 

So there is a beaten, and a broad road that leads the re- 
probate to hell, but you do not find the print of one hoof 
that ever came back. When I have given you ray judg- 
ment about apparitions of the dead in their descending 
from Heaven, or ascending from hell, I must tell you in 
the third place, I have met with a thousand stories in 
Pontifician writings concerning some that have had re- 
passage from Purgatory to their familiars upon earth. 
Notwithstanding the reverence I bear to Gregory the 
Great, I cannot refrain to say ; He was much to blame to 
begin such fictions upon his credulity ; others have been 
more to blame that have invented such Legends ; and 
they are most to be derided that believe them. miser- 
able Theology! if thy tenets must be confirmed by sick 
men's dreams, and dead men's phantastical apparitions !" 

Bp. Hackett. 

" It is a morose humour in some, even ministers, that 
they will not give a due commendation to the deceased : 
whereby they not only offer a seeming unkindness to the 
dead, but do a real iujury to the living, by discouraging 
virtue, and depriving us of the great instruments of piety, 
good examples : which usually are far more effective 
methods of instruction, than any precepts : These com- 
monly urging only the necessity of those duties, while 
the other show the possibility and manner of performing. 

" But then, 'tis a most unchristian and uncharitable 
mistake in those, that think it unlawful to commemorate 
the dead, and to celebrate their memories : whereas there 
is no one thing does so much uphold and keep up the 
honour and interest of religion amongst the multitude, as 
the due observance of those Anniversaries which the 
Church has, upon this account, scattered throughout the 
whole course of the year, would do : and indeed to our 
neglect of this in a great part the present decay of religion 
may rationally be imputed. 

" Thus in this age of our's what Pliny saith of his, 
Postquam desimus facere laudanda, laudari quoque 
ineptum putamus. Since people have left off doing things 
that are praiseworthy, they look upon praise itself as a 
silly thing. 

" And possibly the generality of hearers themselves are 
not free from this fault ; who peradventure may fancy 
their own life upbraided, when they hear another's com- 
mended. 

" But that the servants of God, which depart this life in 
his faith and fear, may and must be praised, I shall en- 
deavour to make good upon these three grounds. 

" In common justice to the deceased themselves. Ordi- 
nary civility teaches us to speak well of the dead. Nee 
quicqjiam sanctius habet reverentia superstitum, quam ut 
amissos venerabiliter recordetur, says Ausonius, and 
makes this the ground of the Parentalia, which had been 
ever since Numa's time. 

" Praise, however it may become the living, is a just 
debt to the deserts of the dead, who are now got clear out 
of the reach of envy ; which, if it have anything of the 
generous in it, will scorn, vulture-like, to prey upon 
carcass. 

" Besides, Christianity lays a greater obligation upon 
us ; The Communion of Saints is a Tenet of our faith. 
Now, as we ought not pray to or for them, so we may and 
must praise them. 

" This is the least we can do in return for those great 
offices they did the Church Militant, while they were with 



THE DOCTOR. 



641 



us, and now do, they are with God : nor have we any 
other probable way of communicating with them. 

" The Philosopher in his Morals makes it a question, 
whether the dead are in any way concerned in what befals 
them or their posterity after their decease ; and whether 
those honours and reproaches, which survivors cast upon 
them, reach them or no ? and he concludes it after a long 
debate in the affirmative ; not so, he says, as to alter 
their state, but, <rvfA,@<x.h\i(rBa,i it, to contribute some- 
what to it. 

" Tully, though not absolutely persuaded of an im- 
mortal soul, as speaking doubtfully and variously of it, 
yet is constant to this, that he takes a good name and a 
reputation, we leave behind us, to be a kind of immor- 
tality. 

" But there is more in it than so. Our remembrance 
of the Saints may be a means to improve their bliss, and 
heighten their rewards to all eternity. Abraham, the 
Father of the Faithful, hath his bosom thus daily enlarged 
for new comers. 

" Whether the heirs of the kingdom are, at their first 
admission, instated into a full possession of all their glory, 
and kept to that stint, I think may be a doubt. For if the 
faculty be perfected by the object, about which 'tis con- 
versant ; then the faculties of those blessed ones being 
continually employed upon an infinite object, must needs 
be infinitely perficible, and capable still of being more 
and more enlarged, and consequently of receiving still 
new and further additions of glory. 

" Not only so, (this is in Heaven:) but even the in- 
fluence of that example, they leave behind them on earth, 
drawing still more and more souls after them to God, 
will also add to those improvements to the end of the 
world, and bring in a revenue of accessory joys. 

" And would it not be unjust in us then to deny them 
those glorious advantages which our commemoration and 
inclination may and ought to give them." * 

Adam Littleton. 

Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and 
the mortal right lined circle must conclude to shut up 
all. There is no Antidote against the Opinion of Time, 
which temporally considereth all things ; Our Fathers 
find their Graves in our short memories and sadly tell us 
how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones 
tell truth scarce forty years : Generations pass while 
some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. 
To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter, to 
hope for Eternity by ^Enigmatical Epithetes, or first 
Letters of our names to be studied by Antiquaries, who 
we were, and have new names given us like many of 
the Mummies, are cold consolations unto the students 
of perpetuity even by everlasting Languages. 

Sir T. Browne. 



* " Five Sermons formerly printed," p. 61., at the end 
of the volume. The one from which the above passage is 
extracted is that preached at the obsequies of the Right 
Honourable the Lady Jane Cheyne. 



CHAPTER CCXXXYL 

CHARITY OF THE DOCTOR IN HIS OPINIONS. 
MASON THE POET. POLITICAL MEDICINE. 
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. CERVANTES. STATE 
PHYSICIANS. ADVANTAGE TO BE DERIVED 
EROM, WHETHER TO KING, CABINET, LORDS, 
OR COMMONS. EXAMPLES. PHILOSOPHY OF 
POPULAR EXPRESSIONS. COTTON MATHER. 
CLAUDE PAJON AND BARNABAS OLEY. 
TIMOTHY ROGERS AND MELANCHOLY. 

Goto! 
You are a subtile nation, you physicians, 
And grown the only cabinets in court ! B. Jonson. 

The Doctor, who was charitable in all his 
opinions, used to account and apologise for 
many of the errors of men, by what he 
called the original sin of their constitution, 
using the term not theologically, but in a 
physico-philosophical sense. What an old 
French physician said concerning Charles 
VIII. was in entire accord with his specula- 
tions, — ce corps etoit compose de mauvais 
pate, et de matiere catliareuse. Men of hard 
hearts and heavy intellect, he said, were 
made of stony materials. For a drunkard, 
his qualifying censure was, — " poor fellow ! 
bibulous clay — bibulous clay ! " Your 
light-brained, light-hearted people, who are 
too giddy ever to be good, had not earth 
enough, he said, in their composition. 
Those upon whose ungrateful temper be- 
nefits were ill bestowed, and on whom the 
blessings of fortune were thrown away, he 
excused by saying that they were made 
from a sandy soil; — and for Mammon's 
muckworms, — their mould was taken from 
the dunghill. 

Mason the poet was a man of ill-natured 
politics, out of humour with his country till 
the French Revolution startled him and 
brought him into a better state of feeling. 
This, however, was not while the Doctor 
lived, and till that time he could see nothing 
but tyranny and injustice in the proceedings 
of the British Government, and nothing but 
slavery and ruin to come for the nation. 
These opinions were the effects of ^^'higgery * 



See Vol. IV. p. 275. — p. 317. of this edition. 



642 



THE DOCTOR. 



acting upon a sour stomach and a saturnine 
constitution. To think ill of the present 
and augur worse of the future has long been 
accounted a proof of patriotism among those 
who by an illustrious antiphrasis call them- 
selves patriots. " What the Romans scorned 
to do after the battle of Cannes," said Lord 
Keeper Finch in one of his solid and elo- 
quent speeches, " what the Venetians never 
did when they had lost all their terra 
Jirma, that men are now taught to think a 
virtue and the sign of a wise and good man, 
desperare de Republica : and all this in a 
time of as much justice and peace at home, 
as good laws for the security of religion and 
liberty, as good execution of these laws, as 
great plenty of trade and commerce abroad, 
and as likely a conjuncture of affairs for the 
continuance of these blessings to us, as ever 
nation prospered under." 

The Doctor, when he spoke of this part of 
Mason's character, explained it by saying 
that the elements had not been happily 
tempered in him — " cold and dry, Sir ! " 
and then he shook his head and knit his 
brow with that sort of compassionate look 
which came naturally into his countenance 
when he was questioned concerning a patient 
whose state was unfavourable. 

But though he believed that many of our 
sins and propensities are bred in the bone, 
he disputed the other part of the proverb, 
and maintained that they might be got out 
of the flesh. And then generalising with a 
rapidity worthy of Humboldt himself, he 
asserted that all political evils in modern 
ages and civilised states were mainly owing 
to a neglect of the medical art ; — and that 
there would not, and could not be so many 
distempers in the body politic, if the prima 
vice were but attended to with proper care ; 
an opinion in which he was fortified by the 
authority of Sir William Temple. 

" I have observed the fate of Campania," 
says that eminent statesman, " determine 
contrary to all appearances, by the caution 
and conduct of a General, which was at- 
tributed by those that knew him to his age 
and infirmities, rather than his own true 
qualities, acknowledged otherwise to have 



been as great as most men of the age. I 
have seen the counsels of a noble country 
grow bold, or timorous, according to the fits 
of his good or ill- health that managed them, 
and the pulse of the Government beat high 
with that of the Governor ; and this unequal 
conduct makes way for great accidents in 
the world. Nay, I have often reflected 
upon the counsels and fortunes of the 
greatest monarchies rising and decaying 
sensibly with the ages and healths of the 
Princes and chief officers that governed 
them. And I remember one great minister 
that confessed to me, when he fell into one 
of his usual fits of the gout, he was no 
longer able to bend his mind or thought to 
any public business, nor give audiences 
beyond two or three of his domestics, 
though it were to save a kingdom ; and that 
this proceeded not from any violence of 
pain, but from a general languishing and 
faintness of spirits, which made him in 
those fits think nothing worth the trouble of 
one careful or solicitous thought. For the 
approaches, or lurkings of the Gout, the 
Spleen, or the Scurvy, nay the very fumes 
of indigestion, may indispose men to thought 
and to care, as well as diseases of danger 
and pain. Thus accidents of health grow to 
be accidents of State, and public constitu- 
tions come to depend in a great measure 
upon those of particular men ; which makes 
it perhaps seem necessary in the choice of 
persons for great employments, (at least such 
as require constant application and pains,) 
to consider their bodies as well as their 
minds, and ages and health as well as their 
abilities." 

Cervantes, according to the Doctor, clearly 
perceived this great truth, and went farther 
than Sir W. Temple, for he perceived also 
the practical application, though it was one 
of those truths which, because it might have 
been dangerous for him to propound them 
seriously, he was fain to bring forward in a 
comic guise, leaving it for the wise to dis- 
cover his meaning, and for posterity to 
profit by it. He knew — (Daniel loquitur) 
— for what did not Cervantes know ? — that 
if Philip II. had committed himself to the 



THE DOCTOR. 



643 



superintendence of a Physician instead of a 
Father Confessor, many of the crimes and 
miseries by which his reign is so infamously 
distinguished, might have been prevented. 
A man of his sad spirit and melancholy 
complexion to be dieted upon fish the whole 
forty days of Lent, two days in the week 
during the rest of the year, and on the eve 
of every holiday besides, — what could be 
expected but atrabilious thoughts, and 
cold-blooded resolutions ? Therefore Cer- 
vantes appointed a Physician over Sancho 
in his Baratarian government : the humour 
of the scene was for all readers, the applica- 
tion for those who could penetrate beyond 
the veil, the benefit for happier ages when 
the art of Government should be better 
understood, and the science of medicine be 
raised to its proper station in the state. 

Shakespeare intended to convey the same 
political lesson, when he said " take physic, 
pomp!" He used the word pomp instead 
of power, cautiously, for in those days it was 
a perilous thing to meddle with matters of 
state. 

When the Philosopher Carneades under- 
took to confute Zeno the Stoic in public 
argument, (still, reader, Daniel loquitur,} how 
did he prepare himself for the arduous dis- 
putation ? — by purging his head with helle- 
bore, to the intent that the corrupt humours 
which ascended thither from the stomach 
should not disturb the seat of memory and 
judgement, and obscure his intellectual per- 
ception. The theory, Sir, was erroneous, 
but the principle is good. When we re- 
quire best music from the instrument, ought 
we not first to be careful that all its parts 
are in good order, and if we find a string 
that jars, use our endeavours for tuning it ? 

It may have been the jest of a satirist 
that Dryden considered stewed prunes as 
the best means of putting his body into a 
state favourable for heroic composition ; but 
that odd person George Wither tells us of 
himself that he usually watched and fasted 
when he composed, that his spirit was lost if 
at such times he tasted meat or drink, and 
that if he took a glass of wine he could not 
write a verse : — no wonder, therefore, that 



his verses were for the most part in a weak 
and watery vein.* Father Paul Sarpi had 
a still more extraordinary custom : it is not 
to an enemy, but to his friend and admirers 
that we are indebted for informing us with 
what care that excellent writer attended to 
physical circumstance as affecting his intel- 
lectual powers. For when he was either 
reading or writing, alone, "his manner," 
says Sir Henry Wotton, " was to sit fenced 
with a castle of paper about his chair, and 
over head ; for he was of our Lord of St. 
Alban's opinion that all air is predatory, and 
especially hurtful when the spirits are most 
employed." 

There should be a State Physician to 
the King, besides his Physicians ordinary 
and extraordinary, — one whose sole busi- 
ness should be to watch over the royal 
health as connected with the discharge of 
the royal functions, a head keeper of the 
King's health. 

For the same reason there ought to be a 
Physician for the Cabinet, a Physician for 
the Privy Council, a Physician for the Bench 
of Bishops, a Physician for the twelve Judges, 
two for the House of Lords, four for the 
House of Commons, one for the Admiralty, 
one for the War Office, one for the Directors 
of the East India Company, (there was no 
Board of Control in the Doctor's days, or 
he would certainly have advised that a Phy- 
sician should be placed upon that Establish- 
ment also) : one for the Lord Mayor, two 
for the Common Council, four for the 
Livery. (He was speaking in the days of 
Wilkes and Liberty.) " How much mis- 
chief," said he, " might have been prevented 
by cupping the Lord Mayor, blistering a 
few of the Aldermen, administering salts 
and manna to lower the pulse of civic 
patriotism, and keeping the city orators 
upon a low regimen for a week before every 
public meeting." 

Then in the Cabinet what evils might 
be averted by administering laxatives or 
corroborants as the case required. 



* The Greek Proverb, adverted toby Horace in 1 Epist. 
xix., was in the Doctor's thoughts: 

uSaig §£ Tina))/ eiSsy ocv rixoi (ToQov. 



644 



THE DOCTOK. 



In the Lords and Commons, by clearing 
away bile, evacuating ill-humours and occa- 
sionally by cutting for the simples.* 

While men are what they are, weak, 
frail, inconstant, fallible, peccable, sinful 
creatures, — it is in vain to hope that Peers 
and Commoners will prepare themselves for 
the solemn exercise of their legislative func- 
tions by fasting and prayer, — that so they 
may be better fitted for retiring into them- 
selves, and consulting upon momentous 
questions, the Urim and Thummim which 
God hath placed in the breast of every man. 
But even as Laws are necessary for keeping 
men within the limits of their duty when 
conscience fails, so in this case it should be 
part of the law of Parliament that what its 
Members will not do for themselves, the 
Physician should do for them. They should 
go through a preparatory course of medicine 
before every session, and be carefully at- 
tended as long as Parliament was sitting. 

Traces of such a practice, as of many 
important and primeval truths, are found 
among savages, from whom the Doctor was 
of opinion that much migjit be learned, if 
their customs were diligently observed and 
their traditions carefully studied. In one 
of the bravest nations upon the Mississippi, 
the warriors before they set out upon an 
expedition always prepared themselves by 
taking the Medicine of War, which was an 
emetic, about a gallon in quantity for each 
man, and to be swallowed at one draught. 
There are other tribes in which the Beloved 
Women prepare a beverage at the Physic 
Dance, and it is taken to wash away sin. 

" Here," said the Doctor, " are vestiges of 
early wisdom, probably patriarchal, and if 
so, revealed," — for he held that all needful 
knowledge was imparted to man at his 
creation. And the truth of the principle is 
shown in common language. There is often 
a philosophy in popular expressions and 
forms of speech, which escapes notice, be- 
cause words are taken as they are uttered, 
at their current value, and we rest satisfied 
with their trivial acceptation. We take 

* The probable origin of this Proverb is given in 
Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. 



them in the husk and the shell, but some- 
times it is worth while to look for the kernel. 
Do we not speak of sound and orthodox 
opinions, — sound principles, sound learning ? 
mens sana in corpore sano. A sound mind 
is connected with a sound body, and sound 
and orthodox opinions result from the sanity 
of both. Unsound opinions are diseased 
ones, and therefore the factious, the here- 
tical and the schismatic, ought to be put 
under the care of a physician. 

"I have read of a gentleman," says Cot- 
ton Mather, " who had an humour of making 
singular and fanciful expositions of scripture ; 
but one Doctor Sim gave him a dose of 
physic, which when it had wrought, the 
gentleman became orthodox immediately 
and expounded at the old rate no more." 

Thus as the accurate, and moderate, and 
erudite Mosheim informs us, the French 
theologian Claude Pajon was of opinion that 
in order to produce that amendment of the 
heart which is called regeneration, nothing 
more is requisite than to put the body, if its 
habit is bad, into a sound state by the power 
of physic, and having done this, then to set 
truth and falsehood before the understand- 
ing, and virtue and vice before the will, 
clearly and distinctly in their genuine 
colours, so as that their nature and their 
properties may be fully apprehended. But 
the Doctor thought that Pajon carried his 
theory too far, and ought to have been phy- 
sicked himself. 

That learned and good man Barnabas 
Oley, the friend and biographer of the saintly 
Herbert, kept within the bounds of discre- 
tion, when he delivered an opinion of the 
same tendency. After showing what power 
is exercised by art over nature, 1st, in in- 
animate materials, 2dly, in vegetables, and 
3dly, the largeness or latitude of its power 
over the memory, the imagination and loco- 
motive faculties of sensitive creatures, he 
proceeds to the fourth rank, the rational, 
" which adds a diadem of excellency to the 
three degrees above mentioned, being an 
approach unto the nature angelical and 
divine." "Now," says he, " 1st, in as much 
as the human body partly agrees with the 



THE DOCTOR. 



645 



first rank of materials inanimate, so can Art 
partly use it, as it uses them, to frame (rather 
to modify the frame of) it into great variety ; 
the head thus, the nose so ; and other duc- 
tile parts, as is seen and read, after other 
fashions. 2. Art can do something to the 
Body answerable to what Gardeners do to 
plants. If our Blessed Saviour's words 
(Matthew vi. 27.) deny all possibility of 
adding procerity or tallness to the stature, 
yet as the Lord Verulam notes, to make the 
Body dwarfish, crook-shouldered (as some 
Persians did) to recover straightness, or pro- 
cure slenderness, is in the power of Art. 
But, 3. much more considerable authority 
has it over the humours, either so to impel 
and enrage them, that like furious streams 
they shall dash the Body (that bottom where- 
in the precious Soul is embarked) against 
dangerous rocks, or run it upon desperate 
sands ; or so to attemper and tune them, 
that they shall become like calm waters or 
harmonious instruments for virtuous habits, 
introduced by wholesome moral precepts, to 
practise upon. It is scarce credible what 
services the Noble Science of Physic may do 
unto Moral, {yea to Grace and Christian,) 
virtue, by prescribing diet to prevent, or 
medicine to allay the fervours and eruptions 
of humours, of blood, and of that irriguum 
concupiscentice, or 6 rpoxog rrjg yevecrewc, 
especially if these jewels, their recipes, light 
into obedient ears. These helps of bettering 
nature are within her lowest and middle 
region of Diet and Medicine." 

A sensible woman of the Doctor's ac- 
quaintance, (the mother of a young family,) 
entered so far into his views upon this sub- 
ject, that she taught her children from their 
earliest childhood to consider ill-humour as 
a disorder which was to be cured by physic. 
Accordingly she had always small doses 
ready, and the little patients, whenever it 
was thought needful, took rhubarb for the 
crossness. No punishment was required. 
Peevishness or ill-temper and rhubarb were 
associated in their minds always as cause 
and effect. 

There are Divines who have thought that 
melancholy may with advantage be treated 



in age, as fretfulness in this family was in 
childhood. Timothy Rogers, who having 
been long afflicted with Trouble of Mind 
and the Disease of Melancholy, wrote a dis- 
course concerning both for the use of his 
fellow sufferers, says of Melancholy, that 
" it does generally indeed first begin at the 
body, and then conveys its venom to the 
mind ; and if anything could be found that 
might keep the blood and spirits in their due 
temper and motion, this would obstruct its 
further progress, and in a great measure 
keep the soul clear. I pretend not" (he 
continues) "to tell you what medicines are 
proper to remove it, and I know of none, I 
leave you to advise with such as are learned 
in the profession of Physic." And then he 
quotes a passage from " old Mr. Greenham's 
Comfort for afflicted Consciences." " If a 
Man," saith old Mr. Greenham, " that is 
troubled in conscience come to a Minister, 
it may be he will look all to the Soul and 
nothing to the Body : if he come to a Phy- 
sician he considereth the Body and neglect- 
eth the Soul. For my part, I would never 
have the Physician's counsel despised, nor 
the labour of the Minister neglected : be- 
cause the Soul and Body dwelling together, — 
it is convenient, that as the Soul should be 
cured by the Word, by Prayer, by Fasting, 
or by Comforting, so the Body must be 
brought into some temperature by physic, 
and diet, by harmless diversions and such 
like ways ; providing always that it be so 
done in the fear of God, as not to think by 
these ordinary means quite to smother or 
evade our troubles, but to use them as pre- 
paratives, whereby our Souls may be made 
more capable of the spiritual methods which 
are to follow afterwards." 

But Timothy Bright, Doctor of Physic, 
is the person who had the most profound 
reverence for the medical art. " No one," 
he said, " shoiild touch so holy a thing that 
hath not passed the whole discipline of libe- 
ral sciences, and washed himself pure and 
clean in the waters of wisdom and under- 
standing." " O Timothy Bright, Timothy 
Bright," said the Doctor, " rightly wert 
thou called Timothv Bright, for thou wert 



646 



THE DOCTOR. 



a Bright Timothy ! " Nor art thou less de- 
serving of praise, O Timothy Bright, say I, 
for having published an abridgement of the 
Book of Acts and Monuments of the Church, 
written by that Reverend Father Master 
John Fox, and by thee thus reduced into a 
more accessible form, — for such as either 
through want of leisure or ability have not 
the use of so necessary a history. 



CHAPTER CCXXXVII. 

MORE MALADIES THAN THE BEST PHYSICIANS 
CAN PREVENT BY REMEDIES. THE DOCTOR 
NOT GIVEN TO QUESTIONS, AND OF THE 
POCO-CURANTE SCHOOL AS TO ALE THE 
POLITICS OF THE DAY. 

A slight answer to an intricate and useless question is a 
fit cover to such a dish ; a cabbage leaf is good enough to 
cover a pot of mushrooms. Jeremy Taylor. 

Yet in his serious moods the Doctor sadly 
confessed with that Sir George, whom the 
Scotch ungratefully call Bloody Mackenzie, 
that " as in the body natural, so likewise in 
the politic, Nature hath provided more 
diseases than the best of Physicians can pre- 
vent by remedies." He knew that king- 
doms as well as individuals have their agues 
and calentures, are liable to plethora some- 
times, and otherwhiles to atrophy, to fits of 
madness which no hellebore can cure, and 
to decay and dissolution which no human 
endeavours can avert. With the maladies 
of the State indeed he troubled himself not, 
for though a true-born Englishman, he was 
as to all politics of the day, of the Poco- 
curante school. But with those of the 
human frame his thoughts were continually 
employed ; it was his business to deal with 
them ; his duty and his earnest desire to 
heal them, under God's blessing, where heal- 
ing was humanly possible, or to alleviate 
them, when anything more than alleviation 
was beyond the power of human skill. 

The origin of evil was a question upon 
which he never ventured. Here, too, he 
said with Sir George Mackenzie, " as I am 
not able by the Jacob's Ladder of my merit 



to scale Heaven, so am I less able by the 
Jacob's Staff of my private ability to take 
up the true altitude of its mysteries :" and 
borrowing a play upon words from the same 
old Essayist, he thought the brain had too 
little pia mater, which was too curious in 
such inquiries. But the mysteries of his own 
profession afforded " ample room and verge 
enough" for his speculations, however wide 
and wild their excursions. Those mysteries 
are so many, so momentous, and so inscru- 
table, that he wondered not at any super- 
stitions which have been excogitated by 
bewildered imagination, and implicitly fol- 
lowed by human weakness in its hopes and 
fears, its bodily and its mental sufferings. 

As little did he wonder at the theories 
advanced by men who were, in their days, 
the Seraphic and Angelic and Irrefragable 
Doctors of the healing art : — the tartar of 
Paracelsus, the Bias and Gas of Van Hel- 
mont, nor in later times at the animalcular 
hypotheses of Langius and Paullinus ; nor 
at the belief of elder nations, as the Jews, 
and of savages everywhere, that all mala- 
dies are the immediate work of evil spirits. 
But when he called to mind the frightful 
consequences to which the belief of this 
opinion has led, the cruelties which have 
been exercised, the crimes which have been 
perpetrated, the miseries which have been 
inflicted and endured, it made him shudder 
at perceiving that the most absurd error 
may produce the greatest mischief to society, 
if it be accompanied with presumption, and 
if any real or imaginary interest be con- 
nected with maintaining it. 

The Doctor, like his Master and benefac- 
tor Peter Hopkins, was of the Poco-curante 
school in politics. He said that the War- 
wickshire gentleman who was going out with 
his hounds when the two armies were begin- 
ning to engage at Edge-hill, was not the 
worst Englishman who took the field that 
day. 

Local circumstances favoured this ten- 
dency to political indifference. It was ob- 
served in the 34th Chapter of this Opus 
that one of the many reasons for which our 
Philosopher thought Doncaster a very like- 



THE DOCTOR. 



647 



able place of residence was, that it sent no 
Members to Parliament. And Yorkshire 
being too large a county for any of its great 
families to engage lightly in contesting it, 
the Election fever, however it might rage 
in other towns or other parts of the county, 
never prevailed there. But the constitution 
of the Doc tor s mind secured him from all 
excitement of this nature. Even in the 
days of Wilkes and Liberty, when not a 
town in England escaped the general In- 
fluenza, he was not in the slightest degree 
affected by it, nor did he ever take up the 
Public Advertiser for the sake of one of 
Junius's Letters. 



CHAPTER CCXXXVIII. 

SIMONIDES. TUNERAL POEMS. UNFEELING 
OPINION IMPUTED TO THE GREEK POET, 
AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE. SENECA. 
JEREMY TAYLOR .AND THE DOCTOR ON 
WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND, 
WERE MEN WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD 
MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE. 

Intendale chi pud ; che non e stretto 
Alcuno a creder piit di quel che vuole. 

Orlando Innamorato. 

Among the lost works of antiquity, there 
are few poems which I should so much 
rejoice in recovering, as those of Simonides. 
Landor has said of him that he and Pindar 
wrote nothing bad ; that his characteristics 
were simplicity, brevity, tenderness, and an 
assiduous accuracy of description. "If I 
were to mention," he adds, " what I fancy 
would give an English reader the best idea 
of his manner, I should say, the book of 
Ruth." 

One species of composition wherein he 
excelled was that which the Dutch in their 
straight- forward way call Lylizangen or Lyh- 
dichten, but for which we have no appropriate 
name, — poems in commemoration of the 
dead. Beautiful specimens are to be found 
in the poetry of all countries, and this might 
be expected, threnodial being as natural as 
amatory verse ; and as the characteristic of 
the latter is passion with little reflection, 
that of the former is, as naturally, to be at 
the same time passionate and thoughtful. 



Our own language was rich in such poems 
during the Elizabethan age, and that which 
followed it. Of foreign poets none has in 
this department exceeded Chiabrera. 

There is a passage among the fragments 
of Simonides which is called by his old 
editor consolatory, -rrnp^yopiKov : but were 
it not for the authority of Seneca, who un- 
doubtedly was acquainted with the whole 
poem, I should not easily be persuaded that 
so thoughtful, so pensive, so moralising a 
poet would, in any mood of mind, have re- 
commended such consolation : 

TVsu /j.h dxvovro? obx, ocv Iv6v,uoi/u.i8oi, 
E'i n Qgovolii.lv, nXtiov -/if&ifK; f^ioLs' 

let us not call to mind the dead, if we think 
of him at all, more than a single day. Indeed 
I am not certain from what Seneca says, 
whether the poet was speaking in his own, 
or in an assumed character, nor whether he 
spoke seriously or satirically ; or I cannot 
but suspect that the passage would appear 
very differently, if we saw it in its place. 
Malherbe gives the same sort of advice in 
his consolation to M. dm Perier upon the 
death of a daughter. 

Ne te lasse done plus d'inutiles complaintes ; 

Mais sage a Vavenir, 
Aime une ombre comme ombre, et des cendres eteintes 

Eteins le souvenir ; 

such a feeling is much more in character 
with a Frenchman than with Simonides. 

Seneca himself, Stoic though he was, gave 
no such advice, but accounted the remem- 
brance of his departed friends among his 
solemn delights, not looking upon them as 
lost : Mihi amicorum defunctorum cogitatio 
dulcis ac blanda est; habidenim illos, tanquam 
amis sums ; amissi tanquam habcam. 

My venerable friend was not hardened by 
a profession, which has too often the effect 
of blunting the feelings, even if it does not 
harden the heart. His disposition and his 
happy education preserved him from that 
injury ; and as his religion taught him that 
death was not in itself an evil, — that for 
him, and for those who believed with him, 
it had no sting, — the subject was as familiar 
to his meditations as to his professional prac- 
tice. A speculation which Jeremy Taylor, 
Avithout insisting on it, oflers to the con- 



648 



THE DOCTOR. 



sideration of inquisitive and modest persons, 
appeared to him far more probable than the 
common opinion which Milton expresses 
when he says that the fruit of the Forbidden 
Tree brought death into the world. That, 
the Bishop argues, " which would have been, 
had there been no sin, and that which re- 
mains when the sin or guiltiness is gone, is 
not properly the punishment of the sin. But 
dissolution of the soul and body should have 
been, if Adam had not sinned ; for the world 
would have been too little to have enter- 
tained those myriads of men, which must, 
in all reason, have been born from that 
blessing of 'Increase and multiply,' which 
was given at the first creation : and to have 
confined mankind to the pleasures of this 
world, in case he had not fallen, would have 
been a punishment of his innocence : but 
however, it might have been, though God had 
not been angry, and shall still be, even when 
the sin is taken off. The proper consequent 
of this will be, that when the Apostle says 
' Death came in by Sin,' and that ' Death 
is the wages of Sin,' he primarily and liter- 
ally means the solemnities, and causes, and 
infelicities, and untimeliness of temporal 
death ; and not merely the dissolution, which 
is directly no evil, but an inlet to a better 
state." 

As our friend agreed in this opinion with 
Bishop Taylor ; and moreover as he read in 
Scriptures that Enoch and Elijah had been 
translated from this world without tasting of 
death ; and as he deemed it probable at least, 
that St. John, the beloved disciple, had been 
favoured with a like exemption from the 
common lot, he thought that Asgill had been 
hardly dealt with in being expelled from 
Parliament for his "Argument," that ac- 
cording to the Covenant of Eternal Life, 
revealed in the Scriptures, man might 
be translated from hence, without passing 
through death. The opinion, Dr. Dove 
thought, might be enthusiastic, the reason- 
ing wild, the conclusion untenable, and the 
manner of the book indecorous, or irreverent. 
But he had learned that much, which appears 
irreverent, and in reality is so, has not been 
irreverently intended ; and the opinion, 



although groundless, seemed to him any- 
thing rather than profane. 

But the exemptions which are recorded 
in the Bible could not, in his judgement, be 
considered as showing what would have been 
the common lot if our first parents had pre- 
served their obedience. This he opined would 
more probably have been uthanasy than 
translation ; death, not preceded by infir- 
mity and decay, but as welcome, and perhaps 
as voluntary, as sleep. 

Or possibly the transition from a corpo- 
real to a spiritual, — or more accurately in 
our imperfect language, — from an earthly 
to a celestial state of being, might have been 
produced by some developement, some formal 
mutation as visible, (adverting to a favourite 
fancy of his own,) as that which in the but- 
terfly was made by the ancients their emblem 
of immortality. Bishop Van Mildert shows 
us upon scriptural authority that " the de- 
gree of perfection at which we may arrive 
has no definite limits, but is to go on in- 
creasing as long as this state of probation 
continues." So in the paradisiacal, and pos- 
sibly in the millennial state, he thought, that 
with such an intellectual and moral-improve- 
ment, a corresponding organic evolution 
might keep pace ; and that as the child 
expands into man, so man might mature 
into Angel. 



CHAPTER CCXXXIX. 

THE DOCTOR DISSENTS FROM A PROPOSITION 
OF warburton's, AND SHOWS IT TO BE 
FALLACIOUS. HUTCHINSON'S REMARKS ON 
THE POWERS OF BRUTES. LORD SHAFTES- 
BURY QUOTED. APOLLONIUS AND THE 
KING OF BABYLON. DISTINCTION IN THE 
TALMUD BETWEEN AN INNOCENT BEAST 
AND A VICIOUS ONE. OPINION OF ISAAC 
LA PEYRESC THE QUESTION DE OR1GINE 
ET NATURA ANIMARUM IN BRUTIS AS 
BROUGHT BEFORE THE THEOLOGIANS OF 
SEVEN PROTESTANT ACADEMIES IN THE 
YEAR 1635 BY DANIEL SENNERTUS. 
Toutes veritez ne sont pas bonnes a dire serieusement. 

GOMGAM. 

Warburton has argued that "from the 
nature of any action morality cannot arise, 



THE DOCTOK. 



649 



nor from its effects; — not from the first, 
because being only reasonable or unreason- 
able, nothing follows but a fitness in doing 
one, and an absurdity in doing the other ; — 
not from the second, because did the good 
or evil produced make the action moral, 
brutes, from whose actions proceed both good 
and evil, would have morality." Bat War- 
burton's proposition is fallacious, and his 
reasoning is inconclusive ; there is an essen- 
tial difference between right and wrong, 
upon which the moral law is founded ; and 
in the reductio ad absurdum upon which he 
relies, there is no absurdity. The language 
of the people is sometimes true to nature 
and philosophy when that of the learned 
departs widely from the one, and is mistaken 
in the other. When we call a beast vicious, 
we mean strictly what the word implies ; 
and if we never speak of one as virtuous, 
it is because man reserves the praise of 
virtue to his own kind. The word good 
supplies its place. A horse that has any 
vice in him is never called good. 

" In this case alone it is," says Lord Shaf- 
tesbury, " we call any creature worthy or 
virtuous, when it can have the notion of a 
public interest, and can attain the specula- 
tion or science of what is morally good or 
ill, admirable or blameable, right or wrong. 
For though we may vulgarly call a horse 
vicious, yet we never say of a good one, 
nor of any mere beast, idiot, or changeling, 
though ever so good-natured, that he is 
worthy or virtuous. 

" So that if a creature be generous, kind, 
constant, compassionate, yet if he cannot 
reflect on what he himself does, or sees 
others do, so as to take notice of what is 
worthy or honest; and make that notice or 
conception of ivorth and honesty to be an 
object of his affection, he has not the 
character of being virtuous ; for thus, and 
no otherwise, he is capable of having a sense 
of right and wrong; a sentiment or judge- 
ment of what is done through just, equal 
and good affection, or the contrary." 

The Jews upon this subject agree with 
the common and natural opinion ; and the 
Talmud accordingly, when any mischief has 



been done by an animal, distinguishes be- 
tween an innocent beast and a vicious one, 
the owner of an innocent one being re- 
quired to pay only half the amount of an 
injury thus, as it was deemed, casually in- 
curred. There have been cases in which 
the laws have considered a beast as guilty 
of a crime, and amenable therefore to penal 
justice. In the year 1403 Simon de Baude- 
mont, Lieutenant at Meulont of Jhean Lord 
of Maintenon, the Bailiff of Mantes and Meu- 
lont, signed an attestation making known the 
expences which had been incurred in order 
to execute justice on a Sow that had eaten a 
child. " For expences with the jail the 
charge was 6 sols. Item, to the executioner 
who came from Paris to Meulont to put the 
sentence in execution by the command of 
our Lord the Bailiff and of the king's At- 
torney, 54 sols. Item, for the carriage that 
conveyed her to execution, 6 sols. Item, 
for ropes to tie and haul her up, 2 sols, 
8 deniers. Item, for gloves 12 deniers; 
amounting in the whole to 69 sols, 8 de- 
niers." It must be supposed the Execu- 
tioner insisted upon the gloves, as a point of 
honour, that no one might reproach him 
with having sullied his hands by performing 
upon such a subject. 

When Apollonius was introduced to the 
King of Babylon, the King invited him to 
sacrifice with him, for he was about to offer 
a ISTisean horse to the Sun, selected for its 
beauty and adorned with all pomp for the 
occasion. But the Philosopher replied, " O 
King, do you sacrifice after your manner, 
and give me leave to sacrifice after mine." 
He then took frankincense, and prayed, 
saying, " O Sun, conduct me so far as it 
seemeth good to me and to thee. And let 
me become acquainted with virtuous men ; 
but as for the wicked, let me neither know 
them nor they me." And throwing the 
frankincense in the fire he observed the 
smoke, how it ascended and which way it 
bent, and just touching the fire when it 
seemed that he had sacrificed enough, he 
said to the King that he had performed the 
rites of his country, and forthwith withdrew 
that he might have nothing to do with blood 



650 



THE DOCTOR. 



and slaughter. Afterwards when the King 
took him where were many lions, bears, and 
panthers reserved for sport, invited him to go 
with him and hunt them, Apollonius replied, 
" King, you should remember, that I did not 
choose to be present at your sacrifice, much 
less should I like to see animals wounded, 
and by the pain of their wounds rendered 
more ferocious than nature has made them." 

Isaac la Peyresc thought differently from 
the Talmudists and the French Lawyers. 
He says, quoting the Apostle, Ubi nori est 
lex, neque prcevaricatio est. Where ' no law 
is, there is no transgression.' Prcevaricatio 
autem eadem est, quce transgressio legis : ilia 
ipsa proprie quce peccatum imputationis labe 
infecit. Quod ut compingatur in oculos : 
pecudes actualiter et materialiter eadem 
faciunt, quce transgrediuntur homines ; in- 
cesiant, rapiunt, occidunt; non erit tamen 
uspiam adeo supinus qui dicat, pecudes pec- 
care ad similitudinem transgressionis homi- 
num ; quia pecudes quce hcec peccant, sequuntur 
tantum suam naturam et suam materiam ; 
neque legum transgrediuntur ullam, quia nulla 
eis data est cujus transgressione formetur in 
eis et imputetur peccatum. 

Yet it cannot be doubted that in such a 
case Peyresc himself, disregarding his own 
arguments, would have ordered the Sow to 
be put to death. 

This author derives peccatum from pecus, 
for, says he, " as often as a man wilfully de- 
parts from that right reason which con- 
stitutes him man, — as often as under the 
impulse of that brute matter which he has 
in common with beasts, he commits any 
action fitting in a beast, but unworthy in 
man, so often he seems to fall below his 
own species, and sink into that of a brute." 
Latini nomen peccati mutuati sunt a pecore. 
Quoties enim homo delirat a recta ratione ilia 
quce hominem constituit; quoties impulsu ma- 
teria suae quam habet communem cum brutis, 
quid agit dignum pecore, et indignum homine, 
toties cadere videtur a specie sua, et incidere 
in speciem pecoris sive bruti. 

Pecunia is known to be derived from 
Pecus, wealth, of which money is the repre- 
sentative, having originally consisted in 



cattle. As money is proverbially the root 
of all evil, this etymological connection 
might be remarkable enough to be deemed 
mysterious by those who are fond of dis- 
covering mysteries in words. 

" Brutes," Hutchinson says, " are made in 
scripture objects to inculcate the duties in 
society, and even emblems of spiritual and 
divine perfections. Many of them are more 
strictly bound in pairs than is common be- 
tween men and women ; many, both males 
and females, take greater care and pains, 
and run greater risques for the education 
and defence of their young, than any of our 
species. Many of them excel us in instruct- 
ing their young, so in policy, in industry, 
in mechanical arts and operations. And 
there are other species among them, examples 
to deter men from the vices in society." 
" The power in brutes," he says, " is by the 
same agent as that in the body of man, and 
they are made of the same species of dust ; 
most of them are guided by what is called 
instinct ; some of them are tamed and dis- 
ciplined and their powers made serviceable 
to men, and all of them are subject to the 
immediate power of God, when he pleases to 
direct them. Mechanism is carried so far in 
them, that in the parts or degrees of sensa- 
tion they excel man ; that by every one of 
their actions man might see the ne plus ultra 
of sense, and know how to distinguish the 
difference between them and the decayed 
image in him, to value it accordingly, and 
excite a proportionate zeal in him to recover 
the first perfections in that image, and aug- 
ment them to secure the pleasure of exer- 
cising them upon the most desirable objects 
to all eternity." So far so good, but this 
once influential writer makes an erroneous 
conclusion when he says, " if you allow any- 
thing farther than mechanism to Brutes, 
imagine that they have souls, or think, or 
act the part of souls : you either begin to 
think that you have no soul, or that it is, 
such as are in Brutes, mortal." 

The question de Origine et Naturd Ani- 
marum in Brutis was brought before the 
Theologians of seven Protestant Academies 
in the year 1635, by Daniel Sennertus, Pro- 



THE DOCTOR. 



651 



fessor of Medicine at Wittemberg, of whose 
Institutes Sir Thomas Browne says to a 
student in that art, " assure yourself that 
when you are a perfect master of them you 
will seldom meet with any point in physic to 
which you will not be able to speak like a 
man." It was the opinion of this very 
learned professor that what in scholastic 
language is called the form of every perfect 
thing, (distinguished from figure, — forma 
est natures bonum,figura, artis opus,) though it 
is not a soul, yet even in precious stones is 
something altogether different from the four 
elements, and that every soul, or living 
principle, is a certain quintessence ; the 
wonderful operations in plants, and the 
more wonderful actions of brute creatures, 
far exceeding all power of the elements, 
had convinced him of this. But for assert- 
ing it, Freitagius the medical Professor at 
G-roninghen attacked him fiercely as a blas- 
phemer and a heretic. Sennertus being 
then an old man was more moved by this 
outrage than became one of his attainments 
and high character. So he laid the case 
before the Universities of Leipsic, Rostock, 
Basle, Marpurg, Konigsberg, Jena, Stras- 
burg, and Altdorff, and he requested their 
opinion upon these two propositions, whether 
what he had affirmed, that the souls of brute 
creatures had been created at first from 
nothing by the Deity, and were not of an 
elementary nature, but of something dif- 
ferent, was blasphemous and heretical, or 
whether it were not an ignorant opinion of 
his assailant, that brute animals consisted 
wholly of elementary matter, both as to 
their body and soul ? 

They all answered the questions more or 
less at large, the Leipsic Doctors saying, 
Officii nostri duximus esse ut in timore Domini 
ea sub diligentem disquisitionem vocaremus. 
They saw nothing irreligious in the opinion 
that God at the creation had formed the 
bodies of brutes from elementary matter, 
and created their souls ex nihilo ; after which 
both were reproduced in the natural course 
of generation ; these souls, however, were not 
immortal, nor so separable from the matter 
with which they were united, as to survive 



it, and exist without it, or return again into 
their bodies ; but when the animals died, the 
animal soul died also. Thus the excellence 
of man was unimpaired, and the privilege of 
the human soul remained inviolate, the pre- 
rogative of man being that God had breathed 
into him the breath of life, whereby he be- 
came a living soul. Thus they fully ac- 
quitted Sennertus of the charge brought 
against him; and waiving any such direct 
condemnation of his accuser as he had 
desired, condemned in strong terms the 
insolent manner in which the accusation had 
been preferred. 

The Theologians of Rostock replied more 
briefly. Dismissing at once the charge 
of blasphemy and heresy as absurd, they 
treated the question as purely philosophical, 
saying, Quod de elementari natura animarum 
brntorum dicitur, de Mo nostrum non est dis- 
serere. Arbitramur, hcec non solum Philo- 
sophorum, sed et libertati, super his modeste, 
veritatis inveniendce studio, philosophantium 
permittenda ; quos nimium constringere, et 
unius hominis, Ainstotelis, alteriusve, velle 
alligare opinioni, pugnare videtur cum natura 
intellectus humani, quern nulli opinioni servum 
Deus esse voluit. Concerning the second 
question, they were not willing, they said, 
to draw the saw of contention with any one ; 
Si tamen, quod sentimus dicendum est, re- 
spondemus, ilium qui caelum et terram ex ni- 
hilo creavit, non eguisse ulla materia, ex qua 
brutorum animas producer et ; sed illi placuisse 
iis quce Moses recitat verbis compellare ter- 
ram et aquam, et ad solius Omnipotentis nutum 
et imperium, ex subjectis qua 1 compellarit, 
animas emersisse. This answer Sennertus 
obtained through his friend Lauremberg the 
Horticulturist and Botanist, who advised 
him at the same time to disregard all in- 
vidious attacks ; Turbas tibi dari quad 
libere philosophari satagis, id ipse nost/, ncque 
novum esse, neque insolens, hdc atate. Ean- 
dem tecum sortem experiuntur omnes elegant er 
et solide e?-uditi, quibus qui paria facere non 
valet, invidet et oblatrat. Tu verb noli hoc 
nomine te quicquam macerare neu obtreeta- 
tionem Warn gravius vocarc ad animum. Nota 
est orbi lua cruditio, tua virtus ct itigenuitas, 



652 



THE DOCTOR, 



quce ea propter nullam patietur jacturam. Tu 
modo, ut hactenus fecisti, pergito bene mereri 
de JRepublicd literarid, et rnilii favere, certb 
tibi persuasus, habere te hie loci hominem tui 
amantem, et observantem maxime. 

Zuinger answered more at large for the 
Faculty at Basle. They bade him not to 
marvel that he should be accused of heresy 
and blasphemy, seeing that the same charge 
has been brought against their Theologians, 
who when they taught according to Scrip- 
ture that God alone was the Father of the 
spirits as their parents were of their bodies, 
and that the reasonable soul therefore was 
not derived from their parents, but infused 
and concreated 6vpa6ev a Deo ajAawg 
were accused either of Pelagianism, as if 
they had denied Original Sin, or of blas- 
phemy, as if they had made God the author 
of sin. They admonished him to regard 
such calumnies more justly and quietly, for 
evil and invidious tongues could never de- 
tract from that estimation which he had won 
for him in the Republic of Letters. Never- 
theless as he had asked for their opinion, 
they would freely deliver it. 

First, then, as to the postulate which he 
had premised in the Epistle accompanying 
his Questions, that wherever there is crea- 
tion, something is produced from nothing, 
(ubicunque creatio est, ibi aliquid ex nihilo 
producitur,) if by this he intended, that in no 
mode of creation, whether it were kt'ktiq, 
or 7rot?/cric, or -nXaoiQ, there was no sub- 
strate matter out of which something was 
made by the omnipotent virtue of the Deity, 
in that case they thought, that his opinion 
was contrary to Scripture, forasmuch as it 
plainly appeared in the book of Genesis, 
that neither the male nor female were 
created from nothing, but the man from 
the dust of the ground, and the woman from 
one of his ribs, tanquam prcecedentibus cor- 
porum materiebus. But though it is in- 
dubitable that the creation of the soul in 
either parent was immediately ex nihilo, as 
was shown in the creation of Adam, we see 
nevertheless that the name of creation has 
been applied by Moses to the formation 
(plasmationi) of their bodies. But if Sen- 



nertus's words were to be understood as in- 
tending that wherever there was a creation, 
something was produced in this either ex 
nihilo absolutely, or relatively and Kara, n 
out of something, some preceding matter, 
which though certainly in itself something, 
yet relatively, — that which is made out of 
it, is nothing, (nihil, aut non ens,) because it 
hath in itself no power, liability, or aptitude 
that it should either be, or become that 
which God by his miraculous and omnipotent 
virtue makes it, they had no difficulty in 
assenting to this. As for example, the dust 
of which God formed the body of Adam 
was something and nothing. Something in 
itself, for it was earth ; nothing in respect 
of that admirable work of the human body 
which God formed of it. 

As for the question whether his opinion 
was blasphemous and heretical, it could be 
neither one nor the other, for it neither 
derogated from the glory of God, nor touched 
upon any fundamental article of faith. Some 
there were who opined that Chaos was 
created ex nihilo, which they understood by 
Tohu Vabohu, from which all things celestial 
and elementary were afterwards mediately 
created by God. Others exploding Chaos 
held that heaven, earth, water, and air, were 
created ex nihilo. But they did not charge 
each other with blasphemy and heresy be- 
cause of this disagreement, and verily they 
who thought that the souls of brutes were 
originally created by God ex nihilo appeared 
no more to derogate from the might, majesty 
and glory of God, than those who held that 
brutes were wholly created from the element. 
The virtue of an omnipotent God became 
in either case presupposed. 

There was no heresy, they said, in his asser- 
tion that the souls of brutes were not of an 
elementary nature, but of something differ- 
ent : provided that a just distinction were 
made between the rational soul and the brute 
soul, the difference being not merely specific 
but generic. For the rational soul is alto- 
gether of a spiritual nature and essence, 
adebque Ens uti vocant iranscendens, bearing 
the image of God in this, that properly speak- 
ing it is a spirit, as God is a Spirit. 2d. 



THE DOCTOR, 



653 



The rational soul as such, as Aristotle him- 
self testifies, has no bodily energies, or opera- 
tions ; its operations indeed are performed 
in the body but not by the body, nor by 
bodily organs ; but the contrary is true con- 
cerning the souls of brutes. 3dly. The ra- 
tional soul, though it be closely conjoined 
with the body and hypostatically united 
therewith, nevertheless is separable there- 
from, so that ever out of the body sit 
v(pia-dnsvoi> aliquod ; but the souls of 
brutes are immersed in matter and in bodies, 
so that they cannot subsist without them. 
Lastly, the rational soul alone hath the privi- 
lege of immortality, it being beyond all con- 
troversy that the souls of brutes are mortal 
and corruptible. These differences being 
admitted, and saving the due prerogative, 
excellence, and as it were divinity of the 
rational soul, the Theological Faculty of 
Basle thought it of little consequence if any 
one held that the souls of brutes were of 
something different from elementary matter. 
They delivered no opinion in condem- 
nation of his assailant's doctrine, upon the 
ground that the question was not within 
their province. Cerium est, they said, 
uti formas rerum omnium difficulter, et non 
nisi a posteriori, et per certas -Kipiardatic, 
cognoscere possumus ; ita omnium difficillime 
Animarum naturam nos pervestigare posse, 
nostramque, uti in aliis, ita in hac materia, 
scientiam esse, ut scite Scaliger loquitur, um- 
bram in sole. Ac non dubium, Deum hie 
vagabundis contemplationibus nostris ponere 
voluisse, ut disceremus imbecillitatis et cacita- 
tis nostrce conscientid humiliari, cum stupore 
opera ejus admirari, atque cum modestia et 
sobrietate philosophari. They declared, how- 
ever, that the rational soul differed from that 
of brutes in its nature, essence, properties 
and actions, and that this was not to be 
doubted of by Christians : that the soul of 
brutes was not spiritual, not immaterial, 
that all its actions were merely material, and 
performed by corporeal organs, and they 
referred to Sennertus's own works as rightly 
affirming that it was partible, et dividatur ad 
dirmonem vmteria, ita ut cum co?-poris parte 
aliquid animal possit avelli, inferring here, as 



it seems from a false analogy, that animal life 
was like that of vegetables, qua ex parte a 
plantd avulsd propagantur. 

They entered also into some curious criti- 
cism metaphysical and philological upon 
certain texts pertinent to the questions before 
them. When the dust became lice through- 
out all the land of Egypt, the mutation of 
the dust into lice was to be understood : so 
too in the creation of Adam, and the for- 
mation of Eve, there could be no doubt 
concerning the matter from which both were 
made. But when water was miraculously 
produced from the rock, and from the hollow 
place in the jaw, ibi sane nemo sanus dicet, 
aquam e petrd out maxilla a Deo ita fuisse 
productam, id petra aut maxilla materiam 
aqua hide prabuerit. 

The answer from Marpurg was short and 
satisfactory. There also the Professors 
waived the philosophical question, saying, 
Nos falcem in alienam messem non mittemus, 
nee Morychi in alieno choro pedem nostrum 
ponemus, sed nostro modulo ac pede nos metie- 
mur, nobis id etiam dictum putantes, ra virep 
■))fj.ccQ cvctv TTpbg i]p.de. Nobis nostra vendica- 
bimus, Philosophis philosophica relinquentes. 
Tertullian, they said, had asserted that Phi- 
losophers were the Patriarchs of Heretics, 
nevertheless a philosophical opinion, while it 
keeps within its own circles, and does not 
interfere with the mysteries of faith, is no 
heresy. They adduced a subtle argument 
to show that upon the point in question there 
was no real difference between something 
and nothing. Creatio ex nihilo intelligitur 
fieri turn ratione sui principii, quod est nihil urn 
i negativum ; turn ratione indispositionis, ob 
quam materia, ex qua aliquid fit, in produc- 
tione pro nihilo habetur. Quam r is igitur 
animcc bestiarum dicereulur in Creatione ex 
potentid materia educta, nihilominus ob indis- 
positioncm materia quam forma educta mid- 
tum superant, ex nihilo creata essent. And 
they agreed with Luther, and with those 
other Divines who held that the words in 
the first Chapter of Genesis whereby the 
Earth was bade to bring forth grass, herbs, 
trees, and living creatures after their kind, 
and the water to brina - forth fishes, were to 



654 



THE DOCTOR. 



be strictly understood, the earth and the 
waters having, ex Dei benedictione, active et 
vere produced them. 

The answer from Konigsberg was not less 
favourable. The dispute which Freitagius 
had raised, infelix ilia avppaliq they called 
it, ought to have been carried on by that 
Professor with more moderation. Granting 
that the souls of brutes were not created 
separately like human souls but conjointly 
with the body, it still remained doubtful 
quomodo se habuerit divinum partim ad aquam 
et terram factum mandatum, partim simultanea 
brutalium animarum cum corporibus creatio. 
For earth and water might here be variously 
considered, 1, as the element, 2, as the mat- 
ter, 3, as the subject, and 4, ut mater vel 
vivus uterus ad animalium productionem im- 
mediatd Dei operatione exaltatus. Water 
and earth themselves were first created, and 
on the fifth the vital and plastic power was 
communicated to them, in which by virtue 
of the omnipotent word they still consist. 
They were of opinion that the souls of brutes 
and of plants also were divinely raised above 
an elementary condition, it being always 
understood that the human soul far trans- 
cended them. The expression of Moses 
that formed every beast and every fowl out 
of the ground, proved not the matter whereof, 
but the place wherein they were formed. 

The Faculty at Jena returned a shorter 
reply. The ingratitude of the world toward 
those who published their lucubrations upon 
such abstruse points, reminded them, they 
said, of Luther's complaint in one of his 
Prefaces : Scepe recordor boni Gersonis dubi- 
tantis num quid boni piiblice scribendum et 
proferendum sit. Si scriptio omittitur, multce 
animce negliguntur, quce liberari potuissent ; 
si verb ilia prcestatur, statim Diabolus prcestb 
est cum Unguis pestiferis et calumniarum ple- 
nis, qua omnia corrumpunt et inficiunt. What 
was said of the production of fish, plants, 
and animals might be understood synec- 
dochically, salvd verborum Mosaicorum in- 
tegritate, as the text also was to be understood 
concerning the creation of man, where it is 
said that the Lord formed him of the dust 
of the earth, and immediately afterwards 



that he breathed into his nostrils the breath 
of life. 

The Strasburg Divines entered upon the 
subject so earnestly that their disquisition 
far exceeds in length the whole of the com- 
munications from the other Universities. 
Sennertus could not have wished for a more 
elaborate or a more gratifying reply. The 
Faculty at Altdorff said that the question 
was not a matter of faith, and therefore no 
one could be obnoxious to the charge of 
heresy for maintaining or controverting either 
of the opposite opinions. They seem, how- 
ever, to have agreed with neither party ; not 
with Freitagius, because they denied that 
brute souls were of an elementary nature ; 
not with Sennertus, because they denied that 
they were created at first from nothing. It 
is manifest, said they, that they are not now 
created from nothing, because it would fol- 
low from thence that they subsist of them- 
selves, and are not dependent upon matter, 
and are consequently immortal, which is 
absurd. It remained therefore that the 
souls of brutes, as they do not now receive 
their existence from mere nothing, so neither 
did they at the first creation, but from some- 
thing presupposed, which the Peripatetics 
call the power of matter or of the subject, 
which from the beginning was nothing else, 
and still is nothing else, than its propension 
or inclination to this or that form. Quce 
forma multiplex, cum etiam in potentia primi 
subjecti passiva prcecesserit, per miracuiosam 
Dei actionem ex ilia fuit educta, aciumque 
essendi completum in variis animalium specie- 
bus accepit. 

Sennertus either published these papers 
or prepared them for publication just before 
his death. They were printed in octavo at 
Wittenberg, with the title De Origine et 
Natura Animarum in Brutis, Sententice CI. 
Theologorum in aliquot Germanice Academiis, 
1638. Sprengel observes that none of the 
Historians of Philosophy have noticed, — 

Cater a desunt. 



THE DOCTOR. 



655 



CHAPTER CCXL. 

THE JESUIT GARASSe's CENSURE OF HUARTE 
AND BARCLAY. EXTRAORDINARY INVESTI- 
GATION. THE TENDENCY OF NATURE TO 
PRESERVE ITS OWN ARCHETYPAE FORMS. 
THAT OF ART TO VARY THEM. PORTRAITS. 
MORAE AND PHYSICAL CADASTRE, PARISH 
CHRONICLER AND PARISH CLERK THE DOC- 
TOR THOUGHT MIGHT BE WELL UNITED. 

Is't you, Sir, that know things ? 
Sooth. In nature's infinite book of secresy, 

A little I can read. Shakspeare. 

The Jesuit Garasse censured his contem- 
poraries Huarte and Barclay for attempting, 
the one in his Examen de los Ingenios, the 
other in his Icon Aniinorum, to class men 
according to their intellectual characters : 
ces deux Autheurs, says he, se sont rendus cri- 
minels contre V esprit de Vhomme, en ce quits 
ont entrepris de ranger en cinq ou six cahiers, 
toutes les diversitez des esprits qui peuvent 
estre parmy les hommes, comme qui voudroit 
verser toute Veau de la mer dans line coquille. 
For his own part, he had learned, he said, 
et par la lecture, et par l 'experience ', que les 
homines sont plus dissemblables en esprit qiien 
visage. 

Garasse was right ; for there goes far 
more to the composition of an individual cha- 
racter, than of an individual face. It has 
sometimes happened that the portrait of one 
person has proved also to be a good likeness 
of another. Mr. Hazlitt recognised his own 
features and expression in one of Michael 
Angelo's devils. And in real life two faces, 
even though there be no relationship between 
the parties, may be all but indistinguishably 
alike, so that the one shall frequently be 
accosted for the other ; yet no parity of 
character can be inferred from this resem- 
blance. Poor Capt. Atkins, who was lost in 
the Defence off the coast of Jutland in 1811, 
had a double of this kind, that was the tor- 
ment of his life ; for this double was a 
swindler, who having discovered the lucky 
facsimileship, obtained goods, took up money, 
and at last married a wife in his name. Once 
when the real Capt. Atkins returned from 



a distant station, this poor woman, who was 
awaiting him at Plymouth, put off in a boat, 
boarded the ship as soon as it came to anchor, 
and ran to welcome him as her husband. 

The following Extraordinary Investiga- 
tion, cut out of a Journal of the day, would 
have excited our Doctor's curiosity, and 
have led him on to remoter speculations. 

" On Tuesday afternoon an adjourned 
inquest was held at the Christchurch work- 
house, Boundary-row, Blackfriars-road, be- 
fore Mr. R.Carter, on the body of Eliza Baker, 
aged 17, who was found drowned at the steps 
of Blackfriars-bridge, on Saturday morning, 
by a police constable. Mr. Peter "Wood, 
an eating-house-keeper, in the Bermondsey 
New-road, near the Bricklayers Arms, hav- 
ing seen a paragraph in one of the Sunday 
newspapers, that the body of a female had 
been taken out of the Thames on the pre- 
vious day, and carried to the workhouse to 
be owned, and, from the description given, 
suspecting that it was the body of a young 
female who had lived in his service, but who 
had been discharged by his wife on account 
of jealousy, he went to the workhouse and 
recognised the body of the unfortunate girl. 
He was very much agitated, and he cut off 
a lock of her hair, and kissed the corpse. 
He immediately went to an undertaker, and 
gave orders for the funeral. He then went 
to the deceased's parents, who reside in Ade- 
laide-place, Whitecross-street, Cripplegate, 
and informed them of the melancholy fate 
of their daughter. They also went to the 
workhouse, and, on being shown the body, 
were loud in their lamentations. 

" On the Jury having assembled on Mon- 
day evening, they proceeded to view the 
body of the deceased, and, on their return, 
a number of witnesses were examined, mostly 
relations, who swore positively to the body. 
From the evidence it appeared that the de- 
ceased had lived with Mr. Wood as a ser- 
vant for four months, but his wife being 
jealous, she was discharged about a month 
ago, since which time Mr. Wood had secretly 
supplied her with money, and kept her from 
want. Mrs. Baker, the mother of the de- 
ceased, and other relations, in giving their 



656 



THE DOCTOE. 



evidence, spoke in severe terms of the con- 
duct of Mr. Wood, and said that they had 
no doubt but that he had seduced the unfor- 
tunate girl, which had caused her to commit 
suicide. 

" The Jury appeared to be very indignant, 
and, after five hours' deliberation, it was 
agreed to adjourn the case until Tuesday 
afternoon, when they re- assembled. Mr. 
Wood, the alleged seducer, was now present, 
but he was so overcome by his feelings at 
the melancholy occurrence, that nothing 
could be made of him ; in fact, he was like 
a man in a state of stupefaction. Mrs. Wood, 
the wife, was called in ; she is twenty-eight 
years older than her husband, and shook her 
head at him, but nothing was elicited from 
her, her passion completely overcoming her 
reason. 

" A Juryman. — ' The more we dive into 
this affair the more mysterious it appears 
against Mr. Wood.' 

" This remark was occasioned on account 
of some marks of violence on the body ; there 
had been a violent blow on the nose, a black 
mark on the forehead, and a severe wound 
on the thigh. The Jury were commencing 
to deliberate on their verdict, when a dray- 
man in the employ of Messrs. Whitbread 
and Co., brewers, walked into the jury- 
room, and said that he wished to speak to 
the Coroner and Jury. 

" Mr. Carter. — ' What is it you want ?' 

"Drayman. — ' I comes to say, gentlemen, 
that Mrs. Baker's daughter, you are now 
holding an inquest on, is now alive and in 
good health.' 

"The Coroner and Jury (in astonishment). 
— ' What do you say ? ' 

"Drayman. — 'I'll swear that I met her 
to-day in the streets, and spoke to her. ' 

" The Coroner, Witnesses, and Jury were 
all struck with amazement, and asked the 
drayman if he could bring Eliza Baker 
forward, which he undertook to do in a short 
time. 

" In the interim the Jury and Witnesses 
went again to view the body of the deceased. 
Mr. Wood shed tears over the corpse, and 
was greatly affected, as well as her relations : 



the drayman's story was treated as nonsense, 
but the Jury, although of the same opinion, 
were determined to await his return. In 
about a quarter of an hour the drayman re- 
turned, and introduced the real Eliza Baker, 
a fine looking young woman, and in full 
health. To depict the astonishment of the 
relations and of Mr. Wood is totally impos- 
sible, and at first they were afraid to touch 
her. She at last went forward, and took 
Mr. Wood by the hand (who stood motion- 
less), and exclaimed, ' How could you make 
such a mistake as to take another body for 
mine ? Do you think I would commit such 
an act ? ' Mr. Wood could not reply, but 
fell senseless in a fit, and it was with great 
difficulty that seven men could hold him. 
After some time he recovered, and walked 
away, to the astonishment of every one, 
with Eliza Baker, leaving his wife in the 
jury-room. Several of the Jurors remarked 
that they never saw such a strong likeness 
in their lives as there was between Eliza 
Baker and the deceased, which fully ac- 
counted for the mistake that the Witnesses 
had made. 

" The whole scene was most extraordi- 
nary, and the countenances of Witnesses and 
Jurymen it is impossible to describe. There 
was no evidence to prove who the deceased 
was : and the Jury, after about eleven 
hours' investigation, returned a verdict of 
' Found drowned,' but by what means the 
deceased came into the water there is no 
evidence to prove." 

But in such likenesses, the resemblance is 
probably never so exact as to deceive an in- 
timate friend, except upon a cursory glance, 
at first sight: even between twins, when 
any other persons might be perplexed, the 
parents readily distinguish. The varieties of 
countenances are far more minute, and con- 
sequently more numerous, than would ap- 
pear upon light consideration. A shepherd 
knows the face of every sheep in his flock, 
though to an inexperienced eye they all 
seem like one another. 

The tendency of Nature is to preserve its 
own archetypal forms, the tendency of art 
and of what is called accident being to vary 



THE DOCTOR. 



65? 



them. The varieties which are produced in 
plants by mere circumstances of soil and 
situation are very numerous, but those 
which are produced by culture are almost 
endless. Moral and physical circumstances 
effect changes as great, both externally and 
internally, in man. Whoever consults the 
elaborate work of Dr. Prichard on the Phy- 
sical History of Mankind, may there see it 
established by the most extensive research 
and the most satisfactory proofs, that the 
varieties of the human race, great and 
striking as they are, are all derived from 
one stock ; philosophical inquiry here, when 
fully and fairly pursued, confirming the 
scriptural account, as it has done upon every 
subject which is within the scope of human 
investigation. 

Dr. Dove, in the course of his professional 
practice, had frequent opportunities of ob- 
serving the stamp of family features at 
those times when it is most apparent ; at 
birth, and in the last stage of decline, — for 
the elementary lines of the countenance 
come forth as distinctly in death as they 
were shaped in the womb. It is one of the 
most affecting circumstances connected with 
our decay and dissolution, that all traces of 
individual character in the face should thus 
disappear, the natural countenance alone 
remaining, and that in this respect, the fresh 
corpse should resemble the new-born babe. 
He had, in the same way, opportunities for 
observing that there were family dispositions 
both of body and mind, some remaining 
latent till the course of time developed them, 
and others, till circumstances seemed as it 
were to quicken them into action. Whether 
these existed in most strength where the 
family likeness was strongest, was a point 
on which his own observation was not ex- 
tensive enough for him to form an opinion. 
Speculatively he inclined to think that 
moral resemblances were likely to manifest 
themselves in the countenance, but that 
constitutional ones must often exist where 
there could be no outward indication of 
them. Thus a family heart, (metaphorically 
speaking,) may be recognised in the " life, 
conduct, and behaviour," though the face 



should be a false index ; and hereditary 
tendencies in the great organs of life show 
themselves only in family diseases. 

Under our Saxon Kings, a person was 
appointed in every great Monastery to 
record public events, register the deaths, 
promotions, &c. in the community, and enter 
in this current chronicle every occurrence 
in the neighbourhood which was thought 
worthy of notice. At the end of every 
reign, a summary record was compiled from 
these materials, — and to this we owe our 
Saxon Chronicle, the most ancient and au- 
thentic in Europe. 

But he often regretted that in every 
generation so much knowledge was lost, and 
that so much experience was continually 
allowed to run to waste, many — very many 
of the evils which afflict mankind being oc- 
casioned by this neglect, and perpetuated 
by it. Especially he regretted this in his 
own art : and this regret would not have 
been removed if Medical Journals had been 
as numerous in his days as they are at 
present. His wishes went much farther. 

We are told that in the sixteenth century 
the great Lords in France piqued them- 
selves upon having able and learned men 
for their secretaries, and treated them as 
their friends. The principal business of 
such secretaries was to keep a journal of 
the most interesting events ; and the masters 
having witnessed or borne a part in the 
business of state, were well able to inform 
them of the intrigues and tortuous policy of 
their own times. From such journals it is 
that most of those old Memoirs have been 
formed, in which French literature is so 
peculiarly rich. They usually include as 
much general history as is in any way con- 
nected with the personage whom the writer 
served. 

Boswell, who if ever man went to Heaven 
for his good works, has gone there for his 
life of Johnson, — Boswell, I say, thought, 
and Johnson agreed with him, that there 
ought to be a chronicler kept in every con- 
siderable family, to preserve the characters 
and transactions of successive generations. 
In like manner, Milton's friend, Henry 



658 



THE DOCTOK. 



More, the Platonist and Poet, would have 
had the stories of apparitions and witchcraft 
publicly recorded, as they occurred in every 
parish, thinking that this course would 
prove " one of the best antidotes against 
that earthly and cold disease of Sadducism 
and Atheism," which he said, " if not pre- 
vented might easily grow upon us, to the 
hazard of all religion and the best kinds of 
philosophy." Our philosopher had more 
comprehensive notions of what ought to be. 
He wished not only for such domestic chro- 
nicles, but that in every considerable family 
there should be a compleat set of portraits 
preserved in every generation, taken in so 
small a size that it might never be necessary 
to eject them in order to make room for 
others. When this had been done for some 
centuries, it might be seen how long a 
family likeness remains ; whether Nature 
repeats her own forms at certain times, or 
after uncertain intervals ; or whether she 
allows them to be continually modified, as 
families intermarry, till the original type at 
last may altogether be obliterated. 

In China there are not only learned men, 
whose business it is to record everything 
remarkable that is either said or done by 
the reigning Emperor, (which is done for 
his own instruction, as well as for that of 
his successors,) but the great families have, 
in like manner, their records, and these are 
considered as the most precious part of the 
inheritance which descends from sire to son. 
All who aspire to any high office are re- 
quired to be well acquainted with the history 
of their ancestors, and in that history their 
indispensable qualifications are examined. 

That excellent good man Gilpin drew up 
a family record of his great-grandfather, 
grandfather, and father, who had all been 
" very valuable men." " I have often 
thought," said he, " such little records might 
be very useful in families ; whether the sub- 
jects of them were good or bad. A light- 
house may serve equally the purpose of 
leading you into a haven, or deterring you 
from a rock." * 



Wakneu's Recollections. 



If it may stand with your soft blush, to hear 
Yourself but told unto yourself, and see 
In my character what your features be, 
You will not from the paper slightly pass. 
No lady, but at some time loves her glass. 
And this shall be no false one, but as much 
Removed, as you from need to have it such.f 

There was once a German who, being a 
poet, physician, and physiognomist, saw in a 
vision of Paradise Physiognomy herself, and 
received from her a most gracious com- 
pliment, which lay buried among the 
Heidelberg Manuscripts in the Vatican, till 
Frederick Adelung, in the year 1799, 
brought it to light some centuries after the 
very name of the poet had perished. Read 
the compliment, reader, if thou canst, as 
given by the German antiquary, without 
note, comment, glossary, or punctuation. 
I can answer for the fidelity of my tran- 
script, though not of his text. 

Zu mir in gar glicher wise 
Quam us hymels paradyse 
Vilmanich schbne frouwe name 
Jeglicher wol die kron %am 
Sie waren schbne und gecleit 
Vrauwelicher zuchte mynneheit 
Sie ziert ine danne riche gewant 
Mir wart iglicher name bekant 
Wanne e.r in geschriben was 
An ir vorgespan als ich las 
Phisonomia kunslenriche 
Gutlicht redt ivider mich 
Wir byden dich herre bescheiden 
Das du in goltes geleiden 
Dust machen myne lobelich kunst 
So hastu mynneclichen gunst 
Von mir und myner gespilen vil 
Der igliche dich des bidden wil 
Das du in erkcnnen gebest 
Und du in unser friintschaft lebest 
Alleine din clcit sy donne 
Got wil dir geben solich wonne 
Die mannich gelerter mane 
Nummer mer gewynnen kan. 

There was no truth in Physiognomy when 
she made this promise to her medico-poet. 
Yet he deserved her gratitude, for he taught 
that her unerring indications might be read 
not in the countenance alone, but in all the 
members of the human body. 

In cases of disputed inheritance, when it 
is contended that the heir claimant is not 
the son of his reputed father, but a spurious 
or supposititious child, such a series of por- 
traits would be witnesses, he thought, 

f Ben Jonson. 



THE DOCTOR. 



659 



against whose evidence no exception could 
be taken. Indeed such evidence would have 
disproved the impudent story of the Warm- 
ing Pan, if anything had depended upon 
legitimacy in that case ; and in our times it 
might divest D. Miguel of all claim to the 
crown of Portugal, by right of birth. 

But these legal and political uses he re- 
garded as trifling, when compared with the 
physiological inferences which in process of 
time might be obtained, for on this subject 
Mr. Shandy's views were far short of Dr. 
Dove's. The improvement of noses would 
be only an incidental consequence of the 
knowledge that might be gathered from the 
joint materials of the family portrait gallery, 
and the family chronicle. From a com- 
parison of these materials it might be in- 
ferred with what temperaments of mind and 
of body, with what qualities good or evil, 
certain forms of feature, and certain charac- 
ters of countenance, were frequently found 
to be connected. And hence it might ulti- 
mately be learned how to neutralise evil 
tendencies by judicious intermarriages, how 
to sweeten the disposition, cool the temper, 
and improve the blood. 

To be sure there were some difficulties in 
the way. You might expect from the family 
chronicler a faithful notice of the diseases 
which had proved dangerous or fatal ; to 
this part of his duty there could be no ob- 
jection. But to assure the same fidelity 
concerning moral and intellectual failings or 
vices, requires a degree of independence 
not to be hoped for from a writer so cir- 
cumstanced. If it had still been the cus- 
tom for great families to keep a Fool, as in 
old times, our Philosopher in his legislative 
character would have required that the 
Fool's more notable sayings should be re- 
corded, well knowing that in his privileged 
freedom of speech, and the monitions and 
rebukes which he conveyed in a jest, the de- 
siderated information would be contained. 
But in our present state of manners he 
could devise no better check upon the family 
historiographer, — no better provision against 
his sins, both of omission and of commission, 
than that of the village or parish chronicle ; 



for in every village or parish he would have 
had every notable event that occurred within 
its boundaries duly and authentically re- 
corded. And as it should be the Chronicler's 
duty to keep a Remembrancer as well as a 
Register, in which whatever he could gather 
from tradition, or from the recollections of 
old persons, was to be preserved, the real 
character which every person of local dis- 
tinction had left behind him among his 
domestics and his neighbours would be 
found here, whatever might be recorded 
upon his monument. 

By these means, one supplying the defi- 
ciencies of the other, our Philosopher thought 
a knoAvledge of the defects and excellencies 
of every considerable family might be ob- 
tained, sufficient for the purposes of physio- 
logy, and for the public good. 

There was a man in the neighbouring vil- 
lage of Bentley, who, he used to say, would 
have made an excellent Parish Chronicler, 
an office which he thought might well be 
united with that of Parish Clerk.* This 
person went by the name of Billy Dutch- 
man : he was a journeyman stone-mason, 
and kept a book wherein he inserted the 
name of every one by whom he had been 
employed, how many days he had worked 
in every week, and how many he had been 
idle, either owing to sickness or any other 
cause, and what money he had earned in 
each week, summing up the whole at the 
year's end. His earning in the course of 
nine and twenty years, beginning in 1767, 
amounts to £583 18s. 3d., being, he said, 
upon an average, seven shillings and nine- 
pence a-week. 

The Doctor would have approved of 
Jacob Abbott's extension of his own plan 
and adaptation of it to a moral and religious 



* Such a Chronicler is old James Long — now 77 years 
of age — 50 of which he has served in the capacity of 
Parish Clerk of West- Tarring, in the County of Sussex. 
There is no by-gone incident in this, or the neighbouring 
Parishes, — no mere-stone or balk — with which he is not 
acquainted. Aged and truthful Chronicler I 
— Enjoy thy plainness 
It nothing ill becomes thee — 

Since the above was written the old man has been 
gathered to his fathers. Bequiescal in pace! 



660 



THE DOCTOR. 



purpose. Jacob Abbott, without any view- 
to the physical importance of such docu- 
ments, advises that domestic journals should 
be kept : " Let three or four of the older 
brothers and sisters of a family agree to 
write a history of the family; any father 
would procure a book for this purpose, and 
if the writers are young, the articles in- 
tended for insertion in it might be written 
first on separate paper, and then corrected 
and transcribed. The subjects suitable to 
be recorded in such a book will suggest 
themselves to every one; a description of 
the place of residence at the time of com- 
mencing the book, with similar descriptions 
of other places from time to time, in case 
of removals ; the journies or absences of the 
head of the family or its members ; the sad 
scenes of sickness or death which may be 
witnessed, and the joyous ones of weddings, 
or festivities, or holydays ; the manner in 
which the members are from time to time 
employed ; and pictures of the scenes which 
the fire-side group exhibits in the long 
winter evening, or the conversation which 
is heard, and the plans formed at the supper 
table or in the morning walk. 

" If a family, where it is first established, 
should commence with such a record of their 
own efforts and plans, and the various deal- 
ings of Providence towards them, the father 
and the mother carrying it on jointly until 
the children are old enough to take the pen, 
they would find the work a source of great 
improvement and pleasure. It would tend 
to keep distinctly in view the great objects 
for which they ought to live ; and repeatedly 
recognizing, as they doubtless would do, the 
hand of God, they would feel more sensibly 
and more constantly their dependence upon 
him," 



CHAPTER CCXLI. 

THE DOCTOR'S UTOPIA DENOMINATED COLUM- 
BIA. HIS SCHEME ENTERED UPON BUT 

" LEFT HALF TOLD " LIKE " THE STORY 
OP CAMBUSCAN BOLD." 

I will to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of 
mine own, a new Atlantis, a poetical commonwealth of 
mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build cities, 
make laws, statutes, as I list myself. And why may I not V 

Burton. 

The Doctor's plan would have provided 
materials for a moral and physiological Ca- 
dastre, or Domesday Book. This, indeed, 
is the place for stating what the reader, 
knowing as much as he knows of our Philo- 
sopher, will not be surprised to hear, that 
Dr. Dove had conceived an Utopia of his 
own. He fixed it an island, thinking the 
sea to be the best of all neighbours, and he 
called it Columbia, not as pretending that it 
had been discovered by his " famous name- 
sake," but for a reason which the sagacious 
may divine. 

The scheme of his government had under- 
gone many changes, although from the be- 
ginning it was established upon the eternal 
and immutable principles of truth and jus- 
tice. Every alteration was intended to be 
final ; yet it so happened that, notwithstand- 
ing the proposed perpetuity of the structure, 
and the immutability of the materials, he 
frequently found cause to exercise the im- 
perscriptible and inalienable right of alter- 
ing and improving his own work. He jus- 
tified this, as being himself sole legislator, 
and moreover the only person in existence 
whose acceptance of the new constitution 
was necessary for its full establishment ; and 
no just objection, he said, could be ad- 
vanced against any of these changes, if they 
were demonstrably for the better, not 
merely innovations, but improvements also ; 
for no possible revolution, however great, or 
however suddenly effected, could occasion 
the slightest evil to his Commonwealth. 
Governments in nubibus being mended as 
easily as they are made, for which, as for 
many other reasons, they are so much better 



THE DOCTOR. 



661 



than any that are now actually existing, 
have existed, or ever will exist. 

At first he denominated his Common- 
wealth an Iatrarchy, and made the Archia- 
tros, or Chief Physician, head of the state. 
But upon after consideration he became 
convinced that the cares of general govern- 
ment, after all the divisions and subdivisions 
which could be made, were quite enough 
for any one head, however capacious and 
however strong, and however ably assisted. 
Columbia, therefore, was made an absolute 
monarchy, hereditary in the male line, ac- 
cording to the Salic law. 

How did he hold sweet dalliance with his crown, 
And wanton with dominion, how lay down, 
Without the sanction of a precedent, 
Rules of a most large and absolute extent, 
Rules which from sense of public virtue spring, 
And all at once commence a Patriot King !* 

O Simon Bolivar, once called the Liberator, 
if thou couldst have followed the example 
of this less practical but more philosophical 
statesman, and made and maintained thyself 
as absolute monarch of thy Columbia, well 
had it been for thy Columbians and for 
thee! better still for thyself, it may be 
feared, if thou hadst never been born. 

There was an order of hereditary nobles 
in the Doctor's Columbia ; men were raised 
to that rank as a just reward for any signal 
service which they had rendered to the 
state ; but on the other hand an individual 
might be degraded for any such course of 
conduct as evinced depravity in himself, or 
was considered as bringing disgrace upon 
his order. The chiefs of the Hierarchy, the 
Iatrarchy, the Nomarchy and the Hoplarchy, 
(under which title both sciences, naval and 
military, were comprised,) were, like our 
Bishops, Peers of the realm by virtue of 
their station, and for life only. 

I do not remember what was the scheme 
of representation upon which his House of 
Commons was elected, farther than it com- 
menced with universal suffrage and ascended 
through several stages, the lowest assembly 
choosing electors for the next above it, so 
that the choice ultimately rested with those 

* Churchill 



who from their education and station of life 
might be presumed to exercise it with due 
discretion. Such schemes are easily drawn 
up ; making and mending constitutions, to 
the entire satisfaction of the person so em- 
ployed, being in truth among the easiest 
things in the world. But like most Uto- 
pianisers the legislator of this Columbia had 
placed his Absolute King and his free 
People under such strict laws, and given 
such functions to the local authorities, and 
established such compleat and precise order 
in every tything, that the duties of the legis- 
lative body were easy indeed ; this its very 
name imported ; for he called it the Conser- 
vative Assembly. 

Nor is Crown-wisdom any quintessence 
Of abstract truth, or art of Government, 
More than sweet sympathy, or counterpease 
Of humours, temper'd happily to please.t 

The legislator of Columbia considered 
good policy as a very simple thing. He said 
to his King, his Three Estates and his col- 
lective nation, with the inspired lawgiver, 
" and now Israel what doth the Lord thy 
God require of thee, but to fear the Lord 
thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love 
him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart and with all thy soul: to keep the 
commandments of the Lord and his statutes, 
which I command thee, this day, for thy 
good ? " And he added with St. Paul, " now 
the end of the commandment is charity, out 
of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, 
and of faith unfeigned." 

Take care of the pennies, says the frugal 
old Proverb, and the pounds will take care 
of themselves. Les petites choses, says M. 
de Custine, sont tout ce qxion sent de V exis- 
tence ; les grandes se savent, ce qui est tres- 
different. Take care of little things, was the 
Doctor's maxim as a legislator, and great 
ones will then proceed regularly and well. 
He was not ignorant that legislators as well 
as individuals might be penny-wise and 
pound foolish ; proofs enough he had seen 
in the conduct of the English Government, 
and many more and more glaring ones he 



t Lord Brooke. 



662 



THE DOCTOR. 



would have seen if he had lived to behold 
the progress of oeconomical reform and libe- 
ral legislation. He also knew that an over- 
attention to trifles was one sure indication 
of a little mind ; but in legislation as in 
experimental philosophy, he argued, that 
circumstances which appeared trifling to the 
ignorant were sometimes in reality of essen- 
tial importance, that those things are not 
trifles upon which the comfort of domestic 
life, the peace of a neighbourhood, and the 
stability of a state depend, and yet all these 
depend mainly upon things apparently so 
trifling as common schools and parochial 
government. 

" I have ever observed it," says Ben Jon- 
son, "to have been the office of a wise 
patriot, among the greatest affairs of the 
state, to take care of the commonwealth of 
learning. For schools they are the semi- 
naries of state ; and nothing is worthier the 
study of a statesman, than that part of the 
republic which we call the advancement of 
letters." 



CHAPTER CCXLII. 

FARTHER REMARKS UPON THE EFFECTS OF 
SCHISM, AND THE ADVANTAGES WHICH IT 
AFFORDS TO THE ROMISH CHURCH AND TO 
INFIDELITY. 

— To non ci ho interresso 
Nessun, ne vifui mai, ne manco chieggo 
Per quel ch? io ne vo dir, d' esservi messo. 
Vb dir, che senza passion eleggo, 
E nonforzato, e senza pigliar parte; 
Di dime tutlo quel, ch' inlendo e veggo. 

Bronzino Pittore. 

One cause why infidelity gained ground 
among the middle and the lower classes was, 
that owing to the increase of population, the 
growth of the metropolis, and the defects of 
our Church Establishment, no provision had 
been made for their religious instruction. 
Every one belonged to a parish, but in popu- 
lous parishes a small part only of the parish- 
ioners belonged to the Clergyman's flock ; 
his fold in very many places would not have 
contained half, and in some not a tenth of 
them ; they were left therefore as stray 



sheep, for false shepherds and for the wolf. 
This was the main cause of the increase of 
dissenters among us, and their increase oc- 
casioned an increase of infidelity. Many 
of their ministers and more of their students, 
revolting against the monstrous doctrines 
of Calvinism, passed from one extreme to the 
other, more gradually indeed than their 
brethren have done in Germany, in Geneva, 
and in New England, for they halted awhile 
on Arian ground, before they pitched their 
tents in the debateable land of Socinianism, 
where not a few of them afterwards crossed 
the border. The principle of Nonconform- 
ity itself led naturally to this consequence ; 
it scornfully rejected that reasonable and 
well-defined submission to authority re- 
quired by the Church of England, which is 
the true Catholic Church ; and thus it 
encouraged, and indeed invited, tutors and 
pupils at their Academies to make their own 
immature and ill-instructed reason the test 
of all truths. A good and wise man has 
well remarked that " what men take for, or 
at least assert to be, the dictates of their 
conscience, may often in fact be only the 
dictates of their pride." With equal truth 
also he has said that he who " decides for 
himself in rejecting what almost all others 
receive, has not shewn himself at least in 
one instance to be a 4 wise man ; ' — he does 
not ' know that he is a fool. ' " 

This cause was continually operating upon 
their students and younger ministers during 
the latter half of the last century. It was 
suspended first by the missionary spirit, 
which called forth a high degree of enthu- 
siasm, and gave that feeling its most useful 
direction, and secondly by the revival of 
political Puritanism, as soon as the succes- 
sors of the Parliamentary Divines thought 
themselves strong enough to act as a party 
in the state, and declare war against the 
Establishment. But as in that time, so in a 
greater degree at present, the floating popu- 
lation, who by no fault of their own are 
extra-parochial as to all purposes of church- 
worship and religious instruction, are as 
much endangered by facility of change, as 
the students used to be by their boasted 



THE DOCTOE. 



663 



liberty of choice. Sectarian history might 
supply numerous examples ; one may be 
related here for the extraordinary way in 
which it terminated. I know not from what 
community of Christians the hero of the tale 
strayed over to the Methodists, but he en- 
joyed for awhile the dream of perfection, and 
the privilege of assurance as one of their mem- 
bers. When this excitement had spent itself, 
he sought for quietness among the Quakers, 
thee'd his neighbour, wore drab, and would 
not have pulled off his hat to the King. After 
awhile, from considering, with them, that 
baptism was a beggarly element, he passed 
to the opposite extreme ; it was not enough 
for him to have been sprinkled in his in- 
fancy, he must be dipped over head and ears 
in the water, and up he rose, rejoicing as 
he shook his dripping locks, that he was now 
a Baptist. His zeal then took another direc- 
tion ; he had a strong desire to convert the 
lost sheep of Israel ; and off he sets from a 
remote part of the country to engage in 
single controversy with a learned Rabbi in 
one of the Midland counties. Tell it not 
in Duke's-Place ! Publish it not in the 
Magazine of the Society for converting the 
Jews! — The Rabbi converted him : and if 
the victor in the dispute had thought proper 
to take the spolia opima which were fairly 
lost, the vanquished would have paid the 
penalty, as he conceived himself in honour 
and in conscience bound. He returned home 
glorying in his defeat, a Jew in everything 
but parentage and the outward and visible 
sign. The sons of the synagogue are not 
ambitious of making converts, and they did 
not choose to adopt him by performing the 
initiating rites. He obtained it, however, 
from a Christian surgeon, who, after many 
refusals, was induced at length in humanity 
to oblige him, lest, as he solemnly declared 
he would, he should perform it upon himself. 
They who begin in enthusiasm, passing in 
its heat and giddiness from one sect to ano- 
ther, and cooling at every transition, gene- 
rally settle in formalism, where they find 
some substantial worldly motives for becom- 
ing fixed ; but where the worldly motives 
are wanting, it depends upon temperament 



and accident whether they run headlong into 
infidelity, or take refuge from it in the 
Roman Catholic church. The papal clergy 
in England have always known how to fish 
in troubled waters ; and when the waters 
are still, there are few among them who 
have not been well instructed in the art of 
catching gudgeons. Our clergy have never 
been, in the same sense, fishers of men. 

In an epigram written under the portrait 
of Gibbon, as unquotable at length, as it is 
unjust in part of the lines which may be 
quoted, the face is said to be 

— the likeness of one 
Who through every religion in Europe has run 
And ended at last in believing in none. 

It was a base epigram which traduced the 
historian's political character for no other 
reason than that he was not a Whig ; and it 
reproached him for that part of his conduct 
which was truly honourable, — the sincerity 
with which, when ill-instructed, he became 
a Roman Catholic, and the propriety with 
which, after full and patient investigation, 
he gave up the tenets of the Romish church 
as untenable. That he proceeded farther, 
and yielded that which can be maintained 
against the Gates of Hell, is to be lamented 
deeply for his own sake, and for those in 
whom he has sown the seeds of infidelity. 
But the process from change to change is a 
common one, and the cases are few wherein 
there is so much to extenuate the culpability 
of the individual. It was not in the self- 
sufficiency of empty ignorance that Gibbon 
and Bayle went astray ; generally the danger 
is in proportion to the want of knowledge ; 
there are more shipwrecks among the shal- 
lows than in the deep sea. 

During the great Rebellion, when the 
wild beasts had trampled down the fences, 
broken into the vineyard and laid it waste, 
it is curious to observe the course taken by 
men who felt for various causes, according 
to their different characters, the necessity of 
attaching themselves to some religious com- 
munion. Cottington, being in Spain, found 
it convenient to be reconciled to the Romish 
church ; the dominant religion being to him, 
as a politician, the best. Weak and plodding 



664 



THE DOCTOR. 



men like Father Cressey took the same turn 
in dull sincerity : Davenant, because he 
could not bear the misery of a state of 
doubt, and was glad to rest his head upon 
the pillow of authority ; Goring from remorse ; 
Digby (a little later) from ambition, and 
Lambert, because he was sick of the freaks 
and follies of the sectaries. 

Their " opinions and contests," says Sir 
Philip Warwick, " flung all into chaos, and 
this gave the great advantages to the Ro- 
manists, who want not their differences 
among themselves, but better manage them ; 
for they having retained a great part of 
primitive truths, and having to plead some 
antiquity for their many doctrinal errors 
and their ambitious and lucrative encroach- 
ments, and having the policy of flinging 
coloquintida into our pot, by our dissentions 
and follies, they have with the motion of the 
circle of the wheel, brought themselves who 
were at the Nadir, to be almost at the Zenith 
of our globe." 

In no other age (except in our own and 
now from a totally different cause) did the 
Papists increase their numbers so greatly in 
this kingdom. And infidelity in all its grades 
kept pace with Popery. " Look but upon 
many of our Gentry," says Sanderson, 
(writing under the Commonwealth,) " what 
they are already grown to from what they 
were, within the compass of a few years : 
and then ex pede Herculem ; by that, guess 
what a few years more may do. Do we not 
see some, and those not a few, that have 
strong natural parts, but little sense of 
religion turned (little better than professed) 
Atheists. And other some, nor those a few, 
that have good affections, but weak and un- 
settled judgements, or (which is still but the 
same weakness) an overweening opinion of 
their own understandings, either quite 
turned, or upon the point of turning Pa- 
pists? These be sad things, God knoweth, 
and we all know, not visibly imputable to 
anything so much, as to those distractions, 
confusions, and uncertainties that in point 
of religion have broken in upon us, since 
the late changes that have happened among 
us in church affairs." 



The Revolution by which the civil and 
religious liberties of the British nation were, 
at great cost, preserved, stopped the growth 
of Popery among us for nearly an hundred 
years: but infidelity meanwhile was little 
impeded in its progress by the occasional 
condemnation of a worthless book ; and the 
excellent works which were written to expose 
the sophistry, the ignorance, and the mis- 
representations of the infidel authors seldom 
found readers among the persons to whom 
they might have been most useful. It may 
be questioned whether any of Jeremy Ben- 
tham's misbelieving disciples has ever read 
Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, or the kin- 
dred work of Skelton which a London book- 
seller published upon Hume's ■imprimatur. 



CHAPTER CCXLIII. 

BREVITY BEING THE SOUL OF WIT THE 
AUTHOR STUDIES CONCISENESS. 

You need not fear a surfeit, here is but little, and tlvat 
light of digestion. Quarles. 

Who was Pompey ? 

" The Dog will have his day," says Shake- 
speare. And the Dog must have his Chap- 
ter, say I. But I will defer writing that 
Chapter till the Dog-days. 



CHAPTER CCXLIV. 

THE AUTHOR VENTURES TO SPEAK A WORD 

ON CHRISTIAN CHEERFULNESS : QUOTES 

BEN S1RACH, SOLOMON, BISHOP HACKET, 
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, BISHOP REY- 
NOLDS, MILTON, ETC. 

— 'AXKot av TOiVT» /ActQuv, fiiorov vori Tie/not 

"SP UXV ™ v ocyzOtov t\v)Qi %tx.Qi'C,6[Jl.ivos. SlMONIDES, 

In the thirtieth chapter of the Book called 
Ecclesiasticus, and at the twenty-fifth verse, 
are these words 

A cheerful and a good heart will have a care of his meat 
and diet. 

This is not the text to a sermon, but the 
beginning of a Chapter. There is no reason 
why a chapter, as well as a sermon, should 
not be thus impressively introduced : and if 
this Chapter should neither be so long as a 



THE DOCTOR. 



665 



I sermon, nor so dull as those discourses 
which perchance and (I fear) per-likeli- 
hood, it may be thy fortune to hear, O 
Eeader, at thy parish church, or in phrase 
nonconformist, to sit under at the conven- 
ticle, it will be well for thee : for having 
began to read it, I dare say thou wilt peruse 
it orally, or ocularly, to the end. 

A cheerful and a good heart the Doctor 
had ; ay, as cheerful and good a one as 
ever man was blessed with. He held with 
Bishop Hacket, that melancholy was of all 
humours the fittest to make a bath for the 
Devil, and that cheerfulness and innocent 
pleasure preserve the mind from rust, and 
the body from putrifying with dulness and 
distempers ; wherefore that Bishop of good 
and merry memory would sometimes say, he 
did not like to look upon a sour man at 
dinner, and if his guests were pleased within, 
would bid them hang out the white flag in 
their countenance. 

Udiie, udite amici, un cor giocondo 
E Rey del Mondo. 

And if the poet says true, (which I will be 
sworn he does,) our Doctor might be more 
truly King of the World, than Kehama after 
he had performed his sacrifice. 

His cheerfulness he would not have ex- 
changed for all the bank-bills which ever 
bore the signature of Abraham Newland, or 
his successor Henry Hase ; he thanked his 
Maker for it ; and that it had been kept 
from corruption, and made so far good as 
(with all Christian humility) to be self- ap- 
proved ; he thanked his heavenly Father 
also for the free grace vouchsafed him, and 
his earthly one for having trained him in 
the way that he should go. 

Cheerful and grateful takers the Gods love, 
And such as wait their pleasures with full hopes ; 
The doubtful and distrustful man Heaven frowns at.* 

Being thus cheerful and good, he had that 
care of his meat and diet which the son of 
Sirach commends in the text, and notices as 
an indication of cheerfulness and goodness. 

Understand me, Reader : and understand 
the author of the Wisdom. It was not such 
a care of his meat and diet as Apicius has 



Beaumont and Fletcher. 



been infamed for in ancient, and Darteneuf 
in modern times ; not such as Lucullus was 
noted for, or Sir William Curtis, with whom 
Lucullus, had he been an English East In- 
dian Governor, instead of a Roman Prastor, 
might have been well pleased to dine. Read 
Landor's conversation between Lucullus and 
Caesar, if thou art a scholar, Reader, and if 
anything can make thee think with respect 
and admiration of Lucullus, it will be the 
beautiful strain of feeling and philosophy 
that thou wilt find there. Wouldst thou see 
another work of first-rate genius, not less 
masterly in its kind, go and see Chantrey's 
bust of Sir William Curtis ; and when thou 
shalt have seen what he hath made of that 
countenance, thou wilt begin to think it not 
impossible that a silk purse may be made of 
a sow's ear. Shame on me that in speaking 
of those who have gained glory by giving 
good dinners, I should have omitted the 
name of Michael Angelo Taylor, he having 
been made immortal for this his great and 
singular merit ! 

Long before the son of Sirach, Solomon 
had spoken to the same effect : "there is no- 
thing better for a man than that he should 
eat and drink, and that he should make his 
soul enjoy good in its labour. This also I 
saw that it was from the hand of God." 
" Go thy way," said the wisest of monarchs 
and of men, in his old age, when he took a 
more serious view of his past life ; the 
honours, pleasures, wealth, wisdom, he had 
so abundantly enjoyed ; the errors and mis- 
carriages which he had fallen into; the large 
experience and many observations he had 
made, of things natural, moral, domestical : 
civil, sensual, divine : the curious and criti- 
cal inquiry he had made after true happi- 
ness, and what contribution all things under 
the sun could afford thereunto : — "Go thy 
way," he said, " eat thy bread with joy, and 
drink thy wine with a merry heart ! " 

" Inasmuch," says Bishop Reynolds in his 
commentary upon this passage, "as the dead 
neither know, nor enjoy, any of these worldly 
blessings ; and inasmuch as God gives them 
to his servants in love, and as comfortable 
refreshments unto them in the days of their 



666 



THE DOCTOK. 



vanity, therefore he exhorteth unto a cheer- 
ful fruition of them, while we have time and 
liberty so to do ; that so the many other 
sorrows and bitterness which they shall 
meet with in this life, may be mitigated and 
sweetened unto them. He speaketh not of 
sensual, epicurean, and brutish excess ; but 
of an honest, decent, and cheerful enjoy- 
ment of blessings, with thankfulness, and in 
the fear of God." " A merry heart," the 
Bishop tells us, might in this text have been 
rendered a good one ; as, in other parts of 
scripture, a sad heart is called an evil heart. 
" It is pleasing unto God," says the Bishop, 
"that when thou hast in the fear of his 
name, and in obedience to his ordinance, 
laboured, and by his blessing gotten thee 
thine appointed portion, then thou shouldst, 
after an honest, cheerful, decent and liberal 
manner, without further anxiety or solicit- 
ousness, enjoy the same. This is the prin- 
cipal boundary of our outward pleasures and 
delights, still to keep ourselves within such 
rules of piety and moderation, as that our 
ways may be pleasing unto God. And this 
shows us the true way to find sweetness in 
the creature, and to feel joy in the fruition 
thereof; namely, when our persons and our 
ways are pleasing unto God : for piety doth 
not exclude, but only moderate earthly de- 
lights ; and so moderate them, that though 
they be not so excessive as the luxurious 
and sensual pleasures of foolish epicures, yet 
they are far more pure, sweet, and satis- 
factory, as having no guilt, no gall, no curse, 
nor inward sorrow and terrors attending on 
them." 

Farther the Bishop observes, that food 
and raiment, being the substantiall of out- 
ward blessings, Solomon has directed unto 
cheerfulness in the one, and unto decency 
and comeliness in the other. He hath advised 
us also to let the head lack no ointment, 
such perfumes being an expression of joy 
used in feasts ; " the meaning is," says the 
Bishop, " that we should lead our lives with 
as much freeness, cheerfulness, and sweet 
delight, in the liberal use of the good bless- 
ings of God, as the quality of our degree, 
the decency of our condition, and the rules 



of religious wisdom, and the fear of God, do 
allow us ; not sordidly or frowardly deny- 
ing ourselves the benefit of those good things 
which the bounty of God hath bestowed 
upon us." 

It is the etiquette of the Chinese Court 
for the Emperor's physicians to apply the 
same epithet to his disease as to himself — 
so they talk of his most high and mighty 
diarrhoea. 

At such a point of etiquette the Doctor 
would laugh — but he was all earnestness 
when one like Bishop Hacket said, " Do not 
disgrace the dignity of a Preacher, when 
every petty vain occasion doth challenge the 
honour of a sermon before it. If ever there 
were to Seov ovk iv tu Stovn, — a good 
work marred for being done unreasonably," 
— (in the Doctor's own words, Grace before 
a sluttish meal, a dirty table-cloth) — " now it 
is when grace before meat will not serve 
the turn, but every luxurious feast must 
have the benediction of a preacher's pains 
before it. Quis te ferat ccenantem ut Lucul- 
lus, concionantem ut Cato ? Much less is it 
to be endured, that somebody must make a 
sermon, before Lucullus hath made a sup- 
per. It is such a flout upon our calling 
methinks, as the Chaldeans put upon the 
Jews in their captivity, — they in the height 
of their jollity must have one of the Songs 
ofSion." 

The Doctor agreed in the main with Lord 
Chesterfield in his opinion upon political 
dieteticks. 

" The Egyptians who were a wise nation," 
says that noble author, "thought so much 
depended upon diet, that they dieted their 
kings, and prescribed by law both the 
quality and quantity of their food. It is 
much to be lamented, that those bills of fare 
are not preserved to this time, since they 
might have been of singular use in all 
monarchical governments. But it is reason- 
ably to be conjectured, from the wisdom of 
that people, that they allowed their kings 
no aliments of a bilious or a choleric nature, 
and only such as sweetened their juices, 
cooled their blood, and enlivened their fa- 
culties, — if they had any." 



THE DOCTOK. 



667 



He then shows that what was deemed 
necessary for an Egyptian King is not less 
so for a British Parliament. For, " suppose," 
he says, " a number of persons, not over- 
lively at best, should meet of an evening to 
concert and deliberate upon public mea- 
sures of the utmost consequence, grunting 
under the load and repletion of the strongest 
meats, panting almost in vain for breath, 
but quite in vain for thought, and reminded 
only of their existence by the unsavoury 
returns of an olio ; what good could be 
expected from such a consultation ? The 
best one could hope for would be, that they 
were only assembled for show, and not for 
use ; not to propose or advise, but silently to 
submit to the orders of some one man there, 
who, feeding like a rational creature, might 
have the use of his understanding. 

" I would therefore recommend it to the 
consideration of the legislature, whether it 
may not be necessary to pass an act, to re- 
strain the licentiousness of eating, and assign 
certain diets to certain ranks and stations ; 
I would humbly suggest the strict vegetable 
as the properest ministerial diet, being ex- 
ceedingly tender of those faculties in which 
the public is so highly interested, and very 
unwilling they should be clogged or in- 
cumbered." 

" The Earl of Carlisle," says Osborne, in 
his Traditional Memorials, " brought in the 
vanity of ante-suppers, not heard of in our 
forefathers' time, and for aught I have read, 
or at least remember, unpractised by the 
most luxurious tyrants. The manner of 
which was, to have the board covered at 
the first entrance of the guests, with dishes, 
as high as a tall man could well reach, filled 
with the choicest viands sea or land could 
afford : and all this once seen, and having 
feasted the eyes of the invited, was in a 
manner thrown away, and fresh set on to 
the same height, having only this advantage 
of the other, that it was hot. 

" I cannot forget one of the attendants of I 



the King, that at a feast made by this mon- 
ster in excess, eats to his single share a 
whole pye, reckoned to my Lord at ten 
pounds, being composed of ambergreece, 
magisteriall of pearl, musk, &c, yet was so 
far, (as he told me,) from being sweet in the 
morning, that he almost poisoned his whole 
family, flying himself, like the Satyr, from 
his own stink. And after such suppers huge 
banquets no less profuse, a waiter returning 
his servant home with a cloak-bag full of 
dried sweetmeats and confects, valued to 
his Lordship at more than ten shillings the 
pound." 

But, gentle and much esteemed Reader, 
and therefore esteemed because gentle, in- 
stead of surfeiting thy body, let me recreate 
thy mind, with the annexed two Sonnets 
of Milton, which tell of innocent mirth, and 
the festive but moderate enjoyment of the 
rational creature. 

TO MR. LAWRENCE. 

Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son, 

Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire, 
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire 
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won 

From the hard season, gaining ? time will run 
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire 
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire 
The lily and rose, that neither sow'd nor spun. 

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, 
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise 
To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice 

Warble immortal notes of Tuscan air ? 

He who of these delights can judge, ajid spare 
To interpose them oft, is not unwise. 

TO SYRIAC SKINNER. 

Cyriac, whose grandsire on the royal bench 
Of British Themis, with no mean applause 
Pronounc'd, and in his volumes taught our laws, 
Which others at their bar so often wrench ; 

To day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench 
In mirth, that after no repenting draws : 
Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause. 
And what the Swede intends, and what the French. 

To measure life learn thou betimes, and know 

Toward solid good what leads the nearest way ; 
For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains, 

And disapproves that care, though wise in show, 
That with superfluous burden loads the day 
And when God sends a cheerful hour refrains. 



gff)0u can#t tvctt tyt %tttsv antr fyt mints, 

ftxteSBattav, fmtl) tfjg tfra*fatti £mmto£t art ; 

l^fjppocrat^ ijat!) taucjT)t tfjes tfje ant fctutr, 
^jpnllo antf tfje JHuj& t\yt afyzv j>art ; 

<&rits fcotf) go focH tfjat tfjcm toeXX fcotf) tftftft please, 

0)£ mmtf fontf) pleasure, antf tfyt tav$£t initi) tK$z. 

Davies of Hereford. 



- 



FRAGMENTS TO THE DOCTOE, 



A LOVE FRAGMENT FOR THE LADIES, IN- 
TRODUCED BY A CURIOUS INCIDENT WHICH 
THE AUTHOR BEGS THET WILL EXCUSE. 

Now will ye list a little space, 
And I shall send you to solace ; 
You to solace and be blyth, 
Hearken ! ye shall hear belyve 
A tale that is of verity. 

RoSWALL AND LlLLIAN. 

A story was told me with an assurance that 
it was literally true, of a Gentleman who 
being in want of a wife, advertised for one, 
and at the place and time appointed was met 
by a Lady. Their stations in life entitled 
them to be so called, and the Gentleman as 
well as the Lady was in earnest. He, how- 
ever, unluckily seemed to be of the same 
opinion as King Pedro was with regard to 
his wife Queen Mary of Aragon, that she 
was not so handsome as she might be good, 
so the meeting ended in their mutual dis- 
appointment. Ccelebs advertised a second 
time, appointing a different Square for the 
place of meeting, and varying the words of 
the advertisement. He met the same Lady, 
— they recognised each other, could not 
choose but smile at the recognition, and per- 
haps neither of them could choose but sigh. 
You will anticipate the event. The per- 
severing Bachelor tried his lot a third time 
in the newspapers, and at the third place of 
appointment he met the equally persevering 
Spinster. At this meeting neither could 
help laughing. They began to converse in 
good humour, and the conversation became 
so agreeable on both sides, and the circum- 
stance appeared so remarkable, that this 



third interview led to a marriage, and the 
marriage proved a happy one. 

When Don Argentes Prince of Galdasse 
had been entrapped into the hands of a 
revengeful woman whose husband he had 
slain in fair combat, he said to two hand- 
some widows who were charged every day 
to punish him with stripes, que par raison Id 
on se se voit une grande beaute ria pas lieu la 
cruaute ou autre vice — and the Chronicler 
of this generation of the house of Amadis, 
observes that this assertion fut bien verifie 
en ces deux jeunes veufues douees de grande 
beaute, lesquelles considerans la beaide et dis- 
position de ce jeune chevalier et la vertu de sa 
personne, presterent Voreille aux raisons quil 
alleguoit pour son excuse, et aux louanges qiCil 
leur donnoit de rare et singuliere beaide, de 
maniere qiielles eurent pitie de luy. 

" I can hardly forbear fancying," says 
Lord Shaftesbury, " that if we had a sort of 
Inquisition, or formal Court of Judicature, 
with grave Officers and Judges, erected to 
restrain poetical licence, and in general to 
suppress that fancy and humour of versifi- 
cation, but in particular that most extrava- 
gant passion of Love, as it is set out by 
Poets, in its heathenish dress of Venus's and 
Cupids ; if the Poets, as ringleaders and 
teachers of this heresy, were under grievous 
penalties forbid to enchant the people by 
their vein of rhyming ; and if the People, on 
the other side, were under proportionable 
penalties forbid to hearken to any such charm, 
or lend their attention to any love-tale, so 
much as in a play, a novel, or a ballad ; we 
might perhaps see a new Arcadia arising out 



670 



THE DOCTOR. 



of this heavy persecution. Old people and 
young would be seized with a versifying 
spirit ; we should have field conventicles of 
Lovers and Poets; forests would be filled 
with romantic Shepherds and Shepherdesses ; 
and rocks resound with echoes of hymns and 
praises offered to the powers of Love. "We 
might indeed have a fair chance, by this 
management, to bring back the whole train 
of Heathen Gods, and set our cold Northern 
Island burning with as many altars to Yenus 
and Apollo, as were formerly in Cyprus, 
Delos, or any of those warmer Grecian 
climates." 

But I promised you, dear Ladies, more 
upon that subject which of all subjects is 
and ought to be the most interesting to you, 
because it is the most important. You have 
not forgotten that promise, and the time has 
now come for fulfilling it. 

Venus, unto thee for help, good Lady, I do call, 
For thou wert wont to grant request unto thy servants all ; 
Even as thou didst help always iEneas thine own child, 
Appeasing the God Jupiter with countenance so mild 
That though that Juno to torment him on Jupiter did 

preace, 
Yet for the love he bare to thee, did cause the winds to 

cease; 
I pray thee pray the Muses all to help my memory, 
That I may have ensamples good in defence of feminye.* 

Something has been said upon various ways 
which lead to love and matrimony ; but what 
I have to say concerning imaginative love 
was deferred till we should arrive at the 
proper place for entering upon it. 

More or less, imagination enters into all 
loves and friendships, except those which 
have grown with our growth, and which 
therefore are likely to be the happiest be- 
cause there can be no delusion in them. 
Cases of this kind would not be so frequent 
in old romances, if they did not occur more 
frequently in real life than unimaginative 
persons could be induced to believe, or 
made to understand. 

Sir John Sinclair has related a remarkable 
instance in his Reminiscences. He was once 
invited by Adam Smith to meet Burke and 
Mr. Windham, who had arrived at Edin- 
burgh with the intention of making a short 



* Edward More. 



tour in the Highlands. Sir John was con- 
sulted concerning their route ; in the course 
of his directions he dwelt on the beauty of 
the road between Dunkeld and Blair ; — 
and added, that instead of being cooped up 
in a post-chaise, they would do well to get 
out and walk through the woods and beau- 
tiful scenes through which the road passes, 
especially some miles beyond Dunkeld. 

Some three years afterwards Mr. Wind- 
ham came up to Sir John in the House of 
Commons, and requested to speak to him for 
a few moments behind the Speaker's chair. 
" Do you recollect," said he, " our meeting 
together at Adam Smith's at dinner?" — 
" Most certainly I do." 

" Do you remember having given us 
directions for our Highland tour, and more 
.especially to stroll through the woods be- 
tween Dunkeld and Blair ? "— " I do." 

Mr. Windham then said, " In consequence 
of our adopting that advice, an event took 
place of which I must now inform you. 
Burke and I were strolling through the 
woods about ten miles from Dunkeld, when 
we saw a young female sitting under a tree, 
with a book in her hand. Burke imme- 
diately exclaimed, ' Let us have a little 
conversation with this solitary damsel, and 
see what she is about.' We accosted her 
accordingly and found that she was reading 
a recent novel from the London press. We 
asked her how she came to read novels, and 
how she got such books at so great a dis- 
tance from the metropolis, and more espe- 
cially one so recently published. She 
answered that she had been educated at a 
boarding-school at Perth, where novels 
might be had from the circulating library, 
and that she still procured them through 
the same channel. We carried on the con- 
versation for some time, in the course of 
which she displayed a great deal of smart- 
ness and talent ; and at last we were obliged, 
very reluctantly, to leave her, and proceed 
on our journey. We afterwards found that 
she was the daughter of a proprietor of that 
neighbourhood who was known under the 
name of the Baron Maclaren. I have 
never been able," continued Mr. W T indham, 



THE DOCTOR. 



671 



" to get this beautiful mountain nymph out 
of my head ; and I wish you to ascertain 
whether she is married or single." And he 
begged Sir John Sinclair to clear up this 
point as soon as possible, for much of his 
future happiness depended upon the result 
of the inquiry. 

If not the most important communication 
that ever took place behind the Speaker's 
chair, this was probably the most curious 
one. Sir John lost no time in making the 
desired inquiry. He wrote to a most re- 
spectable clergyman in the neighbourhood 
where Miss Maclaren lived, the Rev. Dr. 
Stewart, minister of Moulin ; and was in- 
formed in reply, that she was married to a 
medical gentleman in the East Indies of the 
name of Dick. " Upon communicating this 
to Mr. Windham," says Sir John, "he 
seemed very much agitated. He was soon 
afterwards married to the daughter of a 
half-pay officer. I have no doubt, however, 
that had Miss Maclaren continued single, he 
would have paid her his addresses." 

This is an example of purely imaginative 
love. But before we proceed with that sub- 
ject, the remainder of Sir John Sinclair's 
story must be given. Some years afterward 
he passed some days at Duneira in Perth- 
shire, with the late Lord Melville, and in 
the course of conversation told him this 
anecdote of Mr. Windham. Upon which 
Lord Melville said, " I am more interested 
in that matter than you imagine. You must 
know that I was riding down from Blair to 
Dunkeld in company with some friend, and 
we called at Baron Maclaren's, where a most 
beautiful young woman desired to speak 
with me. We went accordingly to the bank 
of a river near her father's house, when she 
said, ' Mr. Dundas, I hear that you are a 
very great man, and what is much better, a 
very good man, I will venture therefore to 
tell you a secret. There is a young man in 
this neighbourhood who has a strong attach- 
ment to me, and to confess the truth, I have 
a great regard for him. His name is Wil- 
liam Dick ; he has been bred to the medical 
profession ; and he says, that if he could 
get to be a surgeon in the East Indies, he 



could soon make his fortune there, and 
would send for me to marry him. Now I 
apply to you, Mr. Dundas, as a great and 
good man, in hopes that you can do some- 
thing for us : and be assured that we shall 
be for ever grateful, if you will procure him 
an appointment.' " 

]\Ir. Dundas was so much struck with the 
impressive manner of her address, that he 
took her by the hand and said, " My good 
girl, be assured that if an opportunity offers, 
I shall not forget your application." The 
promise was not forgotten. It was not long 
before an East India Director with whom 
he was dining, told him that he had then at 
his disposal an appointment of surgeon in 
the East India Company's service, and of- 
fered it to him for any one whom he would 
wish to serve in that line. Dundas imme- 
diately related his adventure, much to the 
amusement of the Director. Mr. Dick ob- 
tained the appointment, and was soon able 
to send for his betrothed. She had several 
offers in the course of the voyage and after 
her arrival, but she refused to listen to any 
one. Her husband attained to great emi- 
nence in his profession, made a handsome 
fortune, came home and purchased an estate 
in the neighbourhood where he was born. 

There is no man among those who in that 
generation figured in public life, of whom a 
story like this could be so readily believed 
as of Windham. He was one whose endow- 
ments and accomplishments would have re- 
commended him at the Court of Elizabeth, 
— and whose speeches, when he did not 
abase himself to the level of his hearers, 
might have commanded attention in the days 
of Charles I. 



A FRAGMENT ON BEARDS. 

Yet have I more to say which I have thought upon, for 
I am filled as the moon at the full ! Ecclesiasticus. 

The reader must not expect that we have 
done Avith our beards yet ; shaving, as he no 
doubt knows but too well, is one of those 
things at which we may cut and come again, 
and in the present Chapter 



672 



THE DOCTOR. 



To shave, or not to shave, that is the question ; 

a matter which hath not hitherto been fully- 
considered. The question as relates to the 
expenditure of time, has been, profitably I 
trust, disposed of; and that of its effect 
upon health has been, as Members of Par- 
liament say, poo-pooh'd. But the propriety 
of the practice is yet to be investigated upon 
other grounds. 

Van Helmont tells us that Adam was 
created without a beard, but that after he 
had fallen and sinned, because of the sinful 
propensities which he derived from the fruit 
of the forbidden Tree, a beard was made 
part of his punishment and disgrace, bring- 
ing him thus into nearer resemblance with 
the beasts towards whom he had made his 
nature approximate ; Ut muliorum quadru- 
pedum compar, socius et similis esset, eorun- 
dem signaturam prce se ferret, quorum more 
ut salax, ita et vultum pilis hirtum ostenderet. 
The same stigma was not inflicted upon 
Eve, because even in the fall she retained 
much of her original modesty, and therefore 
deserved no such opprobrious mark. 

Van Helmont observes also that no good 
Angel ever appears with a beard, and this, 
he says, is a capital sign by which Angels 
may be distinguished, — a matter of great 
importance to those who are in the habit of 
seeing them. Si apparuerit barhatus An- 
gelus, malus esto. Eudcemon enim nunquam 
barbatus apparuit, memor casus ob quern viro 
barba succrevit. He marvelled therefore 
that men should suppose the beard was 
given them for an ornament, when Angels 
abhor it, and when they see that they have 
it in common with he-goats. There must 
be something in his remark ; for take the 
most beautiful Angel that ever Painter de- 
signed, or Engraver copied, put him on a 
beard, and the celestial character will be so 
entirely destroyed, that the simple appen- 
dage of a tail will cacodemonise the Eu- 
daemon. 

This being the belief of Van Helmont, 
who declares that he had profited more by 
reveries and visions than by study, though 
he had studied much and deeply, ought 
he, in conformity to his own belief, to 



have shaved, or not ? Much might be al- 
leged on either side : for to wear the beard 
might seem in a person so persuaded, a 
visible sign of submission to the Almighty 
will, in thus openly bearing the badge of 
punishment, the mark of human degradation 
which the Almighty has been pleased to 
appoint : but, on the other hand, a shaven 
face might seem with equal propriety, and 
in like manner denote, a determination in 
the man to put off, as far as in him lay, this 
outward and visible sign of sin and shame, 
and thereby assert that fallen nature was in 
him regenerate, 

Belle est vraiment V opinion premiere; 

Belle est encores V opinion derniere; 

A qui des deux est-ce doncq' queje xuis ? * 

Which of the two opinions I might in- 
cline to is of no consequence, because I do 
not agree with Van Helmont concerning the 
origin of the beard ; though as to what he 
affirms concerning good Angels upon his 
own alleged knowledge, I cannot contradict 
him upon mine, and have moreover freely 
confessed that when we examine our notions 
of Angels they are found to support him. 
But he himself seems to have thought both 
opinions probable, and therefore, according 
to the casuists, safe ; so, conforming to the 
fashion of his times, without offence to his 
own conscience, he neither did the one 
thing, nor the other ; or perhaps it may be 
speaking more accurately to say that he did 
both ; for he shaved his beard, and let his 
mustachios grow. 

Upon this subject, P. Gentien Hervet, 
Regent of the College at Orleans, printed 
three discourses in the year 1536. In the 
first of these, De radenda barba, he makes it 
appear that we are bound to shave the 
beard. In the second, De alendd barba, he 
proves we ought to let the beard grow. 
And in the third, De vel radenda vel alendd 
barbd, he considers that it is lawful either 
to shave or cultivate the beard at pleasure. 
Si bien, says the Doctor in Theology, M. 
Jean Baptiste Thiers, in his grave and eru- 
dite Histoire des Perruques, published aux 
depens de VAidlieur, at Paris in 1690, — Si 

* Pasquier. 



THE DOCTOR. 



673 



bien, que dans la pensee de ce sgavant Theolo- 
gien, le question des barbes, courtes ou longues, 
est une question tout-a-fait problematique, et 
oil par consequent on peut prendre tel party 
que Von veut, pour ou contre. 

[The following Extracts were to have been 
worked up in this Chapter.] 

D'Israeli quotes an author who, in his Elements of 
Education, 1640, says, " I have a favourable opinion of 
that young gentleman who is curious in fine mustachios. 
The time he employs in adjusting, dressing and curling 
them, is no lost time : for the more he contemplates his 
mustachios, the more his mind will cherish, and be ani- 
mated by, masculine and courageous notions." 

There are men whose beards deserve not so honourable 
a grave as to stuff a botcher's cushion, or to be entombed 
in an ass's packsaddle. Shaksfeare. 

" Human felicity," says Dr. Franklin, " is produced 
not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom 
happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. 
Thus if you teach a poor young man to shave himself and 
keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the 
happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand 
guineas. This sum may be soon spent, the regret only 
remaining of having foolishly consumed it : but in the 
other case he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting 
for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive 
breaths and dull razors ; he shaves when most convenient 
to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done 
with a good instrument." 

By Jupiter, 
Were I the wearer of Antonius' beard 
I would not shave 't to day. Shakspeare. 

D'Israeli says that a clergyman who had the longest 
and largest beard of any Englishman in Elizabeth's reign, 
gave as a reason for wearing it the motive it afforded 
" that no act of his life might be unworthy the gravity of 
his appearance." 



FRAGMENT ON MORTALITY. 

When Fuller in his Pisgah Sight of Pales- 
tine, conies to the city of Aigalon, where 
Elon, Judge of Israel, was buried, " of whom 
nothing else is recorded save his name, time 
of his rule (ten years), and place of his in- 
terment ; slight him not," he says, " because 
so little is reported of him, it tending much 
to the praise of his policy in preventing 
foreign invasions, and domestic commotions, 
so that the land enjoyed peace, as far better 
than victory, as health is to be preferred 
before a recovery from sickness. Yea, times 
of much doing are times of much suffering, 
and many martial achievements are rather 
for the Prince's honour, than the people's 
ease." 



"To what purpose," says Norris, "should 
a man trouble both the world's and his own 
rest, to make himself great ? For besides 
the emptiness of the thing, the Play will 
quickly be done, and the Actors must all 
retire into a state of equality, and then it 
matters not who personated the Emperor, 
or who the Slave." 

The Doctor's feelings were in unison with 
both these passages ; — with the former con- 
cerning the quiet age in which it was his 
fortune to nourish, and with the latter in 
that it was his fortune to nourish in the 
shade. " It is with times," says Lord Ba- 
con, "as it is with ways; some are more up 
hill and down hill, and some are more flat 
and plain ; and the one is better for the 
liver, and the other for the writer." 

He assented also to the Christian-Platonist 
of Bemerton when he asked, " to what pur- 
pose should a man be very earnest in the 
pursuit of Fame ? He must shortly die, 
and so must those too who admire him." 
But nothing could be more opposed to his 
way of thinking than what follows in that 
philosopher, — " Nay, I could almost say, to 
what purpose should a man lay himself out 
upon study and drudge so laboriously in the 
mines of learning ? He is no sooner a little 
wiser than his brethren, but Death thinks 
him ripe for his sickle ; and for aught we 
know, after all his pains and industry, in 
the next world, an ideot, or a mechanic will 
be as forward as he." In the same spirit 
Horace Walpole said in his old age, " What 
is knowledge to me, who stand on the verge, 
and must leave my old stores as well as 
what I may add to them, — and how little 
could that be ! " 

When Johnson was told that Percy was 
uneasy at the thought of leaving his house, 
his study, his books — when he should die, — 
he replied — " a man need not be uneusy on 
these grounds, for as he will retain his con- 
sciousness, he may say with the Philosopher, 
omnia mea mecum porto" 

" Let attention," sa)* the thoughtful John 
Miller in his Bampton Lectures, which do- 
serve to be side by side with those of the 
lamented Van Mildert, " let attention be re- 



674 



THE DOCTOR. 



quested to what seems here an accessory 
sign of the adaptation of all our heavenly 
Father's dealings to that which he ' knows 
to be in man' — I mean his merciful shorten- 
ing of the term of this present natural life, 
subsequently to the period when all- seeing 
justice had been compelled to destroy the 
old world for its disobedience. 

" I call it merciful, because, though we can 
conceive no length of day which could enable 
man with his present faculties to exhaust all 
that is made subject to his intellect, yet ob- 
serving the scarcely credible rapidity of some 
minds and the no less wonderful retention of 
others, we may well conceive a far severer, 
nay too severe a test of resignation and 
patience to arise from length of years. To 
learn is pleasant ; but to be ' ever learning, 
and never able to come to sure knowledge 
of the truth,' (if it were only in matters of 
lawful, and curious, and ardent speculation,) 
is a condition which we may well imagine to 
grow wearisome by too great length of time. 
' Hope delayed' might well 'make the heart 
sick' in many such cases. We may find an 
infidel amusing himself on the brink of the 
grave with many imaginary wishes for a 
little longer respite, that he might witness 
the result of this or that speculation ; but I 
am persuaded that the heart which really 
loves knowledge most truly and most wisely 
will be aifected very differently. From every 
fresh addition to its store, (as far as concerns 
itself,) it will only derive increase to that 
desire wherewith it longs to become disen- 
tangled altogether from a state of imperfec- 
tion, and to be present in the fulness of that 
light, wherein ' everything that is in part 
shall be done away.' Here, then, in one of 
the most interesting and most important of 
all points, (the shortening of human life,) we 
find a representation in Scripture which may 
be accounted favourable to its credibility 
and divine authority on the safest grounds 
of reason and experience. For certainly, as 
to the bare matter of fact, such representa- 
tion corresponds in tfce strictest manner, (as 
far as we have known and have seen,) with 
the state of life as at present existing ; and 
accepting it as true, we can perceive at once 



a satisfactory explanation of it by referring 
it, as a provision for man's well being, to the 
wisdom and mercy of an Omnipotent Spirit 
who knew, and knows ' what is in man.' " 



FRAGMENT OF SIXTH VOLUME. 

Reader, we are about to enter upon the 
sixth volume of this our Opus ; and as it is 
written in the forms of Herkeru, Verily the 
eye of Hope is upon the high road of Ex- 
pectation. 

Well begun, says the Proverb, is half 
done. Horace has been made to say the 
same thing by the insertion of an apt word 
which pentametrises the verse, 

Dimidiumfacti qui bene ccepit habet. 

D. Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor in 
setting forth the merits of Columbus for 
having discovered the New World, and 
thereby opened the way for its conquest by 
the Spaniards, observes that el principio en 
todas las operaciones humanas es el mas 
dificultoso estado ; y assi una voz vencido, se 
reputa y debe reputarse por la mitad della 
obra, b por la principal de ella ; y el pro- 
seguir despues en lo comenzado no contiene 
tanta dificultad. 

When Gabriel Chappuis dedicated the 
eighteenth book of Amadis, by him trans- 
lated from the Spanish, to the Noble and 
Virtuous Lord Jan Anthoine Gros, Sieur 
de S. Jouere, &c, he says, after a preamble 
of eulogies upon the Dedicates and the 
Book, Vous recevrez done, s'il vous plaist 
ce petit livre d'aussy bon ail que ont fait ceux 
ausquels fay dedie les trois livres precedens, 
nCasseurant que s'il vous plaist en avoir la 
lecture, vous y trouverez grande delectation, 
comme a la verite Thistoire qui y est descrite, 
et mesmes en tous les precedens et en ceux qui 
viendront apres, a este inventee pour delecter ; 
mais avec tant de beaux traits, et une infinite 
de divers accidens et occurrences qu'il est 
impossible quavec le plaisir et le delectation, 
Ton n'en tire un grand proffet, comme vous 
experementerez, moyennant la grace de Dieu. 



THE DOCTOR. 



675 



J'ay fait le precedent Ckapitre un peu court ; peut- 
etre que celui-ci sera plus long ; je n'en suis pourtant 
pas bien assure, nous Vallons voir. Scarron. 

Deborah's strong affection for her father 
was not weakened by marriage ; nor his for 
her by the consequent separation. Caroline 
Bowles says truly, and feelingly, and beauti- 
fully, 

It is not love that steals the heart from love ; 
'Tis the hard world and its perplexing cares, 
Its petrifying selfishness, its pride, 
Its low ambition, and its paltry aims. 

There was none of that " petrifying selfish- 
ness " in the little circle which lost so much 
when Deborah was removed from her father's 
parsonage. In order that that loss might be 
less painfully felt, it was proposed by Mr. 
Allison that Sunday should always be kept 
at the Grange when the season or the weather 
permitted. The Doctor came if he could; but 
for Mrs. Dove it was always to be a holiday. 

" The pleasures of a volatile head," says 
Mrs. Carter, " are much less liable to dis- 
appointment, than those of a sensible heart." 
For such as can be contented with rattles 
and raree-shows, there are rattles and raree- 
shows in abundance to content them ; and 
when one is broken it is mighty easily re- 
placed by another. But the pleasures aris- 
ing from the endearments of social relations, 
and the delicate sensibilities of friendly 
affection, are more limited, and their objects 
incontrovertible ; they are accompanied with 
perpetual tender solicitude, and subject to 
accidents not to be repaired beneath the 
Sun. It is no wonder, however, that the 
joys of folly should have their completion in 
a world with which they are to end, while 
those of higher order must necessarily be 
incompleat in a world where they are only 
to begin.* 



* From the writing of the latter paragraph I should 
judge this to be one of the latest sentences Southey ever 
wrote — In the MS. it was to have followed c. cxxxiv. 
vol. iv. p. 361. — P. 337. of this Edition. 



FRAGMENT WHICH WAS TO HAVE ANSWERED 
THE QUESTION PROPOSED IN THE TWO 
HUNDRED AND FORTY- SECOND CHAPTER. 

Io udii gia dire ad un valente uomo nostra vicino, gli 
uomini abbiano molte volte bisogno si di lagrimare, come 
di rider e ; e per tal cagione egli affermava essere state da 
principio trovate le dolorose favole, eke si chiamarono 
Tragedie, accioche raccontate ne' teatri, come in qual 
tempo si costumava difare, tirassero le lagrime agli occhi 
di coloro, eke avevano di cib mestiere j e cost eglino pian- 
gendo delta loro infirmita guarissero. Ma come cib sia 
a noi non ista bene di contristare gli animi delle persone 
con cui favelliamo ; massimamente cold dove si dimori 
per averfesta e sollazzo, e non per piagnere j eke se pure 
alcuno e, eke injermi per vaghezza di lagrimare, assai 
leggier cosafia di medicarlo con la mostarda forte, o porlo 
in alcun luogo alfumo. 

Galateo, del M. Giovanni della Casa. 

The Reader may remember, when he is 
thus reminded of it, that I delayed giving an 
account of Pompey, in answer to the ques- 
tion who he was, till the Dog-days should 
come. Here we are, (if here may be applied 
to time,) in the midst of them, July 24, 
1830. 

Horace Walpole speaks in a letter of two 
or three Mastiff- days, so much fiercer were 
they that season than our common Dog- 
days. This year they might with equal pro- 
priety be called Iceland-Dog-days. Here 
we are with the thermometer every night 
and morning below the temperate point, and 
scarcely rising two degrees above it at 
middle day. And then for weather, — as 
Voiture says, II plent pla-ple-pli-plo-plus. 

If, then, as Robert Wilmot hath written, 
" it be true that the motions of our minds 
follow the temperature of the air wherein 
we live, then I think the perusing of some 
mournful matter, tending to the view of a 
notable example, will refresh your wits in a 
gloomy day, and ease your weariness of the 
louring night :" and the tragical part of my 
story might as fitly be told now in that re- 
spect, as if " weary winter were come upon 
us, which bringeth with him drooping days 
and weary nights." But who does not like 
to put away tragical thoughts ? Who would 
not rather go to see a broad farce than a 
deep tragedy ? Sad thoughts, even when 
they are medicinal for the mind, are as little 
to the mind's liking, as physic is grateful to 
the palate when it is needed most. 



676 



THE DOCTOR. 



FRAGMENT ON HUTCHINSON'S WORKS. * 

These superstitions are unquestionably of 
earlier date than any existing records, and 
commenced with the oldest system of idola- 
try, the worship of the heavenly bodies. 
Hutchinson's view is that when Moses 
brought the Jews out of their captivity, all 
men believed that " Fire, Light, or the 
Operation of the Air, did everything in this 
material system:" those who believed rightly 
in God, knew that these secondary causes 
acted as his instruments, but "those who 
had fallen and lost communication with the 
Prophets and the truth of tradition, and were 
left to reason, (though they reasoned as far 
as reason could reach,) thought the Heavens 
of a divine nature, and that they not only 
moved themselves and the heavenly bodies 
but operated all things on earth ; and in- 
fluenced the bodies, and governed the minds 
and fortunes of men : and so they fell upon 
worshipping them, and consulting them for 
times and seasons." " The Devil," he says, 
" chose right ; this was the only object of 
false worship which gave any temptation ; 
and it had very specious inducements." 
And it was because he thus prevailed over 
" the Children of disobedience," that the 
Apostle stiles him " the Prince of the Powers 
of the Air." "This made the Priests and 
Physicians of the antient heathen cultivate 
the knowledge of these Powers, and after- 
wards made them star-gazers and observe 
the motions of those bodies for their con- 
junctions and oppositions, and all the stuff of 
their lucky and unlucky days and times, and 
especially to make advantage of their 
eclipses, for which they were stiled Magi, 
and looked upon as acquaintance of their 
Gods ; and so much of the latter as is of any 
use, and a great deal more, we are obliged 
to them for." " But these," he says, " who 
thought that the Heavens ordered the events 
of things by their motions and influences, 
and that they were to be observed and fore- 
seen by men, robbed God of his chief attri- 



* A Chapter was to have been devoted to the Hut. 
chinsonian philosophy, and I am inclined to believe that 
this was a part of it. 



butes, and were ordered then, and ought 
still, to be punished with death." 

Hutchinson is one of the most repulsive 
writers that ever produced any effect upon 
his contemporaries. His language is such 
as almost justified Dr. Parr in calling it the 
Hutchinsonian jargon ; and his system is so 
confusedly brought forward that one who 
wishes to obtain even a general knowledge 
of it, must collect it as he can from passages 
scattered through the whole of his treatises. 
Add to these disrecommendations that it is 
propounded in the coarsest terms of insolent 
assumption, and that he treats the offence of 
those who reject the authority of scripture, — 
that is of his interpretation of Hebrew, and 
his exposition of the Mosaic philosophy, — as 
" an infectious scurvy or leprosy of the soul 
which can scarcely be cured by anything 
but eternal brimstone." 

The Paradise Lost, he calls, " that cursed 
farce of Milton, where he makes the Devil 
his hero :" and of the ancient poets and his- 
torians he says that " the mischief which 
these vermin did by praising their heroes in 
their farces or princes for conquering coun- 
tries, and thereby inciting other princes to 
imitate them, were the causes of the greatest 
miseries that have befallen mankind." But 
Sir Isaac Newton was the great object of 
his hatred. " Nothing but villainy," he said, 
" was to be expected from men who had 
made a human scheme, and would construe 
every text concerning it, so as to serve their 
purpose ; he could only treat them as the 
most treacherous men alive. I hope," he 
says, " I have power to forgive any crimes 
which are committed only against myself; I 
am not required, nor have I any power to 
forgive treason against the king, much less 
to forgive any crimes whereby any attempt 
to dispossess Jehovah Aleim. Nay, if I 
know of them and do not reveal them, and 
do not my endeavour to disappoint them in 
either, I am accessary. I shall put these 
things where I can upon the most compas- 
sionate side ; the most favourable wish I can 
make for them is, that they may prove their 
ignorance so fully, that it may abate their 
crimes ; but if their followers will shew that 



THE DOCTOR. 



677 



he or his accomplices knew anything, I must 
be forced to make Devils of them. There 
are many other accidents besides design or 
malice, which make men atheists, — studying 
or arguing to maintain a system, forged by 
a man who does not understand it, and in 
which there must be some things false, makes 
a man a villain whether he will or no. 

" He (Newton) first framed a philosophy, 
which is two thirds of the business of the 
real scriptures, and struck off the rest. And 
when he found his philosophy was built upon, 
and to be supported by emptiness, he was 
forced to patch up a God to constitute space. 
His equipage appears to have been the trans- 
lation of the apostate Jews, and some blind 
histories of the modern heathen Deus, and an 
empty head to make his Deus; Kepler's banter 
of his powers, and some tacit acknowledge- 
ments, as he only supposed, of the ignorantest 
heathens ; an air-pump to make, and a pen- 
dulum or swing to prove a vacuum ; a load- 
stone, and a bit of amber, or jet, to prove his 
philosophy ; a telescope, a quadrant, and a 
pair of compasses to make infinite worlds, 
circles, crooked lines, &c. ; a glass bubble, 
prisms and lenses, and a board with a hole 
in it, to let light into a dark room to form 
his history of light and colours ; and he 
seems to have spent his time, not only when 
young, as some boys do, but when he should 
have set things right, in blowing his phlegm 
through a straw, raising bubbles, and admir- 
ing how the light would glare on the sides of 
them." 

No mention of Hutchinson is made in Dr. 
Brewster's Life of Newton : his system was 
probably thought too visionary to deserve 
notice, and the author unworthy of it be- 
cause he had been the most violent and foul- 
mouthed of all Sir Isaac's opponents. The 
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philo- 
sophy, he called a cobweb of circles and 
lines to catch flies. " Mathematics," he 
said, " are applicable to any data, real or 
imaginary, true or false, more pestilent and 
destructive positions had been fathered upon 
that science than upon all others put to- 
gether, and mathematicians had been put to 
death, both by Heathens and Christians, for 



attributing much less to the heavenly bodies 
than Newton had done." He compared his 
own course of observations with Newton's. 
His had been in the dark bowels of the 
earth, with the inspired light of scripture in 
his hand, — there he had learned his Hebrew, 
and there he had studied the causes and 
traced the effects of the Deluge. " The op- 
portunities," he said, " were infinitely beyond 
what any man can have by living in a box, 
peeping out at a window, or letting the light 
in at a hole : or in separating and extracting 
the spirit from light, which can scarce hap- 
pen in nature, or from refracting the light, 
which only happens upon the rainbow, bub- 
bles, &c, or by making experiments with 
the loadstone, talc or amber, which differ in 
texture from most other bodies, and are only 
found in masses of small size ; or by ar- 
ranging a pendulum, which perhaps has not 
a parallel case in nature : or by the effects 
produced by spirit or light upon mixing 
small parcels of extracted fluids or sub- 
stances, scarce one of which ever happened, 
or will happen in nature : or by taking cases 
which others have put, or putting cases 
which never had, nor ever will have any 
place in nature : or by forming figures or 
lines of crooked directions of motions or 
things, which most of them have no place, 
so the lines no use in nature, other than to 
serve hypotheses of imaginary Powers, or 
courses, which always have been useless, 
when any other Powers, though false, have 
been assigned and received ; and must all 
finally be useless, when the true Powers are 
shewn." 

Such passages show that Hutchinson was 
either grossly incapable of appreciating 
Newton's discoveries, or that he wilfully 
and maliciously depreciated them. His own 
attainments might render the first of these 
conclusions improbable, and the second 
would seem still more so upon considering 
the upright tenour of his life. But the truth 
seems to be, that having constructed a sys- 
tem with great labour, and no little ability. 
upon the assumption that the principles ot' 
natural philosophy as well as of our faith 
are contained in the scriptures, and that the 



678 



THE DOCTOR. 



true interpretation of scripture depended 
upon the right understanding of the Hebrew 
primitives, which knowledge the apostate 
Jews had lost, and he had recovered, his 
belief in this system had all the intolerance 
of fanaticism or supposed infallibility ; and 
those who strongly contravened it, deserved 
in his opinion the punishments appointed in 
the Mosaic law for idolatry and blasphemy. 
Newton and Clarke were in this predica- 
ment. Both, in his judgement, attributed so 
much to secondary causes, — those Powers 
which had been the first objects of idolatry, 
that he considered their Deity to be nothing 
more than the Jupiter of the philosophising 
heathens ; and he suspects that their esoteric 
doctrine resolved itself into Pantheism. To- 
land indeed had told him that there was a 
scheme in progress for leading men through 
Pantheism and Atheism, and made him 
acquainted with all their designs, divine or 
diabolical, and political or anarchical ! and 
all the villanies and forgeries they had 
committed to accomplish them. First they 
sought to make men believe in a God who 
could not punish, and then — that there was 
no God, and Toland was engaged, for pay, 
in this scheme of propagandism, "because 
he had some learning, and more loose 
humour than any of them." The Pantheis- 
ticon was written with this view. Toland 
was only in part the author, other hands 
assisted, and Hutchinson says, he knew 
" there was a physician, and a patient of his 
a divine, who was very serviceable in their 
respective stations in prescribing proper 
doses, even to the very last." But they 
" carried the matter too far," " they dis- 
covered a secret which the world had not 
taken notice of, and which it was highly 
necessary the world should know." For 
" though it be true to a proverb, that a man 
should not be hanged for being a fool, they 
shewed the principles of these men so 
plainly, which were to have no superior, 
to conform to any religion, laws, oaths, &c., 
but be bound by none, and the consequences 
of propagating them, that they thereby 
shewed the wisdom of the heathen people, 
who, because, they could not live safely, 



stoned such men ; and the justice of the 
heathen Emperors and Kings, who put such 
to death, because they could have no secu- 
rity from them, and if their doubts, or 
notions had prevailed, all must have gone to 
anarchy or a commonwealth, as it always 
did, when and where they neglected to cut 
them off." 

That atheism had its propagandists then 
as it has now is certain, and no one who has 
watched the course of opinion among his 
contemporaries can doubt that Socinianism, 
or semi-belief, gravitates towards infidelity. 
But to believe that Newton and Clarke 
were engaged in the scheme which is here 
imputed to them, we must allow more 
weight to Toland's character than to their's, 
and to Hutchinson's judgement. 

What has here been said of Hutchinson 
exhibits him in his worst light, — and it 
must not hastily be concluded that because 
he breathed the fiercest spirit of intolerance, 
he is altogether to be disliked as a man, or 
despised as an author. Unless his theory, 
untenable as it is, had been constructed 
with considerable talent, and supported with 
no common learning, — he could never have 
had such men as Bishop Horne and Jones 
of Nayland among his disciples. Without 
assenting to his system, a biblical student 
may derive instruction from many parts of 
his works. 

There is one remarkable circumstance in 
his history. When he was a mere boy a 
stranger came to board with his father, who 
resided at Spennythorn in the North-Riding 
of Yorkshire, upon an estate of forty pounds 
a-year. The father's intention was to edu- 
cate this son for the office of steward to 
some great landed proprietor, and this 
stranger agreed to instruct him in every 
branch of knowledge requisite for such 
an employment, upon condition of being 
boarded free of expence, engaging at the 
same time to remain till he had compleated 
the boy's education. What he had thus 
undertaken he performed well ; " he was, 
perhaps," says Hutchinson, " as great a 
mathematician as either of those whose 
books he studied, and taught me as much as 



THE DOCTOR. 



679 



I could see any use for, either upon the 
earth or in the heavens, without poisoning 
me with any false notions fathered upon the 
mathematics." The curious part of this 
story is that it was never known who this 
scientific stranger was, for he carefully and 
effectually concealed everything that could 
lead to a discovery. Hutchinson was born 
in 1674, and his education under this tutor 
was compleated at the age of nineteen. 



FRAGMENT RELATIVE TO THE GRAMMAR 
SCHOOL AT DONCASTER AND THE LIVING 
OF ROSSINGTON.* 

The Grammar School was next door to 
Peter Hopkins's, being kept in one of the 



* The Parish of Rossington in the union and soke of 
Doncaster was for many generations the seat of the 
Fossard and Mauley families. In the reign of Henry 
VII., it was granted by that monarch to the corporation 
of Doncaster. 

The following extract is from Mr. John Wainwright's 
History and Antiquities of Doncaster and Conisbro'. 

" Connected with the history of this village, is a singu- 
lar and curious specimen of Egyptian manners, as prac- 
tised by the itinerant gypsies of the British Empire. In 
a letter, which we had the pleasure of receiving from the 
Rev. James Stoven, D.D., the worthy and learned rector 
of this place, it is remarked, that about one hundred and 
twenty years ago, the gypsies commenced here a curious 
custom, which they practised once in almost every year, 
occasioned by the interment, in the churchyard of this 
place, (of) one of their principal leaders, Mr. Charles 
Bosville, on the 30th of June, 1708 or 9. Having, from a 
boy, been much acquainted with this village, I have often 
heard of their (the gypsies) abode here, and with them 
Mr. James Bosville, their king, under whose authority 
they conducted themselves with great propriety and de- 
corum, never committing the least theft or offence. They 
generally slept in their farmers' barns, who, at those 
periods, considered their property to be more safely pro- 
tected than in their absence. Mr. Charles Bosville (but 
how related to the king does not appear,) was much be- 
loved in this neighbourhood, having a knowledge of 
medicine, was very attentive to the sick, well bred in 
manners, and comely in person. After his death, the 
gypsies, for many years, came to visit his tomb, and poured 
upon it hot ale ; but by degrees they deserted the place. 
— (These circumstances must yet hang on their remem- 
brance ; as, only a year ago, 1821, an ill-drest set of them 
encamped in our lanes, calling themselves Boswell's.) — 
These words in the parentheses came within my own 
knowledge." 

It is added in a note — " Boswell's Gang, is an appella- 
tion, very generally applied to a collection of beggars, or 
other idle itinerants, which we often see encamped in 
groups in the lanes and ditches of this part of England." 

In quoting this, I by no means assent to the statement 

that Gypsies are Egyptians They are of Hindostanee 

origin. 



lower apartments of the Town Hall. It was 
a free school for the sons of freemen, the 
Corporation allowing a salary of £50 per 
annum to the schoolmaster, who according 
to the endowment must be a clergyman. 
That office was held by Mr. Crochley, who 
had been bred at Westminster, and was 
elected from thence to Christ Church, Ox- 
ford, in 1742. He came to Doncaster with 
a promise from the Corporation that the 
living of Rossington, which is in their gift 
and is a valuable benefice, should be given 
him provided he had fifty scholars when it 
became vacant. He never could raise their 
numbers higher than forty-five ; the Cor- 
poration adhered to the letter of their agree- 
ment; the disappointment preyed on him, 
and he died a distressed and broken-hearted 
man. 

Yet it was not Crochley's fault that the 
school had not been more flourishing. He 
was as competent to the office as a man of 
good natural parts could be rendered by the 
most compleat course of classical education. 
But in those days few tradesmen ever thought 
of bestowing upon their sons any farther 
education than was sufficient to qualify them 
for trade ; and the boys who were desirous 
to be placed there, must have been endued 
with no ordinary love of learning, for a 
grammar school is still anything rather than 
a Ludus Literarius. 

Two or three years before the Doctor's 
marriage a widow lady came to settle at 
Doncaster, chiefly for the sake of placing 
her sons at the Grammar School there, which, 
though not in high repute, was at least re- 
spectably conducted. It was within five 
minutes' walk of her own door, and thus the 
boys had the greatest advantage that school- 
boys can possibly enjoy, that of living at 
home, whereby they were saved from all the 
misery and from most of the evil with which 
boarding-schools, almost without an excep- 
tion, abounded in those days, and from 
which it may be doubted whether there are 
any yet that are altogether free. Her name 
was Horseman, she was left with six children, 
and just with such means as enabled her by 
excellent management to make what is called 



680 



THE DOCTOR. 



a respectable appearance, the boys being well 
educated at the cheapest rate, and she her- 
self educating two daughters, who were for- 
tunately the eldest children. Happy girls ! 
they were taught what no Governess could 
teach them, to be useful as soon as they were 
capable of being so ; to make their brothers' 
shirts and mend their stockings ; to make 
and mend for themselves ; to cipher so as to 
keep accounts ; to assist in household occu- 
pations, to pickle and preserve, to make 
pastry, to work chair-bottoms, to write a fair 
hand, and to read Italian. This may seem 
incongruous with so practical a system of 
domestic education. But Mrs. Horseman 
was born in Italy, and had passed great part 
of her youth there. 

The father, Mr. Duckinton, was a man of 
some fortune, whose delight was in travelling, 
and who preferred Italy to all other coun- 
tries. Being a whimsical person he had a 
fancy for naming each of his children after 
the place where it happened to be born. 
One daughter therefore was baptized by the 
fair name of Florence, Mrs. Horseman was 
christened Venetia, like the wife of Sir 
Kenelm Digby, whose husband was more 
careful of her complexion than of her cha- 
racter. Fortunate it was that he had no 
daughter born at Genoa or at Nantes, for if 
he had, the one must have concealed her 
true baptismal name under the alias of 
Jenny ; and the other have subscribed her- 
self Nancy, that she might not be reproached 
with the brandy cask. The youngest of his 
children was a son, and if he had been born 
in the French capital would hardly have 
escaped the ignominious name of Paris, but 
as Mr. Duckinton had long wished for a 
son, and the mother knowing her husband's 
wishes had prayed for one, the boy escaped 
with no worse name than Deodatus. 



FRAGMENT OF INTERCIIAPTER. 

Kissing has proverbially been said to go by 
favour. So it is but too certain, that Pre- 
ferment does in Army and Navy, Church 
and State ; and so does Criticism. 



That Kissing should do so is but fair and 
just ; and it is moreover in the nature of 
things. 

That Promotion should do so is also in 
the nature of things — as they are. And 
this also is fair where no injustice is com- 
mitted. When other pretensions are equal, 
favour is the feather which ought to be put 
into the scale. In cases of equal fitness, no 
wrong is done to the one party, if the other 
is preferred for considerations of personal 
friendship, old obligations, or family connec- 
tion ; the injustice and the wrong would be 
if these were overlooked. 

To what extent may favour be reasonably 
allowed in criticism ? 

If it were extended no farther than can 
be really useful to the person whom there is 
an intention of serving, its limits would be 
short indeed. For in that case it would 
never proceed farther than truth and dis- 
cretion went with it. Far more injury is 
done to a book and to an author by inju- 
dicious or extravagant praise, than by in- 
temperate or malevolent censure. 

Some persons have merrily surmised that 
Job was a reviewer because he exclaimed, 
" Oh that mine enemy had written a book ! " 
Others on the contrary have inferred that 
reviewing was not known in his days, be- 
cause he wished that his own words had 
been printed and published. 



[The timbers were laid for a Chapter on 
wigs, and many notes and references were 
collected. — This Fragment is all that 
remains.] 

Bernardin St. Pierre, who, with all his 
fancies and oddities, has been not undeser- 
vedly a popular writer in other countries as 
well as in his own, advances in the most 
extravagant of his books, (the Harmonies de 
la Nature,}' the magnificent hypothesis that 
men invented great wigs because great wigs 
are semblables aux criniers ales lions, like 
lion's manes. But as wigs are rather de- 
signed to make men look grave than ter- 
rible, he might with more probability have 



THE DOCTOR. 



681 



surmised that they were intended to imi- 
tate the appearance of the Bird of Wisdom. 

The Doctor wore a wig : and looked nei- 
ther like a Lion, nor like an Owl in it. 
Yet when he first put it on, and went to the 
looking-glass, he could not help thinking 
that he did not look like a Dove. 

But then he looked like a Doctor, which 
was as it became him to look. He wore it 
professionally. 

It was not such a wig as Dr. Parr's, which 
was of all contemporary wigs facile princeps. 
Nor was it after the fashion of that which 
may be seen in "immortal buckle," upon 
Sir Cloudesley Shovel's monument in West- 
minster Abbey &c. 



MEMOIRS OF CAT S EDEN. 

[The following Fragments were intended to 
be worked up into an Interchapter on the 
History of Cats. The first fairly written 
out was to have been, it would appear, the 
commencement. The next is an Extract 
from Eulia Effendi. " That anecdote about 
the King of the Cats, Caroline, you must 
write out for me, as it must be inserted," 
said the lamented Author of " The Doctor, 
&c." to Mrs. Southey. The writer of the 
lines is not known, they were forwarded to 
the Author when at Killer ton. The " Me- 
moirs of Cats of Greta Hall" was to have 
furnished the particulars, which the first frag- 
ment states had got abroad. 

What was to have been the form of the 
Interchapter the Editor does not know, nei- 
ther does Mrs. Southey. The playful letter 
is given exactly as it was written. A beau- 
tiful instance, as will be acknowledged by 
all, of that confidence which should exist 
between a loving father and a dutiful daugh- 
ter. Sir Walter Scott wrote feelingly when 
he said, 

Some feelings are to mortals given 

With less of earth in them than heaven : 

And if there be a human tear 

From passion's dross refined and clear, 

A tear so limpid and so meek, 

It would not stain an angel's cheek, 

'Tis that which pious fathers shed 

Upon a duteous daughter's head !] 



FRAGMENT OF INTERCHAPTER. 

More than prince of cats, I can tell you. 

Romeo and Juliet. 

An extract from the Register of Cat's Eden 
has got abroad, whereby it appears that the 
Laureate, Dr. Southey, who is known to be 
a philofelist, and confers honours upon his 
Cats according to their services, has raised 
one to the highest rank in peerage, promot- 
ing him through all its degrees by the follow- 
ing titles, His Serene Highness the Arch- 
duke Rumpelstilzchen, Marquis Macbum, 
Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waowl- 
her and Skaratchi. 

The first of these names is taken from the 
German Collection of Kinder und Haus- 
Marchen. A Dwarf or Imp so called was 
to carry off the infant child of the Queen 
as the price of a great service which he had 
rendered her, but he had consented to forego 
his right if in the course of three days she 
could find out what was his name. This 
she never could have done, if the King had 
not on the first day gone hunting, and 
got into the thickest part of the wood, 
where he saw a ridiculous Dwarf hopping 
about before a house which seemed by its 
dimensions to be his home, and singing for 
joy ; these were the words of his song, 

Heute back ich, morgen bran ich, 
Uebermorgen hohl ich der Frau Koniginn: ihr Kind, 
Ach wie gut ist, das niemand weiss, 
Dass ich Rumpelstilzchen heiss ! 
I bake to-day, and I brew to-morrow, 
Mrs. Queen will see me the next day to her sorrow, 
When according to promise her child I shall claim, 
For none can disclose, because nobody knows 
That Rumpelstilzchen is my name. 

Now if Rumpelstilzchen had had as many 
names as a Spanish Infante, the man must 
have a good memory who could have carried 
them away upon hearing them once. 

" The Cats of Diorigi are celebrated all 
over Greece, for nowhere are to be found 
cats so pretty, so vigilant, so caressing and 
well-bred as at Diorigi. The Cats of the 
Oasis in Egypt, and of Sinope, are justly 
renowned for their good qualities, but those 
of Diorigi are particularly fat, brilliant, and 
playing different colours. They are carried 
from here to Persia, to Ardebeil where they 



•:-2 



THE DOCTOR. 



are shut up in cages, proclaimed by the 
public criers and sold for one or two tomans. 
The Georgians also buy them at a great 
price, to saTe their whiskers which are com- 
monly eaten up by mice. The criers of 
ArdebeiL who cry these cats, have a parti- 
cular melody to which they sing their cry in 
these words, 

O you who like a Cat 
That catches mouse aDd rat, 
Well-bred, caressing, gay 
Companion to sport and play, 
Amusing and genteel, 
Shall never scratch and steal. 

Singing these words they carry the cats on | 
their head and sell them for great prices, 
because the inhabitants of Ardebeil are 
scarce able to save their woollen cloth from 
the destruction of mice and rats. Cats are 
called Hurre, Katta, Senorre, Merabe, 
Matshi, "VTeistaun, Wemistaun, but those of 
Diorigi are particularly highly esteemed. 
Notwithstanding that high reputation and 
price of the Cats of Diorigi, they meet with 
dangerous enemies in their native place, 
where sometimes forty or fifty of them are 
killed secretly, tanned, and converted into 
fur for the winter time. It is a fur scarce 
to be distinguished from Russian ermelin, and 
that of the red cats is not to be distinguished 
from the fox that comes from Ozalov." * 

A labouring man returning to his cottage 
after night-fall, passed by a lone house in 
ruins, long uninhabited. Surprised at the 
appearance of light within, and strange 
sounds issuing from the desolate interior, he 
stopped and looked in through one of the 
broken windows, and there in a large old 
gloomy room, quite bare of furniture except 
that the cobwebs hung about its walls like 
tapestry, he beheld a marvellous spectacle. 
A small coffin covered with a pall stood in 
the midst of the floor, and round and round 
and round about it, with dismal lamentations 
in the feline tongue, marched a circle *of 
Cats, one of them being covered from head 
to foot with a black veil, and walking as 
chief mourner. The man was so frightened 
with what he saw that he waited to see no 

* Evlia Effendi. 



more, but went straight home, and at supper 
told his wife what had befallen him. 

Their own old Cat, who had been sitting, 
as was her wont, on the elbow of her Mas- 
ter's chair, kept her station very quietly, till 
he came to the description of the chief 
Mourner, when, to the great surprise and 
consternation of the old couple, she bounced 
up, and flew up the chimney exclaiming — 
" Then I am King of the Cats."' 

Keswick, January 9/A. 
Dear Master, 

Let our boldness not offend, 
If a few lines of duteous love we send ; 
Nor wonder that we deal in rhyme, for long 
We've been familiar with the founts of song ; 
Nine thorougher tabbies you would rarely find, 
Than those who laurels round your temples bind : 
For how, with less than nine lives to their share, 
Could they have lived so long on poet's fare ? 
Athens surnamed them from their mousing powers, 
And Rome from that harmonious MU of ours, 
In which the letter U, (as we will trouble you 
To say to Todd) should supersede ew — 
This by the way — we now proceed to tell, 
That all within the bounds of home are well ; 
All but your faithful cats, who inly pine ; 
The cause your Conscience may too well divine. 
Ah I little do you know how swiftly fly 
The venomed darts of feline jealousy ; 
How delicate a task to deal it is 
With a Grimalkin's sensibilities, 
When Titten's tortoise fur you smoothed with bland 
And coaxing courtesies of lip and hand, 
We felt as if, (poor Fuss's constant dread,) 
Some school-boy stroked us both from tail to head ; 
Nor less we suffer'd while with sportive touch 
And purring voice, you played with grey-backed Gutch ; 
And when with eager step, you left your seat, 
To get a peep at Richard's snow-white feet, 
Himself all black ; we long'd to stop his breath 
With something like his royal namesake's death ; 
If more such scenes our frenzied fancies see, 
Resolved we hang from yonder apple tree — 
And were not that a sad catastrophe ! 
O : then return to your deserted lake, 
Dry eyes that weep, and comfort hearts that ache ; 
Our mutual jealousies we both disown, 
Content to share, rather than lose a throne. 
The Parlour, Rumple's undisputed reign, 
Hurley's the rest of all your wide domain. 
Return, return, dear Bard xxt ilr,y_y\. 
Restore the happy days that once have been, 
Resign yourself to Home, the Muse and us. 
(Scralchd) Rcmplestitchkin, 

Hirlyburlybcss. 



MEMOIR OF THE CATS OF GRETA HALL. 

For as much, most excellent Edith May, as 
you must always feel a natural and becom- 
ing concern in whatever relates to the house 
wherein you were born, and in which the 
first part of your life has thus far so happily 



THE DOCTOR. 



683 



been spent, I have, for your instruction and 
delight, composed these Memoirs of the Cats 
of Greta Hall : to the end that the memory 
of such worthy animals may not perish, but 
be held in deserved honour by my children, 
and those who shall come after them. And 
let me not be supposed unmindful of Beel- 
zebub of Bath, and Senhor Thomaz de Lis- 
boa, that I have not gone back to an earlier 
period, and included them in my design. 
Far be it from me to intend any injury or 
disrespect to their shades ! Opportunity of 
doing justice to their virtues will not be 
wanting at some future time, but for the 
present I must confine myself within the 
limits of these precincts. 

In the autumn of the year 1803, when I 
entered upon this place of abode, I found 
the hearth in possession of two cats, whom 
my nephew Hartley Coleridge, (then in the 
7th year of his age,) had named Lord Nelson 
and Bona Marietta. The former, as the 
name implies, was of the worthier gender : 
it is as decidedly so in Cats, as in grammar 
and in law. He was an ugly specimen of 
the streaked-carrotty, or Judas-coloured 
kind ; which is one of the ugliest varieties. 
But nimium ne crede colori. In spite of his 
complection, there was nothing treacherous 
about him. He was altogether a good Cat, 
affectionate, vigilant, and brave ; and for 
services performed against the Rats was de- 
servedly raised in succession to the rank of 
Baron, Viscount, and Earl. He lived to a 
good old age ; and then being quite helpless 
and miserable, was in mercy thrown into the 
river. I had more than once interfered to 
save him from this fate ; but*it became at 
length plainly an act of compassion to con- 
sent to it. And here let me observe that in 
a world wherein death is necessary, the law 
of nature by which one creature preys upon 
another is a law of mercy, not only because 
death is thus made instrumental to life, and 
more life exists in consequence, but also be- 
cause it is better for the creatures them- 
selves to be cut off suddenly, than to perish 
by disease or hunger, — for these are the 
only alternatives. 

There are still some of Lord Nelson's 



descendants in the town of Keswick. Two 
of the family were handsomer than I should 
have supposed any Cats of this complection 
could have been ; but their fur was fine, the 
colour a rich carrot, and the striping like 
that of the finest tyger or tabby kind. I 
named one of them William Rufus ; the 
other Danayn le Roux, after a personage in 
the Romance of Gyron le Courtoys. 

Bona Marietta was the mother of Bona 
Fidelia, so named by my nephew aforesaid. 
Bona Fidelia was a tortoiseshell cat. She 
was filiated upon Lord Nelson, others of the 
same litter having borne the unequivocal 
stamp of his likeness. It was in her good 
qualities that she resembled him, for in 
truth her name rightly bespoke her nature. 
She approached as nearly as possible in dis- 
position, to the ideal of a perfect cat : — he 
who supposes that animals have not their 
difference of disposition as well as men, 
knows very little of animal nature. Having 
survived her daughter Madame Catalani, 
she died of extreme old age, universally es- 
teemed and regretted by all who had the 
pleasure of her acquaintance. 

Bona Fidelia left a daughter and a grand- 
daughter ; the former I called Madame 
Bianchi — ■ the latter Pulcheria. It was im- 
possible ever to familiarise Madame Bianchi, 
though she had been bred up in all respects 
like her gentle mother, in the same place, 
and with the same persons. The nonsense 
of that arch-philosophist Helvetius would be 
sufficiently confuted by this single example, 
if such rank folly, contradicted as it is by 
the experience of every family, needed con- 
futation. She was a beautiful and singular 
creature, white, with a fine tabby tail, and 
two or three spots of tabby, always deli- 
cately clean ; and her wild eyes were bright 
and green as the Duchess de CadavaTs 
emerald necklace. Pulcheria did not cor- 
respond as she grew up to the promise of 
her kittenhood and her name ; but she was 
as fond as her mother was shy and intracta- 
ble. Their late was extraordinary as well 
as mournful. When good old Mrs. Wilson 
died, who used to feed and indulge them, 
they immediately forsook the house, nor 



C84 



THE DOCTOR. 



could they be allured to enter it again, 
though they continued to wander and moan 
around it, and came for food. After some 
weeks Madame Bianchi disappeared, and 
Pulcheria soon afterwards died of a disease 
endemic at that time among cats. 

For a considerable time afterwards, an 
evil fortune attended all our attempts at re- 
establishing a Cattery. Ovid disappeared 
and Virgil died of some miserable distemper. 
You and your cousin are answerable for 
these names : the reasons which I could find 
for them were, in the former case, the satis- 
factory one that the said Ovid might be 
presumed to be a master in the Art of Love ; 
and in the latter, the probable one that 
something like Ma-ro might be detected 
in the said Virgil's notes of courtship. 
There was poor Othello : most properly 
named, for black he was, and jealous un- 
doubtedly he would have been, but he in 
his kittenship followed Miss Wilbraham into 
the street, and there in all likelihood came 
to an untimely end. There was the Zombi 
— (I leave the Commentators to explain 
that title, and refer them to my History of 
Brazil to do it,) — his marvellous story was 
recorded in a letter to Bedford, — and after 
that adventure he vanished. There was 
Prester John, who turned out not to be of 
John's gender, and therefore had the name 
altered to Pope Joan. The Pope I am 
afraid came to a death of which other Popes 
have died. I suspect that some poison which 
the rats had turned out of their holes 
proved fatal to their enemy. For some 
time I feared we were at the end of our 
Cat-a-logue: but at last Fortune, as if to 
make amends for her late severity, sent us 
two at once, — the-never-to-be-enough- 
praised Rumpelstilzchen, and the equally-to- 
be-admired Hurlyburlybuss. 

And " first for the first of these " as my 
huge favourite, and almost namesake Robert 
South, says in his Sermons. 

When the Midgeleys went away from the 
next house, they left this creature to our 
hospitality, cats being the least moveable of 
all animals because of their strong local 
predilections ; — they are indeed in a do- 



mesticated state the serfs of the animal 
creation, and properly attached to the soil. 
The change was gradually and therefore 
easily brought about, for he was already 
acquainted with the children and with me ; 
and having the same precincts to prowl in 
was hardly sensible of any other difference 
in his condition than that of obtaining a 
name ; for when he was consigned to us he 
was an anonymous cat; and I having just 
related at breakfast, with universal applause, 
the story of Rumpelstilzchen from a Ger- 
man tale in Grimm's Collection, gave him 
that strange and magnisonant appellation ; 
to which, upon its being ascertained that he 
came when a kitten from a bailiff's house, I 
added the patronymic of Macbum. Such is 
his history ; his character may with most 
propriety be introduced after the manner of 
Plutarch's parallels, when I shall have given 
some previous account of his great compeer 
and rival Hurlyburlybuss, — that name also 
is of Germanic and Grimmish extraction. 

Whence Hurlyburlybuss came was a 
mystery when you departed from the Land 
of Lakes, and a mystery it long remained. 
He appeared here, as Mango Capac did in 
Peru, and Quetzalcohuatl among the Azte- 
cas, no one knew from whence. He made 
himself acquainted with all the philofelists 
of the family — attaching himself more par- 
ticularly to Mrs. Lovell, but he never 
attempted to enter the house, frequently dis- 
appeared for days, and once, since my return, 
for so long a time that he was actually be- 
lieved to be dead, and veritably lamented as 
such. The wonder was whither did he retire 
at such times — and to whom did he belong ; 
for neither I in my daily walks, nor the chil- 
dren, nor any of the servants, ever by any 
chance saw him anywhere except in our 
own domain. There was something so 
mysterious in this, that in old times it might 
have excited strong suspicion, and he would 
have been in danger of passing for a Witch 
in disguise, or a familiar. The mystery, 
however, was solved about four weeks ago, 
when, as we were returning from a walk up 
the Greta, Isabel saw him on his transit 
across the road and the wall from Shulicrow, 



THE DOCTOR. 



685 



in a direction toward the Hill. But to this 
day we are ignorant who has the honour to 
be his owner in the eye of the law ; and the 
owner is equally ignorant of the high favour 
in which Hurlyburlybuss is held, of the 
heroic name which he has obtained, and that 
his fame lias extended far and wide — even 
unto Norwich in the East, and Escott and 
Crediton and Kellerton in the West, yea — 
that with Rumpelstilzchen he has been cele- 
brated in song, by some hitherto undisco- 
vered poet, and that his glory will go down 
to future generations. 

The strong enmity which unhappily sub- 
sists between these otherwise gentle and 
most amiable cats is not unknown to you. 
Let it be imputed, as in justice it ought, 
not to their individual characters, (for Cats 
have characters, — and for the benefit of 
philosophy, as well as felisophy, this truth 
ought generally to be known,) but to the con- 
stitution of Cat nature, — an original sin, or 
an original necessity, which may be only an- 
other mode of expressing the same thing : 

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, 
Nor can one purlieu brook a double reign 
Of Hurlyburlybuss and Rumpelstilzchen. 

When you left us, the result of many a 
fierce conflict was, that Hurly remained 
master of the green and garden, and the 
whole of the out of door premises ; Rumpel 
always upon the appearance of his victorious 
enemy retiring into the house as a citadel or 
sanctuary. The conqueror was, perhaps, in 
part indebted for this superiority to his 
hardier habits of life, living always in the 
open air, and providing for himself; while 
Rumpel, (who though born under a bum- 
bailiff's roof was nevertheless kittened with 
a silver spoon in his mouth,) passed his hours 
in luxurious repose beside the fire, and 
looked for his meals as punctually as any 
two-legged member of the family. Yet I 
believe that the advantage on Hurly's side 
is in a great degree constitutional also, and 
that his superior courage arises from a 
confidence in his superior strength, which, 
as you well know, is visible in his make. 
What Bento and Maria Rosa used to say 
of my poor Thomaz, that he was miiito fidal- 



go, is true of Rumpelstilzchen, his coun- 
tenance, deportment, and behaviour being 
such that he is truly a gentleman-like Tom- 
cat. Far be it from me to praise him be- 
yond his deserts, — he is not beautiful, the 
mixture, tabby and white, is not good, (ex- 
cept under very favourable combinations,) 
and the tabby is not good of its kind. 
Nevertheless he is a fine cat, handsome 
enough for his sex, large, well-made, with 
good features, and an intelligent counte- 
nance, and carrying a splendid tail, which in 
Cats and Dogs is undoubtedly the seat of 
honour. His eyes, which are soft and ex- 
pressive, are of a hue between chrysolite 
and emerald. Hurlyburlybuss's are between 
chrysolite and topaz. Which may be the 
more esteemed shade for the olho de gato I 
am not lapidary enough to decide. You 
should ask my Uncle. But both are of the 
finest water. In all his other features 
Hurly must yield the palm, and in form 
also ; he has no pretensions to elegance, his 
size is ordinary and his figure bad : but the 
character of his face and neck is so mascu- 
line, that the Chinese, who use the word 
bull as synonymous with male, and call a 
boy a bull- child, might with great pro- 
priety denominate him a bull-cat. His 
make evinces such decided marks of 
strength and courage, that if cat-fighting 
were as fashionable as cock-fighting, no Cat 
would stand a fairer chance for winning a 
Welsh main. He would become as famous 
as the Dog Billy himself, whom I look upon 
as the most distinguished character that has 
appeared since Buonaparte. 

Some weeks ago Hurlyburlybuss was 
manifestly emaciated and enfeebled by ill 
health, and Rumpelstilzchen with groat 
magnanimity made overtures of peace. The 
whole progress of the treaty was seen from 
the parlour window. The caution with 
which Rumpel made his advances, the sullen 
dignity with which they were received, their 
mutual uneasiness when Rumpel, after a 
slow and wary approach, seated himself 
whisker-to-whisker with his rival, the mu- 
tual fear which restrained not only tooth 
and claws, but even all tones of defiance, 



THE DOCTOR. 



the mutual agitation of their tails which, 
though they did not expand with anger, 
could not be kept still for suspense, and 
lastly the manner in which Hurly retreated, 
like Ajax still keeping his face toward his 
old antagonist, were worthy to have been 
represented by that painter who was called 
the Rafaelie of Cats. The overture I fear 
was not accepted as generously as it was 
made ; for no sooner had Hurlyburlybuss 
recovered strength than hostilities were re- 
commenced with greater violence than ever ; 
Rumpel, who had not abused his superiority 
while he possessed it, had acquired mean 
time a confidence which made him keep the 
field. Dreadful were the combats which 
ensued, as their ears, faces and legs bore 
witness. Rumpel had a wound which went 
through one of his feet. The result has been 
so far in his favour that he no longer seeks 
to avoid his enemy, and we are often com- 
pelled to interfere and separate them. Oh 
it is aweful to hear the " dreadful note of 
preparation" with which they prelude their 
encounters ! — the long low growl slowly rises 
and swells till it becomes a high sharp yowl, — 
and then it is snapped short by a sound which 
seems as if they were spitting fire and venom 
at each other. I could half persuade myself 
that the word felonious is derived from the 
feline temper as displayed at such times. 
All means of reconciling them and making 
them understand how goodly a thing it is 
for cats to dwell together in peace, and 
what fools they are to quarrel and tear each 
other, are in vain. The proceedings of the 
Society for the Abolition of War are not 
more utterly ineffectual and hopeless. 

All we can do is to act more impartially 
than the Gods did between Achilles and 
Hector, and continue to treat both with 
equal regard. 

And thus having brought down these 
Memoirs of the Cats of Greta Hall to the 
present day, I commit the precious me- 
morial to your keeping, and remain 
Most dissipated and light-heeled daughter, 
Your most diligent and light-hearted father, 
Robert Sotjthey. 
Keswick, 18 June, 1824. 



FRAGMENT OP INTERCHAPTER. 

[The following playful effusion was like- 
wise, as the " Memoirs of Cat's Eden," in- 
tended for " The Doctor, &c," but how it 
was to have been moulded, so as to obscure 
the incognito, I do not know. It will tend, 
if I mistake not, to show the easy versatility, 
— the true evTpa.7re\ia, — -of a great and 
a good man's mind. "Fortune," says 
Fluellen, "is turning and inconstant, and 
variations, and mutabilities," — but one who, 
in the midst of constant and laborious occu- 
pations, could revel in such a recreation as 
this " Chapter on the Statutes" was Fortune's 
master, and above her wheel. 

ARS UTINAM MORES ANIMUMQUE EFFINGERE POSSET : 
PULCHIU^R IN TERRIS NULLA TABELLA FORET.* 

It may be added that there -was another 
very curious collection of Letters intended 
for " The Doctor, &c," but they have not 
come to my hand. They were written in a 
peculiar dialect, and would have required 
much mother wit and many vocabularies 
to have decyphered them. She who sug- 
gested them, — a woman " of infinite jest, — 
of most excellent fancy," — a good woman, 
and a kind, — is now gathered to her rest ! ] 



EI2 TOT2 ANAPIANTA2. 

' fx.h 7>i&,fioXo? hitfvtucri run ■rx^a.vif^oi? oivQeaxoi;, xon 
US rohi rcuv (3ottn\ickiv vj3%nruv u.v'hgioo/ra.s. 

Chrysost. Hom. ad Popul. Antiochen. 

My dear daughter, 

Having lately been led to compose 
an inscription for one of our Garden statues, 
an authentic account of two such extraor- 
dinary works of art has appeared to me so 
desirable that I even wonder at myself for 
having so long delayed to write one. It is 
the more incumbent on me to do this, be- 
cause neither of the artists have thought 
proper to inscribe their names upon these 
master-pieces, — either from that modesty 
which often accompanies the highest genius, 



Mart. Epigr. 



THE DOCTOR. 



687 



or from a dignified consciousness that it was 
unnecessary to set any mark upon them, the 
works themselves sufficiently declaring from 
what hands they came. 

I undertake this becoming task with the 
more pleasure because our friend Mrs. Kee- 
nan has kindly offered to illustrate the 
intended account by drawings of both Sta- 
tues, — having, as you may well suppose, 
been struck with admiration by them. The 
promise of this co-operation induces me not 
to confine myself to a mere description, but 
to relate on what occasion they were made, 
and faithfully to record the very remarkable 
circumstances which have occurred in con- 
sequence; circumstances I will venture to 
say, as well attested and as well worthy of 
preservation as any of those related in the 
History of the Portuguese Images of Nossa 
Senhora, in ten volumes quarto, — a book 
of real value, and which you know I regard 
as one of the most curious in my collection. 
If in the progress of this design I should 
sometimes appear to wander in digression, 
you will not impute it to any habitual love 
of circumlocution ; and the speculative no- 
tions which I may have occasion to propose, 
you will receive as mere speculations and 
judge of them accordingly. 

Many many years ago I remember to have 
seen these popular and rustic rhymes in print, 

God made a great man to plough and to sow, 
God made a little man to drive away the crow ; 

they were composed perhaps to make some 
little man contented with that office, and 
certain it is that in all ages and all countries 
it has been an object of as much consequence 
to preserve the seed from birds when sown, 
as to sow it. JSTo doubt Adam himself when 
he was driven to cultivate the ground felt 
this, and we who are his lineal descendants, 
(though I am sorry to say we have not in- 
herited a rood of his estates,) have felt it 
also, in our small but not unimportant con- 
cern, the Garden. Mrs. L., the Lady of 
that Garden, used to complain grievously of 
the depredations committed there, especially 
upon her pease. Fowls and Ducks were 
condemned either to imprisonment for life, 
or to the immediate larder for their offences 



of this kind ; but the magpies (my prote- 
gees) and the sparrows, and the blackbirds 
and the thrushes, bade defiance to the coop 
and the cook. She tried to fright them 
away by feathers fastened upon a string, but 
birds were no more to be frightened by 
feathers than to be caught by chaff. She 
dressed up two mopsticks ; not to be for- 
gotten, because when two youths sent their 
straw hats upon leaving Keswick to K. and 
B., the girls consigned the hats to these 
mopsticks, and named the figures thus at- 
tired in due honour of the youths, L. N., 
and C. K. These mopsticks, however, were 
well dressed enough to invite thieves from 
the town, — and too well to frighten the 
birds. Something more effectual was wanted, 
and Mrs. L. bespoke a man of Joseph Glover. 
Such is the imperfection of language that, 
write as carefully and warily as we can, it is 
impossible to use words which will not fre- 
quently admit of a double construction; upon 
this indeed it is that the Lawyers have 
founded the science of the Law, which said 
science they display in extracting any mean- 
ing from any words, and generally that 
meaning that shall be most opposite to the 
intention for which they were used. When 
I say that your Aunt L. bespoke a man of 
Joseph Glover, I do not mean that she com- 
missioned him to engage a labourer : nor 
that she required him actually to make a 
man, like Frankenstein, — though it must 
be admitted that such a man as Frankenstein 
made, would be the best of all scarecrows, 
provided he were broken in so as to be per- 
fectly manageable. To have made a man 
indeed would have been more than even 
Paracelsus would have undertaken to per- 
form ; for according to the receipt which 
that illustrious Bombast ab Hohenheim has 
delivered to posterity, an honvunculus cannot 
be produced in a hotbed in less than forty 
weeks and forty days ; and this would not 
have been in time to save the pease ; not to 
mention that one of his homunculi had it 
been ready could not have served the pur- 
pose, for by his account, when it was produced, 
it was smaller even than Mark Thumb. Such 
an order would have been more unreason- 



688 



THE DOCTOR. 



able than ai v of those which Juno imposed 
upon Hercules ; whereas the task imposed 
by Mrs. L. was nothing more than Glover 
thought himself capable of executing, for 
he understood the direction plainly and 
simply in its proper sense, as a carpenter 
ought to understand it. 

An ordinary Carpenter might have hesi- 
tated at undertaking it, or bungled in the 
execution. But Glover is not an ordinary 
Carpenter. He says of himself that he should 
have been a capital singer, only the pity is, 
that he has no voice. Whether he had ever 
a similar persuasion of his own essential but 
unproducible talents for sculpture or paint- 
ing I know not : — but if ever genius and 
originality were triumphantly displayed in 
the first effort of an untaught artist, it was 
on this occasion. Perhaps I am wrong in 
calling him untaught ; — for there is a super- 
natural or divine teaching'; — and it will 
appear presently that if there be any truth 
in heathen philosophy, or in that of the 
Roman Catholics, (which is very much the 
same in many respects,) some such assist- 
ance may be suspected in this case. 

With or without such assistance, but cer- 
tainly con amore, and with the aid of his 
own genius, if of no other, Glover went to 
work : ere long shouts of admiration were 
heard one evening in the kitchen, so loud 
and of such long continuance that inquiry 
was made from the parlour into the cause, 
and the reply was that Mrs. L.'s man was 
brought home. Out we went, father, mother 
and daughters, (yourself among them, — for 
you cannot have forgotten that memorable 
hour,) My Lady and the Venerabilis, — and 
Mrs. L. herself, as the person more imme- 
diately concerned. Seldom as it happens 
that any artist can embody with perfect suc- 
cess the conceptions of another, in this in- 
stance the difficult and delicate task had 
been perfectly accomplished. But I must 
describe the Man, — calling him by that 
name at present, the power, coon or intelli- 
gence which had incorporated itself with 
that ligneous resemblance of humanity not 
having at that time been suspected. 

Yet methinks more properly might he 



have been called youth than man, the form 
and stature being juvenile. The limbs and 
body were slender, though not so as to con- 
vey any appearance of feebleness, it was 
rather that degree of slenderness which in 
elegant and refined society is deemed essen- 
tial to grace. The countenance at once 
denoted strength and health and hilarity, 
and the incomparable carpenter had given 
it an expression of threatful and alert deter- 
mination, suited to the station for which he 
was designed and the weapon which he bore. 
The shape of the face was rather round than 
oval, resembling methinks the broad harvest 
r;„vpn ; the eyes were of the deepest black, 
the eyebrows black also ; and there was a 
blackness about the nose and lips, such as 
might be imagined in the face of Hercules, 
while he was in the act of lifting and stran- 
gling the yet unsubdued and struggling An- 
taeus. On his head was a little hat, low in the 
crown and narrow in the brim. His dress 
was a sleeved jacket without skirts, — our 
ancestors would have called it agipion \jubon 
it would be rendered if ever this description 
were translated into Spanish, gibao in Por- 
tuguese ; jupon or gippon in old French. It 
was fastened from the neck downward with 
eight white buttons, two and two, and be- 
tween them was a broad white stripe, the 
colour of the gipion being brown : whether 
the stripe was to represent silver lace, or a 
white facing like that of the naval uniform, 
is doubtful and of little consequence. The 
lower part of his dress represented inno- 
minables and hose in one, of the same colour 
as the gipion. And he carried a fowling- 
piece in his hand. 

Great was the satisfaction which we all 
expressed at beholding so admirable a man ; 
great were the applauses which we bestowed 
upon the workman with one consent ; and 
great was the complacency with which Glover 
himself regarded the work of his own hands. 
He thought, he said, this would please us. 
Please us indeed it did, and so well did it 
answer that after short trial Mrs. L. think- 
ing that a second image would render the 
whole garden secure, and moreover that it 
was not good for her Man to be alone, 



THE DOCTOR. 



689 



directed Glover to make a woman also. The 
woman accordingly was made. Flesh of his 
flesh and bone of his bone, she could not be, 
the Man himself not being made of such 
materials ; but she was wood of his wood and 
plank of his plank, — which was coming as 
nearly as possible to it, made of the same 
tree and fashioned by the same hand. 

The woman was in all respects a goodly 
mate for the man, except that she seemed to 
be a few years older ; she was rather below the 
mean stature, in that respect resembling the 
Venus de Medicis ; slender waisted yet not 
looking as if she were tight-laced, nor so 
thin as to denote ill health. Her dress was 
a gown of homely brown, up to the neck. 
The artist had employed his brightest colours 
upon her face ; even the eyes and nose par- 
took of that brilliant tint which is sometimes 
called the roseate hue of health or exercise, 
sometimes the purple light of love. The 
whites of her eyes were large. She also was 
represented in a hat, but higher in the crown 
and broader in the rim than the man's, and 
where his brim was turned up, her's had a 
downward inclination giving a feminine cha- 
racter to that part of her dress. 

She was placed in the garden : greatly as 
we admired both pieces of workmanship, we 
considered them merely as what they seemed 
to be ; they went by the names of Mrs. 
L.'s Man and Woman ; and even when you 
departed for the south they were still known 
only by that vague and most unworthy de- 
signation. Some startling circumstances 
after awhile excited a more particular atten- 
tion to them. Several of the family declared 
they had been frightened by them; and 
K. one evening came in saying that Aunt 
L.'s woman had given her a jump. Even 
this dici not awaken any suspicion of their 
supernatural powers as it ought to have done, 
till on a winter's night, one of the maids hear- 
ing a knock at the back door opened it ; and 
started back when she saw that it was the 
woman with a letter in her hand ! This is 
as certain as that Nosso Senhor dos Passos 
knocked at the door of S. Roque's convent 
in Lisbon and was not taken in, — to the infi- 
nite regret of the monks when they learned 



that he had gone afterwards to the Graca 
Convent and been admitted there. It is as 
certain that I have seen men, women and 
children of all ranks kissing the foot of the 
said Image in the Church, and half Lisbon 
following his procession in the streets. It is 
as certain as all the miracles in the Fasti, the 
Metamorphoses, and the Acta Sanctorum. 

Many remarkable things were now called 
to mind both of the man and woman; — 
how on one occasion they had made Miss 
Christian's maid miscarry of — half a mes- 
sage ; and how at another time when Isaac 
was bringing a basket from Mr. Calvert's, 
he was frightened into his wits by them. 
But on Sunday evening last the most extra- 
ordinary display of wonderful power oc- 
curred, for in the evening the woman, instead 
of being in her place among the pease, ap- 
peared standing erect on the top of Mr. 
Fisher's haymow in the forge field, and there 
on the following morning she was seen by 
all Keswick, who are witnesses of the fact. 

You may well suppose that I now began 
to examine into the mystery, and manifold 
were the mysteries which I discovered, and 
many the analogies in their formation of 
which the maker could never by possibility 
have heard ; and many the points of divine 
philosophy and theurgic science which they 
illustrated. In the first place two Sweden- 
borgian correspondencies flashed upon me 
in the material whereof they were con- 
structed. They were intended to guard the 
Garden ; there is a proverb which says, set a 
thief to catch a thief, and therefore it is that 
the;- were fir statues. Take it in English 
and the correspondence is equally striking ; 
they were made of deal, because they were 
to do a deal of good. The dark aspect of 
the male figure also was explained ; for 
being stationed there contra fures, it was 
proper that he should have a furious coun- 
tenance. Secondly there is something won- 
derful in their formation: — they are bi- 
fronted, not merely bifaced like Janus, but 
bifronted from top to toe. Let the thief be 
as cunning as he may he cannot get behind 
them. — They have no backs, and were they 
disposed to be indolent and sit at their posts 



690 



THE DOCTOR. 



it would be impossible. They can appear at 
the kitchen door, or on the haymow, they 
can give the children and even the grown 
persons of the family a jump, but to sit is 
beyond their power, however miraculous it 
may be ; for impossibilities cannot be effected 
even by miracle, and as it is impossible to 
see without eyes, or to walk without legs, — 
or for a ship to float without a bottom, so is 
it for a person in the same predicament as 
such a ship — to sit. 

Yet farther mysteries ; both hands of 
these marvellous statues are right hands and 
both are left hands, they are at once ambi- 
dexter and ambisinister. It was said by 
Dryden of old Jacob Tonson that he had 
two left legs : but these marvellous statues 
have two left legs and two right legs each, 
and yet but four legs between them, that is 
to say but two a-piece. In the whole course 
of my reading I have found no account of 
any statues so wonderful as these. For 
though the Roman Janus was bifronted, and 
my old acquaintance Yamen had in like 
manner a double face, and many of the 
Hindoo and other Oriental Deities have their 
necks set round with heads, and their elbows 
with arms, yet it is certain that all these 
Gods have backs, and sides to them also. 
In this point no similitude can be found for 
our Images. They may be likened to the 
sea as being bottomless, — but as being with- 
out a back, and in the mystery of having 
both hands and legs at once right and left, 
they are unequalled ; none but themselves 
can be their parallel. 

Now, my daughter, I appeal to you and to 
all other reasonable persons, — I put the 
question to your own plain sense, — is it 
anyways likely that statues so wonderful, so 
inexpressibly mysterious in their properties 
should be the mere work of a Keswick car- 
penter, though aided as he was by Mrs. L.'s 
directions ? Is it not certain that neither 
he, nor Mrs. L., had the slightest glimpse, 
the remotest thought of any such properties, 
— she when she designed, he when he exe- 
cuted the marvellous productions? Is it 
possible that they should ? Would it not be 
preposterous to suppose it ? 



This supposition therefore being proved 
to be absurd, which in mathematics is equal 
to a demonstration that the contrary must 
be true, it remains to inquire into the real 
origin of their stupendous qualities. Both 
the ancient Heathens and the Romanists 
teach that certain Images of the Gods or of 
the Saints have been made without the aid 
of human hands, and that they have appeared 
no one knew whence or how. The Greeks 
called such images Diopeteis, as having 
fallen from the sky, and I could enumerate, 
were it needful, sundry Catholic Images 
which are at this day venerated as being 
either of angelic workmanship or celestial 
origin. We cannot, however, have recourse 
to this solution in the present case ; for 
Glover is so veracious a man that if he had 
found these figures in his workshop without 
knowing how they came there, — or if he 
had seen them grow into shape while he was 
looking on, — he would certainly not have 
concealed a fact so extraordinary. All Kes- 
wick would have known it. It must have 
become as notorious as Prince Hohenlohe's 
miracles. 

There remains then another hypothesis, 
which is also common to the ancient Pagans 
and the Romanists ; — that some superior 
powers finding a congruity in the Images 
have been pleased to communicate to them 
a portion of their influence, and even of 
their presence, and so, if I may be allowed 
the word, have actually become inligneate 
in them. Were my old acquaintance, 
Thomas Taylor, here, who entirely believes 
this, he would at once determine which of 
his Heathen Deities have thus manifested 
their existence. Who indeed that looks at 
the Youth but must be reminded of Apollo ? 
Said I that his face resembled in its rotun- 
dity the Moon ? the Sun would have been 
the fitter similitude, — the sun shorn of its 
beams: — Phoebus, — such as he appeared 
when in the service of Admetus. And for 
his female companion, her beauty and the 
admiration which it excites in all beholders, 
identify her with no less certainty for 
Venus. We have named them therefore 
the Apollo de Lovell, and the Venus de 



THE DOCTOR. 



691 



Glover , in justice to both artists ; and in 
farther honour of them and of the Images 
themselves have composed the following 
inscription : 

No works of Phidias we ; but Mrs. L. 

Designed, and we were made by Joseph plover. 
Apollo, I, and yonder Venus stands, 

Behold her. and you cannot chuse but lore her. 
If antient sculptors could behold us here, 

How would they pine with envy and abhorrence ! 
For even as I surpass their Belvedere, 

So much doth she excel the pride of Florence. 



EPILUDE OF MOTTOES. 

Careless ! bring your apprehension along with you. 

CONGREYE. 

If I have written a sentence, or a word, that can bear a 
captious or unreasonable construction, I earnestly intreat 
a more lenient interpretation. When a man feels acutely, 
he may perhaps speak at times more pointedly than he 
ought ; yet, in the present instance, I am conscious of no 
sentiment which I could wish to alter. Bishop Jebb. 

vr, -rot TLo<ni$£, xx) >Jyu y\ cLcri^ Xiyu, 

Sizauat t«vt«, xoisSh ocutoji/ tyiuhiTcti. ARISTOPHANES. 

Will you be true ? 
Tro. Who, I ? alas, it is my vice, my fault. 

While others fish with craft for great opinion, 
4 with great truth catch mere simplicity. 
Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, 
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare. 
Fear, not my truth ; the moral of my wit 
Is — " plain and true ; " there's all the reach of it. 
Shakespeare. 

— come angel che pria s' amenta e teme 
Stassifra i rami paventoso e solo 
Mirando qu^sto ed or quell' altro colle ; 
Cos) mi leva e mi ritengo insieme, 
L' ale aguxzando al mio dubbioso volo. 

Giusto de' Conti. 

Whosoever be reader hereof maie take it by reason for 
a riche and a newe labour ; and speciallie princes and 
governours of the common wealth, and ministers of jus- 
tice, with other. Also the common people eche of theim 
maie fynd the labour conveniente to their estate. And 
herein is conteigned certaine right highe and profounde 
sentences, and holsome counsaylles, and mervaillous 
devyses agaynste the encumbraimce of fortune; and 
ryght swete consolacions for theim that are overthrowen 
by fortune. Finally it is good to them that digeste it, 
and thauke God that hath given such grace to the Auctour 
in gevyng us example of vertuous livyng, with hye and 
salutary doctrynes, and marvailous instructions of per- 
fectness. — A ryght precious meale is the sentences of 
this boke ; but fynally the sauce of the saied swete style 
moveth the appetyte. Many bookes there be of substan- 
ciall meates, but they bee so rude and so unsavery, and 
the style of so small grace, that the first morcell is loth- 
some and noyfull ; and of suche bookes foloweth to lye 
hole and sounde in lybraries ; but I trust this will not. 
Of trouth great prayse is due to the auctour of his travaj le. 
Lord Berxers. 



The current that with gentle murmur glides, 

Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage ; 

But when his fair course is not hindered, 

He makes sweet music with the enamel'd stones, 

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge 

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage ; 

And so by many winding nooks he strays, 

With willing sport, to the wild ocean. 

Then let me go, and hinder not my course ; 

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream, 

And make a pastime of each weary step, 

Till the last step have brought me to my rest. 

Shakespeare. 

Sith you have long time drawn the weeds of my wit and 
fen yourseives with the cockle of my conceits, I have at 
last made you gleaners of my harvest, and partakers of 
my experience.— Here shall you find the style varying 
according to the matter, suitable to the style, and all of 
these aimed to profit. If the title make you suspect, com- 
pare it with the matter, it will answer you ; if the matter, 
apply it with the censures of the learned, they will coun- 
tenance the same ; of the handling I repent me not, for I 
had rather you should condemn me for default in rheto- 
rick, Mian commend my style and lament my judgement. 
Thus resolved both of the matter, and satisfied in my 
method, 1 ^ave the whole to your judgements ; which, it 
they be not depraved with envy, will be bettered in know- 
ledge, and if not carried away with opinion, will receive 
much profit. Thomas Lodge. 

This good Wine I present, needs no Ivy-bush. They 
that taste thereof shall feel the fruit to their best content, 
and better understanding. The learned shall meet with 
matter to refresh their memories ; the younger students, 
a directory to fashion their discourse ; the weakest capa- 
city, matter of wit, worth and admiration. 

T.L.D. M. P's. Epistle Prefatory to the Learned 
Summarie upon the famous Poem of William of 
Salust, Lord of Bartas. 

This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeon's pease, 
And utters it again when Jove doth please ; 
He is wit's pedlar, and retails his wares. 

Love's Labotr Lost. 

Imagination, thro' the trick 
Of Doctors, often makes us sick ; 
And why, let any sophist tell, 
May it not likewise make us well ! 

Churchill. 

His mind fastens 
On twenty several objects, which confound 
Deep sense with folly. Webster. 

It is a crown unto a gentle breast, 
To impart the pleasure of his flowing mind, 

(Whose sprightly motion never taketh rest) 
To one whose bosom he doth open find. 

Thomas Scott. 

— Be prepared to hear : 
And since you know you cannot see yourself 
So well as by reflection, I, your glass 
Will modestly discover to yourself 
That of yourself which you yet know not of. 

Shakespeare. 

And whereas in my expression I am very plain and 
downright, and in my teaching part seem to tautologize, 
it should be considered, (and whoever has been a teacher 



692 



THE DOCTOR. 



will remember,) that the learners must be plainly dealt 
with, and must have several times renewed unto them . 
the same thing. — Therefore I have chosen so to do in 
several places, because I had rather (in such cases) speak 
three words too many, than one syllable too few. 

Thomas Mace. 

Eire et repasser souvent 

Sur Athtnes et sur Rome, 
Cest dequoy faire un Sgavant, 

Mais non pas un habile homme. 

Meditex incessamment, 

Devorex livre apres livre, 
C'est en vivant settlement 

Que vous apprendrez a vivre. 

Avant qu'en sqavoir les loi.v, 

La clarte nous est ravie : 
Ilfaudroit vivre deuxfois 

Pour bien conduire sa vie. 

De Charleval. 

If we could hit on't, gallants, there are due 
Certain respects from writers, and from you. 

Prologue to the Adventures of Five Hours. 

— Here you have a piece so subtly writ 

Men must have wit themselves to find the wit. 

Epilogue to the Adventures of Five Hours. 

All puddings have two ends, and most short sayings 
Two handles to their meaning. 

Lord Digby. 

Reader, Now I send thee like a Bee to gather honey out 
of flowers and weeds ; every garden is furnished with 
either, and so is ours. Read and meditate; thy profit 
shall be little in any book, unless thou read alone, and 
unless thou read all and record after. 

Henry Smith. 

The most famous of the Pyramids was that of Hermes. 
— Through each door of this Pyramid was an entrance 
into seven apartments, called by the names of the Planets. 
In each of them was a golden Statue. The biggest was 
in the apartment of Osiris, or the Sun. It had a book 
upon its forehead, and its hand upon its mouth. Upon 
the outside of the Book was written this inscription. / 
must be read in a profound silence. 

Travels of Cyrus. 

— Facio ego ut solent, qui quanto plus aliquem mirantur 
et explicare volunt quod sentiunt, eo minus id assequuntur 
quod volunt, ut quamquam magnum aliquid animo con- 
cipiunt, verba tamen desint, et moliri polius quam dicere 
poluisse videantur. 

Hermolaus Barbarus Jo. Pico Mirandul/e. 

Nihil mihi potest esse beatius quam scire ; discendum 
verb ut sciamus. Ego quidem sapientice ambitum, tan- 
quarn ammi nostri cerarium quoddam semper judicavi, id 
quod communia com.mentationum nostrarum vectigalia 
inferenda censro, sed proba ; unde sibi suum quisque in 
usum sumut sine invidia atque simultate. 

J. C. Scaliger. 

Felix yerba es la yedra, si se enrama 
A un muro altivo, a quien no alcanxa el corte 
De la envidia ; puer queda con su altura, 
El mas visloso, y clla mas segura. 

Balbuena, El Bernardo. 

— en poco tiempo te he dicho 
lo que passb en mucho tiempo. 

Calderon, El Maestro de Danzar. 



I'll range the plenteous intellectual field, 

And gather every thought of sovereign power 

To chase the moral maladies of man ; 

Thoughts which may bear transplanting to the skies, 

Nor wholly wither there where Seraphs sing, 

Refined, exalted, — not annull'd — in heaven. Young. 

Let every man enjoy his whim ; 
What's he to me, or I to him. 

Churchill. 

And whereas I may seem too smart or satyrical in some 
particular places, I do not at all repent me, as thinking 
what is said to such ill-deserving persons much too little. 
Thomas Mace. 
— Play the fool with wits, 
'Gainst fools be guarded, 'tis a certain rule, 
Wits are safe things ; there's danger in a fool. 

Churchill. 

And in this thought they find a kind of ease, 
Bearing their own misfortune on the back 
Of such as have before endured the like. 

Richard II. 

Our life indeed has bitterness enough 

To change a loving nature into gall : 
Experience sews coarse patches on the stuff 

Whose texture was originally all 
Smooth as the rose-leaf's, and whose hues were bright 

As are the colours of the weeping cloud 
When the sun smiles upon its tears. 

Mrs. Lenox Conyngham. 

Thus much we know, eternal bliss and pure, 
By God's unfailing promise, is secure 
To them who their appointed lot endure 
Meekly, striving to fulfil, 
In humble hopefulness, God's will. 

Mrs. Lenox Conyngham. 

I thowt how hard it is to denye 

A ladye's preyer, wych after the entent 

Of the poete is a myghty comaundement ; 

Wherfore me thoht as in this caas 

That my wyt war lakkyd bettyr it was 

That my wyl, and therfore to do 

My ladyes preyer I assentyd to. 

OSBERN BOKENAM. 

Al peco de los afios 

lo eminente se rinde ; 

que a lofacil del tiempo 

no ay conquista dificil. Calderon. 

We only meet on earth 
That we may know how sad it is to part : 
And sad indeed it were, if in the heart 
There were no store reserved against a dearth, 
No calm Elysium for departed Mirth, 
Haunted by gentle shadows of past pleasure, 
Where the sweet folly, the light- footed measure, 
And graver trifles of the shining hearth 
Live in their own dear image. 

Hartley Coleridge. 

Sweet are the thoughts that smother from conceit : 

For when I come and sit me down to rest, 

My chair presents a throne of majesty ; 

And when I set my bonnet on my head, 

Methinks I fit my forehead for a crown ; 

And when I take a truncheon in my fist, 

A sceptre then comes tumbling in my thoughts. 

Robert Greene. 



THE DOCTOR. 



693 



Quanquam verb hoc mihi non polliceri possum, me 
ubique veritatem quam sectatus sum, assecutum esse ; sed 
potius eofine ea proposui, ut et alios ad veritatis investi- 
gationem invitarem : tamen ut recti Galenus habet, 

TOA|C4*7T£OV TS XOi) g»JT'/}T£(JV TO kX'fffi? , il J-«g X.CU (AY) TUX ^ 

ccvtou ttolvtoi;, S'/ivov T\7i<riitrTt£ov v) vvv ztrfABv o^piiofAtdot. '■ 
Audendum est, et Veritas investiganda, quam etiamsi non 
assequamur, omnino tamen propius quam nunc sumus, 
ed earn perveniemus. Quo vero ego animo ad scribendum 
accessi, eo ut alii ad legendum accedant, opto. 

Sennertus. 

I do confess the imperfect performance. Yet I must 
take the boldness to say, I have not miscarried in the 
whole ; for the mechanical part of it is regular. That I 
may say with as little vanity, as a builder may say he has 
built a house according to the model laid down before 
him, or a gardener that he has set his flowers in a knot of 
such or such a figure. Congreve. 

As wheresoever these leaves fall, the root is in my 
heart, so shall they have ever true impressions thereof. 
Thus much information is in very leaves, that they can 
tell what the Tree is ; and these can tell you I am a 
friend and an honest man. Donne. 

On ne recognoistroit les monts, sans les valees ; 
Et les tattles encor arlistement meslees 
En ceuvre mosayque, out, pour plus grand beaute, 
Divers prix, divers teint, diverse quantite. 
Dieu vueille qu'en mes chants la plus insigne tache 
Semble le moucheron qu'une pucelle attache 
A saface neigeusc, el que bien peu d'erreurs 
Donnent lustre aux beaux traicts de mes hautesfureurs. 
Du Bartas, La Magnificence. 

Hills were not seen but for the vales betwixt ; 

The deep indentings artificial mixt 

Amid mosaicks, for mere ornament, 

Have prizes, sizes and dyes different. 

And, Oh, God grant, the greatest spot you spy 

In all my frame, may be but as the fly, 

Which on her ruff, (whiter than whitest snows,) 

To whiten white, the fairest virgin sows, 

(Or like the velvet on her brow, or like 

The dunker mole on Venus' dainty cheek.) 

And that a few faults may but lustre bring 

To my high furies where I sweetest sing. 

Sylvester. 

Be as capricious and sick-brained as ignorance and 
malice can make thee, here thou art rectified ; or be as 
healthful as the inward calm of an honest heart, learning, 
and temper can state thy disposition, yet this book may 
be thy fortunate concernment and companion. 

Shirley. 
Humble and meek befitteth men of years, 
Behold my cell, built in a silent shade, 
Holding content for poverty and peace, 
And in my lodge is fealty and faith, 
Labour and love united in one league. 
I want not, for my mind affordeth wealth, 
I know not envy, for I climb not high ; 
Thus do I live, and thus I mean to die. 

Robert Greene. 
The events of to-day make us look forward to what will 
happen to-morrow ; those of yesterday carry our views 
into another world. Danby. 

Mine earnest intent is as much to profit as to please, 
non tarn ut populo placer em, quam ut populum juvarcm : 
and these my writings shall take, I hope, like gilded pills, 



which are so composed as well to tempt the appetite and 
deceive the palate, as to help and medicinally work upon 
the whole body. My lines shall not only recreate, but 
rectify the mind. Burton. 

— Sit thou a patient looker on ; 
Judge not the play, before the play is done, 
Her plot has many changes ; every day 
Speaks a new scene, the last act crowns the play. 

Quarles. 

Lord, if thy gracious bounty please to fill 
The floor of my desires, and teach me skill 
To dress and chuse the corn, take those the chaff that 
will. Quarles. 

Je 7i'ay pas plus faict mon livre, que mon livre m'a 
faict, — livre consubstantiel a son autheur. Montaigi .. 

— se le parole che usa lo scrittore portan seco un poco, 
non dira di difficulta, ma d'acutezza recondita, et non cost 
nota, come quelle che si dicono parlando ordinariamente, 
danno una certa maggior auttorita alia scrittura, elfanno 
che il letlore va piu ritenuto, et sopra di se, et meglio con- 
sider a, et si diletta delV ingegno et dottrina di chi scrive j 
et col buon giudicio affaticandosi un poco gusta quel 
piacere, che s' ha nel conseguir le cose difficili. Et se 
V ignorantia di chi legge e tanta, che non posse superar 
qutlla difficulta, non e la colpa dello scrittore. 

Castiglione, Il Cortigiano. 

Certo eslava eu que o Doutor sabia de tudo o que disse 
7iau so os termos ejundamentos, mas acuda o mas diffi- 
cultoxa, e substantial ; — mas o praticar deltas de modo, 
que en as entendesse, he graca de seu saber, e naa suffi- 
ciencia do meu ingenho. Francisco Rodrigues Lobo. 

Sir, Our greatest business is more in our power than 
the least, and we may be surer to meet in Heaven than in 
any place upon earth ; and whilst we are distant here, we 
may meet as often as we list in God's presence, by soli- 
citing in our prayers for one another. Donne. 

Or ti riman, Lettor, sovra 7 tuo banco, 
Dietro pensando a cib che si preliba, 
S' esser vuoilieto assai prima che slanco. 

Messo V ho innanzi j omaiper le ti ciba j 
Che a se ritorce tutta la mia cura 
Quella materia ond' io sonfatto scriba. Dante. 

I have been often told that nobody now would read any 
thing that was plain and true ; — that was accounted dull 
work, except one mixed something of the sublime, pro- 
digious, monstrous, or incredible ; and then they would 
read the one for the sake of the other — So rather than 
not be read, I have put in a proportionable little of the 
monstrous. If any thing be found fault with, it is possible 
I may explain and add. Hutchinson. 



Who secketh in thee for profit and gain 
Of excellent matter soon shall attain. 



T. H. 



Pay me like for like ; give me good thoughts for great 
studies ; and at leastwise shew me this courtly courtesy to 
afford me good words, which cost you nothing, for serious 
thoughts hatched up with much consideration. Thus 
commending my deserts to the learned, and committing 
my labour to the instruction of the ignorant, I bid you all 
heartily farewell. Lazarus Piot. 

Even at this time, when I humbly thank God, I ask and 
have his comfort of sadder meditations, I do not condemn 
in myself that I have given my wit such evaporations as 
these. DONNB. 



694 



THE DOCTOR. 



L'ENVOY. 



Gentle Reader — for if thou art fond of 
such works as these, thou art like to be the 
Gentleman and the Scholar — I take upon 
me to advertise thee that the Printer of 
The Doctor, &c. is William Nicol of the 
Shakspeare Press — the long-tried Friend 
of the lamented Southey and of their mutual 
Friend, the late Grosvenor Bedford of Her 
Majesty's Exchequer — 

Felices anirrue, et quales neque candidiores 
Terra tulit I 

The Sonnet following, Gentle Reader, I 
do thee to wit, is the composition of the 
above kind-hearted and benevolent William 
Nicol — and I wish it to be printed, because 



on Grosvenor Bedford's short visit to Southey 
in 1836, he expressed himself much pleased 
with it. May be, if thou art fond of the 
gentle craft, it may please thee too, and so 
I wish thee heartily farewell ! 

Who wrote The Doctor? Who's the scribe unknown?— 
Time may discover, when the grave has closed 
Its earthy jaws o'er us, who now are posed 
To father that which greatest pen might own ; 

Learning diffuse, quaint humour, lively wit, 
Satire severe and bold, or covert, sly, 
Turning within itself the mental eye 
To fancies strange that round its orbit flit, 

Unknown to others and by self scarce seen ; 

Teaching, in sweetest English, England's plan, — 
When England was herself, her laurels green — 

Honour to God and charity to man : 

Who wrote the Doctor ? her best Son, I ween, 
Whether his works, or his fair life you scan. 



THE END. 



London j 

Spottiswoode and Shaw, 

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